T.J. Clark taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers; Farewell to an Idea, a history of modernism; and Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come. His many pieces for the LRB have included such subjects as Walter Benjamin, Picasso and tragedy, Cézanne’s ‘strange apprenticeship’ and the work of Lee Krasner. His essay collection Those Passions: On Art and Politics came out in February 2025.
‘Suburb in Havana’ (1958) by Willem de KooningArtwork © 2026 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London.Photo: Owen Conway. Courtesy Gagosian.
Willem de Kooning’s Suburb in Havana was painted in 1958. The canvas seems to have had its first showing at Sidney Janis’s gallery in New York, part of an exhibition...
Marble kouros (c.590-80 BCE).
For young men, all things are as they should be when they are in the brilliant flowering of their youth, an object of admiration for men and desire for women, and beautiful in death in the front rank.
Tyrtaeus, ‘Fragment 7’
It is one of the wonders of the world. You round a corner from the Met’s entrance hall and see the sculpture deep in a...
Jabalia in northern Gaza, January 2025.
‘We make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve got a lot of them,’ Trump told the Knesset on 13 October.
And we’ve given a lot to Israel, frankly. Bibi would call me so many times, ‘Can you get me this weapon, that weapon, that weapon?’ Some of ’em I never heard of, Bibi, and I made ’em! [Laughter]...
So you thought the spectacle was just smoke and mirrors? Is that why you’re shocked? You didn’t think I would do anything? How can I have allowed something as boring as a tariff war to take over your screens, after only a few weeks of excitement – suddenly it’s talking heads, eager economists, graphs and percentage points, ten-year Treasuries, ‘the end of...
In his latest book Heaven on Earth art historian T.J. Clark draws on examples from Giotto to Picasso to provide an exciting new history of the depiction of the divine. He talks to LRB contributing editor...
T.J. Clark comes face to face with Rembrandt.
T.J. Clark shows how Picasso’s first history painting, Guernica, changed the way he thought about space.
T.J. Clark’s definition of modernism draws on an old-school idea of modernity: Max Weber on ‘the disenchantment’ of a rationalised world, Georg Simmel on the ‘indifference’ of a money economy,...
People talk of painted eyes in portraits that ‘follow you round the room’. T.J. Clark, in the third of the six essays collected in his new book, Heaven on Earth, strangely inverts...
‘There are the Alps,’ Basil Bunting wrote on the flyleaf of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, ‘you will have to go a long way round/if you want to avoid them.’ T.J. Clark is an...
Like many other plutocrats who are now remembered as great collectors, J. Paul Getty began acquiring works of art in a serious way when he began to die – that is to say, in his forties (he...
The grainy photograph shows the doorway of a house, the double door itself scarcely visible, obscured by a row of three huge paintings, all four to five feet in height, which have been carefully...
‘Impressionism became very quickly the house style of the haute bourgeoisie,’ T.J. Clark observes at the close of The Painting of Modern Life. Few seem to have resisted the...
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