T. J. Clark's Annoying Class Consciousness

Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid (c. 1657-58)

I’ve always loved the word “bourgeois.” I don’t use it very much. When I do, it’s usually in relation to the great Dutch art of the Golden Age. Vermeer, Hals, de Hooch, Terborch – art that caught the beauty and vitality of Holland’s new bourgeois individualism. T. J. Clark uses “bourgeois” a lot in his art writings, and not in a positive way. To him the bourgeoisie are a scourge, producers and consumers of kitsch. Clark is for the working class. There’s a lot of class content in his work. He sees society divided into at least four categories: the working class, the petty bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie, and the aristocracy. It’s a Marxist view of life and art. I don’t share it. I don’t see people in terms of class. “Nobody better, better than nobody” is my motto. The doctor, the movie star, the plumber, the hedge fund tsar – we’re all equal. Clark would likely scoff at that as naïve. That’s okay. We don’t have to share political views in order to enjoy art. But I will say this. If it wasn’t for Clark’s wonderful, perceptive descriptions of art, I likely wouldn’t read him. His descriptions show me details and felicities I wouldn’t otherwise see. Descriptions such as this: 

Look at the jester on the branch in the Louvre Ship of Fools: he is one of Bosch’s prime inventions. The pink, grey and white of the young man’s rags, dazzling as they are, don’t seem to be deployed just to dazzle. I think they’re meant to float the figure into a realm of fragility, vulnerability, perhaps even pathos – anyway, somewhere different from the idiocy below. The jester’s smallness is calculated: it moves him away from the group. The wandering lines of white on his costume, delicate even by Bosch’s standards, and dramatised by little dots and stitches applied to the belt, cap, guy rope and trailing flounces – what do they do? What are they meant to suggest? Maybe that the costume is threadbare. Maybe that it’s flimsy and transparent. Jesters are beggars, after all. Burghers are not amused by them. Somehow the nature of the grey material draws the young man closer to the natural world (further from the nudities in the foreground). He fits into the frame of leaves; he grows out of the grey tree. The dialogue between his profile and the face on the wand is infinitely touching. [“Aboutness,” London Review of Books, April 1, 2021]

And this:

Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders. [“Strange Apprentice,” London Review of Books, October 8, 2020]

And this:

Look again at the angel in Paris with the pointing finger. There had never been a figure like it before in painting, and there never would be again. It is not just the foot on the grass and the pointing finger that are uncanny: it is the pose as a whole, spreading out laterally, half turning towards us, but meeting our eyes from an utter remoteness; and the roll of the green sleeve and the long pale arm inside its diaphanous puff of drapery; and the astonishing – unthinkable – explosion of rich red, tying the figure to a world of flesh and blood but spreading and unfolding far beyond (it feels like) the mere frame of the illusion. No wonder all this – this overflowing wish-fulfilment – had to be corrected in 1508. The London angel’s drapery is still elusive, but at least now it adheres to a possible anatomy: it does not just seem to occur as the brush tries out a new colour. Colour drains away. The angel’s shoulders come out of their carapace. The figure is clear and coherent (comparatively) but also (comparatively) unfelt. It is as if the invention had been put back inside a box – robbed of its first fairytale unfolding. [“The Chill of Disillusion,” London Review of Books, January 5, 2012]

Who would not want such glorious writing to go on forever? There’s not an ounce of class consciousness in it. That’s the way it should be.