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The History of Art Department's Emeritus Faculty Member - T.J. Clark |
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  T.J. Clark Professor Emeritus Modern Art email: travesty@berkeley.edu Notes on picture to the left: T.J. Clark’s Travel Seminar to Madrid, Spring 2008. Photo: Andrew Moisey. |
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TIM CLARK RETIRES SPRING 2010 Tributes to Tim Clark by his students This year T.J. Clark retires after a stellar career of teaching and writing. He came to U.C. Berkeley from Harvard in 1988, already famous for his field-hanging, intense, and vivid scholarship. But over his long career he has also been a remarkable mentor of graduate students, having trained many of art history's modernists. He also continually challenged undergraduates, sometimes regarding the art of Mondrian and Malevich, most recently on approaches to Cezanne's painting. For some of us, it is difficultto imagine the teaching of art history without him. Few have cared so deeply about what painting is like. This fall our community enjoyed hearing a reprisal of three of Tim's Mellon Lectures delivered in Washington, D.C. the previous spring. Thanks to Kaja Silverman, Tim gave the lectures three nights in a row and ended with an intense reading of Picasso's Guernica. Nothing less than stunning. André Dombrowski, University of Pennsylvania A few weeks ago, I went to a talk here on the U Penn campus. Early on in the lecture (on contemporary photography), the speaker mentioned that she had recently reread most of Tim Clark's work and was still coming to terms with its implications for her current project. My hand went up afterwards: could she please specify? About half way through my question, some in the audience started laughing. I have never considered myself (nor, truth be told, been considered by others) terribly funny, neither in my firstnor second language, so I was taken aback. The laughter erupted, it later dawned on me, because I had asked—probably down to the word—the question everyone thought I would ask. Tim can expect a royalty check (I hope) from the students in my Impressionism lecture course last fall who used The Painting of Modern Life as their (sole) textbook. The book is 25 years old. Yet I cannot conceive a course on 19th-century French painting without assigning it. Some of my students that term reread the Olympia-chapter in my seminar on Haussmannization (which some read yet again in my department's UG methods seminar). You get it. Enough already. But it's hard for me to mask the fact that I had the good fortune to study with the mind I most admire in art history and beyond, who was, moreover, one of the kindest, caring and most giving advisers I could have hoped for. This has made stepping out of his shadow, as a scholar and a mentor, not always easy. There are the small things through which I mark my difference: I could never write an email with dashes: "Dear XXX – […]. Much love – André"—that is his trademark mode of address. I try not to erupt at my teaching assistants when the projectors or computers fail and the like. Yes, Tim has a quick temper, perhaps the most overt sign of the deep care for knowledge that animates him. Plus, I am obviously holding on to a phase in Tim's career he has left behind—he recently wrote that he worried (i.e. hoped) he would get "his fingersrapped by some of the social history of art types" for now denouncing Manet. Ouch. I do not feel quite so done with Manet, and especially that Manet, yet. In every other way, I try to teach and mentor like him, which is of course to say in every way. I struggle to meet with my TAs as often as he did and engage them in as deep an intellectual discussion, not stick to grades and missed deadlines. I don't seem to manage that—now looking back—with nearly the ease he did. I try to write the most insightful and helpful hand-written comments on a paper or dissertation chapter I can, but how are 2 or 3 pages humanly possible? I try to develop the same profound insights he had about his students and their strengths. He was the one who steered me towards my dissertation topic, and away from another, with a simple, enthusiastic "Now, there's a dissertation!"; he saw it sooner than I did. I try to have as much curiosity about the world in general as he does, and a modicum of the same strong ethical commitments. Of course he's read everything, but I also remember him staring with glee at some animals for hours out there in Arizona (during Anne's marvelous earthwork seminar trip). I try to instill in my students the same sense of the value of knowledge and close looking, and will never forget a day at LACMA—we went as a group to look at their Cézannes—and Tim asking who could identify Émile Bernard's Three Races. I couldn't at the time, and Sarah Evans carried away the price: lunch with Tim. This kept us always on our toes. But, above all, I try to emulate two things in particular: the ways in which he encouraged us all to be (and speak for and as) ourselves. In a fieldthat he knew had deep-seated class biases and heterosexist presumptions, he never suggested that I tone it down, to not wear that orange belt, even though he must have recognized the anxieties my surfaces masked. Secondly, I try to achieve his ways of mixing criticism with praise and encouragement, of turning failure into small gain (what an honor to be runner-up given the competition!). As I am rereading some old emails, the following sentence strikes me as typical: "And persist, in your inimitable way." To hear that after being turned down for one or the other thing—priceless. There is Tim, the mind, and Tim, the mentor, who never seemed to stop believing in you, who, just at the right moment, knew when it was time not to blame oneself but outside forces beyond one's control. The other day a student in the finalstages of her dissertation broke down in my office,and I think I said what he would have said to me: now is not the time to throw in the towel, but to realize that your sense of failure stems from the process, not yourself. What would I have said if I didn't have Tim to ventriloquize in situations like these? Christina Kiaer, Northwestern University It makes me sad to think of an art history world without Tim Clark as a teacher in it. He has been a rock star in our celebrity-obsessed academic culture for a long time, but at Berkeley he was also the most generous of teachers and advisors. In the many years that have passed since he was my teacher – years that have taken me far away from Berkeley — it has always made me happy to think of him out there on the west coast, training art historians who will always be just a bit different from those emerging from similarly blue chip programs to the east. I think I can speak for all of us who started studying with Tim and Anne during their firstyear at Berkeley when I say that it felt like we were part of a special moment. Berkeley seemed like the center of the intellectual universe, and Tim and Anne were determined to establish a community for their modernist flok. That firstsemester, they co-taught their — for us, legendary — seminar on the body in French visual culture around 1900, creating an atmosphere of intensity and esprit-de-corps. We were invited up to their house for a party after that seminar, of course, and over the years there would be frequent trips up to the house on the hill, for evenings of the French Visual Culture Group, for seminar parties, for end-of-semester evenings for teaching assistants, for all kinds of events. Their home was a place we knew well, and where we felt welcome. A particularly warm memory is working as Tim's teaching assistant, along with Jennifer Shaw, for his course on Art in France, 1890-1914: every week after class, he invited us to lunch at Panini for our TA meetings. It was such a gracious gesture, and such a generous gift of his time, turning this part of our job into something we looked forward to — sitting at umbrella tables in the sunny courtyard, close by the flwering foliage, eating lovely California-Italian food, talking intensely about our discussion sections and teaching strategies, but also enjoying conversations that extended well beyond the class. What I want most to say about Tim as an advisor is this: no matter his stature in the field,and in spite of all the ill-informed people out there who used to call him a dogmatic Marxist, he was the most responsible and fair minded of readers. He did not impose his views, even when my interests in a topic diverged pretty seriously from his; he was simply a deeply critical reader who engaged with whatever I was trying to argue. Nor did his stature get in the way of his commitment to students: he returned all written work promptly and cheerfully, covered with incisive comments scrawled in red ink, never complaining about tight turn-around times, never harried. He was fairly hands-off in terms of formulating topics, and he was not about professionalization at all – conference papers, publications, CVs, application letters and career strategies were not things we discussed much. But he was an interlocutor and a reader. Having unstinting access to one of the most compelling writers and brilliant minds on the planet — if you can't pull out all the stops in a retirement tribute, then when? — was a privilege and a gift for me as a student at Berkeley. I opened by calling Tim an academic rock star who is also a great teacher, and I want to close by calling on the figureof an actual rock star to help me describe Tim as I seem him now, exiting Berkeley at the height of his powers. I recently saw the documentary "It Might Get Loud," about legendary electric guitarists. Jimmy Page was the elder statesman of the group, and the more I watched him, the more I had the sensation that I was watching the T.J. Clark of rock music. Page is so supremely confidentin his skills and his achievements that he is completely relaxed, curious, and generous with his younger costars, listening with interest to their stories and their music, then picking up the guitar and blowing everyone away with an expert riff or song. Seeing the resemblance was helped along for me, no doubt, by the fact that they are both handsome sixty-something Brits with long white hair. I'm aware that the music is probably all wrong for Tim – I have my doubts that Led Zeppelin was ever his rock music – but I offer him this tribute as I wish him, and Anne, all the very best in the next chapter of their lives in London. Brigid Doherty, Princeton University Hearing of the chance to write something in tribute to Tim brought an image to mind. Not of an artwork projected on the screen in the seminar room in Doe. Not of a scene of teaching and learning around the table in front of the windows in that room facing the Bay. Not even of Tim, lecturing in a basement room in Moffitt,at once more intense and seemingly more at ease in his own words (and in their intensity) than anyone else I'd ever seen (or have since met). And not, finall, an image of the rest of us in that lecture hall, electrified,a couple of us doing our weekly wondering about how it would be possible to teach a section that might seem anything other than banal, or lifeless, in the wake of this particular account of, say, Malevich's Black Square. Instead what came to mind was an image of a photocopy of a page of handwriting: notes prepared by Tim and distributed to a seminar in advance of its firstmeeting, or maybe on its firstday. (I think the lines on the page in my mental image treat Blake's illuminated books.) Presented as an attempt at coming to grips with the subject of a course about to begin, those notes materialized ways of thinking about looking and seeing and reading and teaching and talking and writing that were as Tim delivered them both singular and shareable. Ways of thinking, and of writing about thinking, that were and remain for me moving in so many senses. Tim was not setting out in those pages to give his students anything like a "model" for how we might all think and eventually write about the subject of the seminar. He was offering us (or anyway this is how I guess it worked for me) a kind of demonstration piece for the kinds of brooding and enthusiasm and mediation that taking up the problems raised by the works we'd be studying in seminar was bound to involve. The idea of those notes has stayed with me for a long time, and Tim's handwritten pages continue to figuresome kind of an ideal for me. It's an ideal of balancing, and bringing together, thinking and writing and teaching with an ethically and subjectively full refusal to impinge or intrude on another person and her or his thinking, a kind of balancing and bringing together I saw Tim do in every aspect of his work as a teacher and advisor at Berkeley. Something he did as if effortlessly, as if that was just what teaching and advising were, in his hands. I know I have plenty of company in feeling that my debt to Tim's teaching and advising is colossal, and in feeling that far from being burdened by that debt, I'm lucky to have incurred it, and content to know I can't repay it. If the subtlety of Tim's pedagogy and the happy debt it was saddling his students with were ipso facto invisible to me while I was at Berkeley, the immensity of his intellectual achievement was everywhere to be seen. Here I can offer a memory-image in which Tim does visibly take the stage. It's the CIHA conference in Berlin in July 1992, and Tim has just delivered the talk that would be published in October as "In Defense of Abstract Expressionism," and then, revised, as the finalchapter of Farewell to an Idea. The text's thetic form seemed somehow even more pronounced in that context than it does in the published versions. This may have been an effect of hearing it spoken, in a big hall at the sprawling late-1970s ICC congress center in the shadow of the mid-1920s Funkturm, a place that usually plays host to trade fairs, and where the atmosphere in its rooms full of art historians wearing headsets for simultaneous translation was weird — interesting-weird, not appalling CAA-weird. I remember Tim in Berkeley in the months before the conference, energized by the writing of that paper, and I remember the charge his presentation carried in Berlin. Above all, I remember, or can still feel, the impact of the paper's finalthesis. "So now I think I understand what I have been defending all along," it begins in the published versions. "It seems I cannot quite abandon the equation of Art with lyric. Or rather — to shift from an expression of personal preference to a proposal about history — I do not believe that modernism can ever quite escape from such an equation." The closing section proceeds in terms many readers of this tribute will be able to call to mind. It strikes its most powerful note, for me, with this:
I mentioned to Tim after his talk how stunning the finalthesis was. And without a trace of offhandedness or arrogance he said he'd written that part the night before. Only Tim, I think, could have offered up the perfection of the (modernist) irony of the relation of the claims and the voice of those lines to the scene of their composition (in a Berlin hotel room as part of a script to be spoken the very next day at the CIHA in the ICC) with such cunning yet sheepish glee. When I was at Berkeley, the way Tim did art history seemed both impossible to imagine as an enterprise for anyone but him and necessary as a means to imagine a way into the profession at all. It still seems that way to me today. |
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| BIO T. J. Clark was born in Bristol, England, in 1943, and educated at Bristol Grammar School, Cambridge University, and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He has taught at various places in England and the U.S., since 1988 at Berkeley, where he is at present George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair, and Professor of Art History. His books include The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-51 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, both 1973; The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, 1985; Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, 1999; and (with Iain Boal, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts: under the name "Retort") Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, 2005. Among his recent essays are: “Phenomenality and Materiality in Cézanne,” in Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, Andrzej Warminski, and Thomas Cohen, eds., Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, 2001; "Should Benjamin Have Read Marx?" in Kevin McLaughlin and Philip Rosen, eds., Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with 'The Arcades Project', special issue, boundary 2, 2003; "Painting at Ground Level," The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 24, 2004; and "The Sabine Women and Lévi-Strauss," in Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask and David Simpson, eds., Land, Nation and Culture 1740-1840, 2005. On his current research and teaching interests, Clark comments: "Living in a world increasingly invaded by regimes of high-speed visualization, I find my art history more and more directed to keeping alive – and trying to describe more fully – past paradigms of complexity and depth in visual communication. A book to be published in 2006, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, explores such issues in two paintings by Poussin, the Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (National Gallery, London) and Landscape with a Calm (Getty Museum, Los Angeles). Much of my recent teaching has focused on problems of effective writing in art history – looking for ways to describe pictorial structures that do not treat them simply as extensions or expressions of a universe of texts. Lately I have lectured on Cézanne as an object of art-historical interest in the 20th century, and given seminars on Picasso in the 1920's and 30's. I hope to turn my Tanner Lectures, delivered in 2002, into a book dealing with certain painters' concern for the uprightness and bipedalism of the human animal, especially the nature of its contact with the ground. The Page-Barbour Lectures, "Seeing Too Much: Some Themes in Poussin and Veronese," which I shall give at the University of Virginia in 2006, will explore connected questions of grounding and orientation. If all goes well, my work on Picasso will eventually become a book, perhaps approaching Picasso's art in the years around 1930 from the perspective of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Among graduate dissertations just completed or still under way with me as main adviser, there are studies of Italian Futurism in the crisis years after 1917, of the final phase of Realism in 19th-century France, of Matisse's conception of individuality and visual pleasure, of Cézanne's extremism in the late 1860's, of Soviet Constructivism's dialogue with the Central European avant gardes, of De Chirico's cityscapes, of Rosa Bonheur and the cult of animals, of the gender of abstraction in its first golden age (Kandinsky and Münter, Taeuber and Arp), and of the artist's studio as a model of bourgeois sociability (in Courbet, Manet, Fantin, and Degas)." | ||
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RECENT ACTIVITIES Clark writes “Over the past three years the word ‘Mellon’ has ruled my life, thank goodness.” Clark received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2006, and this has made many things possible. It meant that Catherine Zuromskis spent two highly successful years in the department, teaching the history of photography—the University of New Mexico is fortunate to have her now on its faculty—and that Sebastian Zeidler was with us for two years as postgraduate fellow before taking up a position at Yale. The award also helped to finance the year-long visits in 2008-09 of Tom McDonough and Aruna d’Souza, both of SUNY Binghamton. Central to Clark’s work lately has been the preparation of a set of Mellon Lectures (a different Mellon) on Picasso between the wars, delivered at the National Gallery in Washington in Spring 2009. The lectures, which will become a book, provided just the right incentive to finish work on Picasso that (as several generations of students can attest) might have gone on forever. Back in Berkeley the award resulted in a series of international conferences: one on Picasso in 2007, one on Materialism and Materiality in Nineteenth-Century Art (organized by Darcy Grigsby) in 2008, and a forthcoming conference on Roman sarcophagi—partly intended as a response to Paul Zanker’s remarkable new study of the subject— which has been put together by Chris Hallett, with Clark’s help. The award enabled Clark to co-teach an unforgettable seminar on Ethics and Aesthetics in Nietzsche with Judith Butler (a seminar that deeply affected the shape of the Mellon Lectures), and to teach a graduate seminar on Picasso’s Guernica which culminated in a week’s visit to Madrid, with many hours spent in front of our object of study. And he was able to invite some art historians he particularly admires to campus on extended visits: Malcolm Bull from the Ruskin School in Oxford came and talked mainly about Nietzsche and nihilism (his seminars in the Townsend Center have resulted in a Townsend publication), and Caroline Arscott from the Courtauld Institute gave three brilliant papers on Art, Nature, and the “Decorative” in late-nineteenth century Britain. There are other sides to the “Mellon period”—for instance, it has helped graduate and library funding at a difficult time, and has supported an ongoing project to translate Guy Debord’s Mémoires (leaning heavily here on the skills of Donald Nicholson-Smith)—but he hopes he has said enough to suggest the kind of enrichment, of his own work and, he hopes, of intellectual life in the humanities at Berkeley more generally, that has followed from it. |
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| To one side of Mellon, finally, Clark has been involved in various activities spawned by the reaction to a book written with others (under the name Retort), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War An exchange with the Chicago-based journal Platypus in December 2008 was especially productive. And he has greatly enjoyed writing regularly for a very different (differently demanding) audience in the London Review of Books: a review of the great Courbet and Poussin shows last year at the Metropolitan Museum, and an essay on SFMOMA’s Matisse, “Woman with a Hat.” |  |
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