The title of the self-proclaimed ‘scot-free Western Marxist’ T J Clark’s new anthology nods to an enigmatic line in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’. In that poem, an ancient monument-maker has baked into a sculpture of the titular pharaoh his ‘sneer of cold command’, producing a searing critique of his patron, even while honouring him. Clark is attentive to moments when artists are called upon to construct iconographies of power, whether in accordance or disagreement with political diktats. He winces at Isaak Brodsky’s 1927 portrait of Stalin (‘as appalling and persuasive as David toadying to Napoleon’) and winks at the question of whether Delacroix’s Lion Hunt merely shows violence or aestheticises it. ‘Politics is action, yes,’ Clark states, ‘but action always involves the invention – the renewal – of a language.’

Those Passions is divided into three sections. ‘Precursors’, which opens the book, is a fascinating trilogy of essays on Bosch, Rembrandt and Velázquez. In the middle section, Clark turns to ‘moderns’, a category extending from David and Delacroix to Pollock and Richter. Here, he touches on everything from the abduction of the Sabine women to the Passage des Panoramas and Madame Matisse’s luxuriant hat. The final section leads the reader into the foggy zone of the contemporary (‘modernities’). There are readings of Picasso’s Guernica, Pasolini’s Accattone and the centenary commemorations of the Russian Revolution, and an essay on what Clark calls the ‘Image-World’ – an analysis of late late capitalism taking in the 2011 London riots and the infamous Sparkasse Chemnitz credit card which featured a statue of Karl Marx. 

‘Precursors’ is vintage Clark – art criticism to be enjoyed. ‘Velázquez’s Slave Language’ is among his most perceptive studies of portraiture, his forensic eye scouring the canvas for clues. The Spanish master’s Aesop (c 1636–8) and Mars (c 1638) receive the kind of close attention that Clark devoted to