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From International Socialism, No. 62, September 1973, p. 28.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Paul Blackledge.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Absolute Bourgeois. Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851
Image of the People. Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution
T.J. Clarke
Thames and Hudson, £4.50 each
‘ART is dead. Do not consume its corpse’ said the slogans on the walls of Paris in May 1968. T.J. Clarke has produced two very fine books about an earlier revolutionary period in France: that around 1848 in which art, and particularly painting, was very much alive and kicking in (or at least about) the struggles of the time.
I say ‘produced’, and not simply ‘written’ for in these books the reproductions are not just illustrations – they are integral to the work. Clarke blends the skills of the art historian with those of the perceptive student of social and political history; and he brings to his work a refreshing understanding of the relations between art and society, including a real awareness of the ideas developed by socialist writers.
The Absolute Bourgeois tells the story of art in the Revolution of 1848 and in the Second Republic which followed. (‘I do not want to write history first, and then art history later – that arrangements begs all the questions,’ Clarke explains.) The art of the barricade in February and in June (the workers’ insurrection): the art produced under state patronage in the Republic, in the shadow of the victory of reaction; the work of Millet, Daumier, Delacroix and Baudelaire, their contradictions and ambiguities – these are what are subtly explored in this book.
This was a time in which art and politics ‘could not escape each other’. But however much these artists responded to a political world, none of their work represented ‘effective political art’. Clarke asks if indeed it could have done, in ‘the basic conditions of artistic production in the 19th century-easel painting, privacy, isolation, the art market, the ideology of individualism? Could there be any such thing as revolutionary art until the means existed – briefly, abortively – to change those basic conditions: till 1919, when El Lissitzky puts up his propaganda poster outside a factory in Vitebsk ...?’ But one painter of 1848 ‘for a moment achieved almost the impossible’ – Gustave Courbet.
His achievement, as Clarke presents it in The Image of the People, is not the result of his putting on the canvas a political response: ‘it is the inarticulate response that counts, or rather, the response articulated in oil paint on canvas, with knife and rags and brushes.’. In the mid-century cultural crisis, in the dissolution of the old bourgeois and popular cultures, Clark sees Courbet as the possibility of a ‘fusion in which the dominance of one culture over the other might have ended’. It didn’t, of course, and this defeat leads to our present situation in which the opportunity for a Courbet to end it has been lost.
Most of the book discusses Courbet in the years 1848–51, and splendidly justifies Clark’s point of view. Like the first book, this is a detailed and sensitive study which breaks down the barricade between art history and socialist theory. The difficulty of both is a product of this strength: the coherence of the argument is not always sufficiently visible.
A very valuable element is that, unlike many ‘sociological’ and even ‘Marxist’ works of art, the relationship with society is not presented as static, but as historically changing. While one is glad that Clarke has produced these studies rather than a formal treatise, his views could undoubtedly do with systematic presentation, around the themes that are loosely suggested in the first chapter of Image of the People. For the author of even one book as rich as either of these would certainly have a lot to give all those who are interested in the relations of art and revolution.
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