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)."