Picasso and Monstrosity

The Shih Hsio-yen Distinguished Lecture in Art History series

Picasso and Monstrosity

Date: 3 December 2008 (Wednesday)
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Rm 223, Knowles Building, HKU

Speaker: Prof. T.J. Clark

Many regard T.J. Clark as the most influential art historian of the past half century. Beginning in 1973, his work pioneered modern methods and models for a social history of art rooted in Marxist theory and committed to understanding art’s concrete role in constituting social reality. In demonstrationg art’s fundamental ideological power, Clark also opened art history to a variety of other new methodologies.

Educated at Cambridge and the Courtauld Institute of Art, T.J. Clark was professor at Harvard University from 1980 to 1988 before moving to the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair in modern art. Major books include The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-51 and its companion volume Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (both 1973); The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1985); Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999); and (with Iain Boal, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts) Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2005).