T. J. Clark (art historian)

Timothy James Clark often known as T.J. Clark, is an art historian and writer, born in 1943 in Bristol, England.

Life and work

University of California, Berkeley, where Clark was a professor until his retirement in 2010.

Clark attended Bristol Grammar School. He completed his undergraduate studies at St. John's College, Cambridge University, he obtained a first-class honours degree in 1964. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1973. He lectured at the University of Essex 1967-1969 and then at Camberwell College of Arts as a senior lecturer, 1970-1974. During this time he was also a member of the British Section of the Situationist International, from which he was expelled along with the other members of the English section. He was also involved in the group King Mob.

In 1973 he published two books based on his Ph.D. dissertation: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851. Clark returned to Britain from his position at the University of California, Los Angeles and Leeds University to be chair of the Fine Art Department in 1976. In 1980 Clark joined the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University. Chief among his Harvard detractors was the Renaissance art historian Sydney Freedberg, with whom he had a public feud.

In 1988 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where he held the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair as Professor of Modern Art until his retirement in 2010.

In 1991 Clark was awarded the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Notable students include Brigid Doherty, Hollis Clayson, Thomas E. Crow, Whitney Davis, Andre Dombrowski, Serge Guilbaut, Matthew Jackson, Christina Kiaer, Michael Kimmelman, Sabine Kriebel, Michael Leja, John O'Brian, Bibiana Obler, Joshua Shannon, Bridget Alsdorf, Jeremy Melius, and Jonathan Weinberg.

In the early 1980s, he wrote an essay, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art," critical of prevailing Modernist theory, which prompted a notable and pointed exchange with Michael Fried. This exchange defined the debate between Modernist theory and the social history of art. Since that time, a mutually respectful and productive exchange of ideas between Clark and Fried has developed.

Clark's works have provided a new form of art history that take a new direction from traditional preoccupations with style and iconography. His books regard modern paintings as striving to articulate the social and political conditions of modern life.

Clark received an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006. He is a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.

Bibliography

Books

• Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. ISBN 0520217454, trad Fr. :Image du peuple: Gustave Courbet et la révolution de 1848, Les Presses du Réeel, 2007. ISBN 2840662140
• The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. ISBN 0520217446. trad Fr. :Le Bourgeois Absolu - Les Artistes Et La Politique En France De 1848 À 1851, Art édition, 1992. EAN13 9782905986108, (projet) Presses du réel, ISBN 2840662150.
• The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. ISBN 0691009031
• T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith (Winter, 1997). "Why Art Can't Kill the Situationist International". October. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0162-2870(199724)79%3C15%3AWACKTS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y. Retrieved 2008-04-12.  Also published at pp. 467–488 of book Tom McDonough (2004) (Editor) Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. The MIT Press (April 1, 2004) 514 pages ISBN 0262633000 ISBN 978-0262633000, trad. Fr. :Pourquoi l'art ne peut pas tuer l'internationale situationniste, Egrégores, 2006, ISBN 2952381933
• Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. ISBN 0300089104
• Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. With Iain Boal, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts. London: Verso, 2005. ISBN 1844670317
• The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. Yale University Press, 2006. ISBN 0300137583
• The Painting of Postmodern Life?. Barcelona: MACBA, 2009. ISSN: 1886-5259

Articles

• "At Tate Modern". London Review of Books 33 (4): 32–33. 17 February 2011. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n04/tj-clark/at-tate-modern. Retrieved 11 February 2011.  Subject: Gabriel Orozco retrospective at the Tate Modern.

External links

• Timothy J. Clark, noted art historian, awarded Mellon Foundation grant
• Dictionary of Art Historians entry from which part of the entry was derived