T.J. Clark

T. J. Clark was born in Bristol in 1943, took a B.A. in Modern History at Cambridge and a Ph.D. at the Courtauld Institute. He taught at several places in Britain and the U.S. and is now George C. and Helen N. Professor Emeritus at Berkeley, where he worked for twenty years. Among his books are Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973), The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1984), Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999), The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006), Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (2013), Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life (with Anne M. Wagner, 2013), Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (2018), and If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present (2022).  He has been associated with Retort, the Bay Area group of artists and activists, and in 2005 was part-author of Retort’s Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. Since 2000 he has written regularly for the London Review of Books and The Threepenny Review. At present he is working on a collection of essays, Those Passions: On Art and Politics, and a book of poems, Climbing Path: Poems and Pictures