Conversation with T.J. Clark
Channel: Barnes Foundation
Date: 03/07/2019

Eminent art historian T. J. Clark will discuss his newest book, Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (2018), followed by a conversation with Shira Brisman and David Young Kim of the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. 

In Heaven on Earth, Clark investigates the different ways painting has depicted the dream of God’s kingdom come: Heaven descended to Earth. He goes back to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance—to Giotto in Padua, Bruegel facing the horrors of religious war, Poussin painting the sacraments, and Veronese unfolding the human comedy in his inscrutable Allegory of Love. Was it ultimately to painting’s advantage that in an age of orthodoxy and enforced censorship (threats of hellfire, burnings at the stake) artists found ways reflect on the powers and limitations of religion without putting their thoughts into words? Clark concludes by bringing us into the atomic age with Picasso’s Fall of Icarus, made for UNESCO in 1958, which seems to signal a time when all futures are dead. 

T. J. Clark is George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair Emeritus of the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of many books, including the seminal The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. 

Shira Brisman is assistant professor in early modern art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research investigates the boundaries between privacy and society, patterns and aberrations, religious modes of thinking and categories of secularization.

David Young Kim is assistant professor in Southern Renaissance art at the University of Pennsylvania. David Young Kim teaches and researches Southern Renaissance art, with a focus on the issues of art literature, transcultural exchange, and material culture. In May 2017, he delivered the Tomàs Harris Lectures at University College London. He recently received the Dean’s Award for Innovation in Teaching for his contributions to undergraduate education.