Those Passions

‘For those, though, who relish brilliant analysis of painting – as well as former students of art history, like me, for whom, at university, Clark was a sort of god – Those Passions will be essential reading. Its finest essays engage in depth with painting’s subtle minutiae, observing and explaining how tiny touches can contribute to powerful overall effects. A bravura study of Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (1905) is a case in point. … Likewise, his scintillating exposition of The Lion Hunt (1855) by Eugène Delacroix – a detail from which, reproduced on a French poster which he bought in 1966, dominates his study’ - Sunday Telegraph‘A timely study of the connection between art and politics’ - Observer‘The historian T.J. Clark introduces a cast of provocateurs in this thoughtful work on the role of politics in art … For the most part, Clark assesses the ways in which artists have responded to the upheavals of their times, using examples that encompass Rembrandt’s self-portraits, Jacques-Louis David’s revolutionary verve, the anarchism of James Ensor and the Marxism of filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’ - Christie’s

T. J. Clark is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1984), Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999) and The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006). He writes art criticism regularly for the London Review of Books. His last book was If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present (2022), also published by Thames & Hudson.