Reading Review: On the Social History of Art: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution by T.J.
Clark
Deborah Baxter (Christensen)
Scope and Methods of Art History
8 October 2021
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In the first chapter of T. J. Clark’s 1973 book, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and
the 1848 revolution, “On the Social History of Art,” Clark attempts to generalize the procedures
he will employ and his reasoning for them in his highly specific study of three years of the
French realist’s life and work. It is a difficult framework to summarize due to its insistence on
specificity. His central argument refutes Hegelian and Formalist attempts to explain the larger
patterns, changes, and styles of art history because they were too general and created a
constructed ideology of specific artworks’ and artists’ place in history. The connoisseurs, with
their emphasis on individual genius, did not properly account for the individual artist’s point of
view, not just “influenced” by a “background” history, but as an active entity with individual
political, social, and class motivations. Clark also rejects the tendency of iconologists to rely on
intuitive analogies, preferring iconological interpretation that is specific and overt, he says,
“flirting with hidden analogies is worse than working openly with inelegant ones.”1
The solution to these problems and the goal of Clark’s social art history is to study an
extremely limited period of an individual artist’s work in order to gain a comprehensive and
concrete understanding of all the interconnections between the artist’s specific, political point of
view, and his friends, artistic traditions and ideologies, historical situation, conception of his
public, relationship with critics, etc. His five concerns of socialist art history deal with how the
artist and the work relate to 1) classicism vs. realism, 2) Individualism, 3) Sanctification or
subversion of the bourgeoisie, which relates to whether the artist himself identifies as bourgeois
or an outcast 4) How the art deals with popular imagery and its ties to class politics, and 5) the
withering away of art, relating to technology and social utility.
I agree with the depth of research necessary to gain a complete picture of how an artwork
is situated historically and strongly agree with the notion that not all individual artists from the
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Clark, “On the Social History of Art,” 11
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same period were influenced by their social circumstances in the same ways or held the same
beliefs. Overall, I am fascinated by his choice of topic, and am personally more interested in art
with a clear political perspective and purpose, than art for art’s sake, sensationalism, or
literary/historical subjects. I want to read the rest of the book and learn more about how
Courbet’s work changed the world.
However, I also see two weaknesses in Clark’s approach. First, while Clark does
acknowledge the political bias in his reasoning for studying only three years of Courbet’s work,
the method cannot be applied universally where historical information at the level of specificity
he requires no longer exists. Second, its specific focus abandons the hermeneutic problem. His
explanation of changes in art across time prioritizes a biased political ideology that does not
necessarily apply, for example, to societies without a bourgeoisie class. In fact, the self-limited
evidence he uses really only proves his thesis about three years in France. My personal
frustration with the dense, highly philosophical, often self-contradictory/self-attenuating style of
the framework laid out in the first chapter would hopefully ease once he got into the meat of the
matter in the rest of the book.
Clark begins and ends the chapter with enigmatic quotes by Baudelaire and Mondrian
prophesying an end to art. Hatt and Klonk elaborate that Clark was “Marxist enough to believe
that no art can bring about the only social change that really matters: a revolution in the
ownership of the means of production.”2 Another socialist art historian, Patricia Leighten,
contradicts this idea by pointing out Picasso’s political activism, and the impact of his anti-war
works. Leighten’s perspective here seems far less caught up in a constructed socialist “ideology,”
to me. I side with Clark, however, where Leighten diverges from his methodology and only
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Hatt, “Marxism and the Social History of Art,” 137
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focuses on, “what the artist has intentionally conveyed.”3 Clark’s insistence on seeking out the
blindspots, engaging with what may have prevented certain representations, and noting the
artist’s prejudices would produce a far more holistic, socially situated analysis, though the task of
supporting an argument of what is not in the artwork is daunting, if not impossible.
3
Hatt, 138
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Bibliography
Clark, T. J. “On the Social History of Art.” Essay. In Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and
the 1848 Revolution, 9–20. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Hatt, Michael, and Charlotte Klonk. “Marxism and the Social History of Art.” Essay. In Art
History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods, 120–40. Manchester, MI: Manchester
University Press, 2006.