Marx's Cézanne

Art historian and George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, T. J. Clark is the author of a groundbreaking sequence of books on the social character and formal dynamics of modern art: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851 (1973); Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973); The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1984); and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999). More recent titles include Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (written collaboratively with “Retort,” 2005); The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006); Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (2013); and a book accompanying the Tate Britain exhibition, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life (2013), co-authored with Anne M. Wagner. Clark contributes regular art criticism to the London Review of Books. A booklet on the present state of Left politics, Por uma esquerda sem futuro (For a Left with No Future) was published in Brazil in 2013.

Clark is currently a scholar at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Focusing on the Getty's Cézanne, Still Life with Apples, Clark will reflect on what it is to write about Cézanne at present – now that the artist is so firmly a thing of the past.

Image: Still Life with Apples by Paul Cézanne. Courtesy of the Getty Center.