Each of Timothy Clark’s two books merits a separate study. Both are important works, especially fascinating for a French reader. But I shall confine myself here to Image of the People,footnote1 since its field is narrower than that of The Absolute Bourgeois,footnote2 and for that very reason it is all the more conclusive. The choice of a single guiding thread (the formation of an individual style, an individual painter—Courbet) in fact makes it possible to pick up and amplify the meaning of even the most minute variations in a given work. The more visible the initial continuum, the more legible are the signs of any break from it. Courbet is treacherous ground precisely because of the openings which he offers to the Marxist critic: Clark traces a confident route through these difficulties, avoiding pitfalls and well-worn paths alike. He rejects from the start all ideological overloading, that whole mass of pious images and mechanical references which have finished up by making Courbet into a simple propaganda theme, the classic lecture topic for evening classes at the Université Populaire. Clark’s study is a real revelation in that it is first and foremost the work of a historian. Yet this history crammed with personalities, contemporary texts and factual information never lapses into mere anecdote. Its great merit is that it elucidates a number of crucial theoretical problems through the concrete analysis of a concrete situation. To the eternal—and false—question: ‘What is revolutionary in art?’, Clark gives as it were an oblique, implicit reply by substituting for it another, much more fertile question: ‘What were the effects of a particular Revolution upon contemporary pictorial practice?’ Specifically, in this book, he asks: ‘How did 1848 modify Courbet’s painting?’ This proves to be an excellent way of avoiding, from the outset, the danger which seems inherent in most Marxist ventures onto the terrain of aesthetics (think of Lukács, for instance, in the case of literature): the normative preconception, whereby camps are demarcated and prescriptions are laid down in the name of immediate political imperatives dis
It is by now generally understood that history of art in the sense of a strictly autonomous discipline, in other words left to professional art historians, comes down to explaining the work of art by the genius of the artist and in the end is simply tautologous. But we are also familiar with a naïvely determinist sociology of art, which has the unfortunate prospensity to liquidate its specific object by dissolving the work of art into the ideological sphere. The causal model of explanation is not relevant when the task is to elucidate the relation of symbolic forms to the societies in which they appear. The history of art is not a region of the Continent of History, united to social history by a relation of particular to general. No more is it another history, totally outside the latter. The two are related, without being equivalent; they imply each other, without explaining each other. Figurative reality has a nature of its own, and a picture is not an idea given form. Yet at the same time there is no figuration that is not the vehicle of an implicit ideology and no picture that does not betray some ‘representation of the world’—whether as background or as project. However, this twofold warning is clearly insufficient: for two negatives do not add up to a positive. The problem is how, each time, to find the modus operandi of the work of art, i.e. the internal rules of transformation of the real into the formal, the social into the figurative. Of all that is going on outside, what is it that penetrates the painter’s studio? What enters the painter’s head and what comes out onto the canvas on his easel? A mysterious but not necessarily a mystical operation; a transmuting transformation which is not necessarily alchemical in nature; a key problem of the kind which the image-filled language of cybernetics terms a ‘black box’. This is the problem which Clark seeks to elucidate with respect to Courbet.