Excerpted and adapted with permission from The Power of Art: A Human History of Art From Babylon to New York City, by Caroline Campbell, published January 2024 by Pegasus Books. All rights reserved. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” With this bleak sentence, at once familiar and dissonant, George Orwell begins his celebrated novel of life in a totalitarian state. I first read 1984 in the autumn of 1989. At the time, I was studying the beginnings of the French Revolution at…
