Art and the ruins of the left

TJ Clark is one of the most intelligent, perceptive and passionate contemporary art critics.

He is an avowed Marxist but an anti-Leninist .

Clark ’s theme is, in large part, the failure of the left agenda after, as he writes, “Our catastrophe [in] the 70 years from 1914 to 1989 ”.

The best piece in the book is surely Whatever Happened to the Painter of Modern Life ?” Here, the theoretician of the left cedes the podium to the enraptured lover of art as art.

Clark remains loyal to the savants of the Sixties on marriage as not so much a union between man and woman as a transaction.

Those Passions: On Art and Politics by TJ Clark is published by Thames and Hudson .

Clark tackles politics impure and un -simple in the third part of the book.

The work of art forms itself into a closed world, and remains so, no matter how much politics is thrown at it.