Image of the People

The book Image of the People, written by Timothy Clark, not only serves as an introductory text to Gus tave Courbet but also provides a clear image of the social art and a new unders tanding of the methodology of the social his tory of art. By choosing to s tand in a critic’s position towards the methods of his toriography of social arts in classic Marxis t tradition, Clark argues that they were s tructuralis ts unable to to explain the role and agency of the artis t in his tory.
Clark does not consider the work of art as a passive reflection of the dominant ideology, and he does not believe that all artis ts experience their environment in one or a similar way. Rather he believes that artis ts react to the his torical grounds in their own particular ways, reacting to and reshaping that his tory. Clarke develops a new approach to the his tory of social art in his book Image of the People.