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.
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...
‘Television Was a Baby Crawling towards That Deathchamber.’ These words are by Allen Ginsberg, writing in 1961, the title of a poem anathematising America. ‘It is here, the long Awaited bleap-blast light that Speaks one red tongue like Politician.’ The most chilling word in Ginsberg’s title strikes me as ‘That’. It knows we know what it refers to. But...
Frantz Fanon is a thing of the past. It doesn’t take long, reading the story of his life – the Creole childhood in Martinique, volunteering to fight for the Free French in the Second World War, his career in Lyon as arrogant young psychiatrist, the part he played in the war in Algeria, the encounters with Nkrumah and Lumumba, his death at the age of 36 – to realise that...
The island on Eagle Pond is a ruin. The trunk of a long dead treeArches in agony into the water,Not so much hollow as disemboweled.
Six clumps of municipal daffodils struggle for life on earthSterilised by goose shit and particulates.The A24 has no mercy.
South London is not all like this, I hasten to add. Ten minutes walk down Crescent Lane,Past the Catholic primary with its cuddly Virgin, you...
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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