TJ Clark (art historian)

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Timothy James Clark (often TJ Clark ; born April 12, 1943 in Bristol , England ) is a British art historian who has made significant contributions to the social history of art .

Clark first became famous as a Marxist art historian. He is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley . He deals with a special form of painterly thinking that he calls ground level painting . Artists who particularly interest him in this context are Nicolas Poussin , Pieter Bruegel and Paolo Veronese .

Life

Clark attended Bristol Grammar School before studying at St. John's College , Cambridge University . He graduated there in 1964 with distinction. In 1973 he received his PhD from the University of London's Courtauld Institute of Art and taught at the University of Essex from 1967 to 1969 and then from 1970 to 1974 at Camberwell College of Arts . 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 British section. He was also a member of the King Mob group .

In 1973 he published two books, both based on his dissertation and establishing his career. The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851 were received as manifestos of a new history of art in English.

In 1974, his position as visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) was converted to that of associate professor . Clark returned to the United Kingdom and in 1976 became head of the Art History Department at Leeds University . In 1980, Clark became a member of the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University , which provoked negative reactions from more conservative art historians in the same department. His main antagonist at Harvard was Renaissance specialist Sydney Freedberg, with whom a public controversy arose. In 1980 Clark accepted a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley.

In the early 1980s, Clark wrote the essay Clement Greenberg 's Theory of Art , which critically examined the prevailing modernist theory. This led to a scientific discussion with Michael Fried . This exchange of views resulted in a productive exchange of ideas between Clark and Fried.

Despite earlier approaches to a social history of art in English-speaking countries ( Frederick Antal ), Clark's work was groundbreaking for the establishment of a social history of art that differs from traditional style history and iconology . In his books, he views modern paintings as attempts to articulate the social and political conditions of modern life.

Awards

In 1992, Clark was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 2006 he was awarded an honary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art . He has been an elected member of the American Philosophical Society since 2007 .

Fonts

  • Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973), new edition: Thames & Hudson, 1982, ISBN 0-500-27245-X
  • The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 (1973), German Der absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851 , Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981
  • The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1985), revised new edition Princeton University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-691-00903-1
  • Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism , paperback edition, B&T 2001, ISBN 0-300-08910-4
  • Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (with UC Berkeley geography professor Michael Watts and two independent authors from the San Francisco Bay Area Iain Boal and Joseph Matthews ), Verso Books 2005, ISBN 1-84467-031-7
  • The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing , paperback, Yale University Press, 2008, ISBN 0-300-13758-3 - about two paintings by Nicolas Poussin

Individual evidence

  1. According to Held / Schneider, Clark has "brought Impressionism research to a new level" with "The Painting of Modern Life" (together with Robert L. Herbert, "Paris Society and Art", Stuttgart, Zurich, 1989). Jutta Held / Norbert Schneider, Social History of Painting , Cologne 2006, p. 448
  2. Member History: Timothy J. Clark. American Philosophical Society, accessed June 20, 2018 (with a short biography).

Web links