Timothy James Clark, often known as T.J. Clark, is an art historian and writer, born in 1943 in Bristol, England.
Clark attended Bristol Grammar School. He completed his undergraduate studies at St. John’s College, Cambridge University, he obtained a first-class honours degree in 1964. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1973. He lectured at the University of Essex 1967-1969 and then at Camberwell College of Arts as a senior lecturer, 1970-1974. During this time, he was also a member of the British Section of the Situationist International, from which he was expelled along with the other members of the English section. He was also involved in the group King Mob.
In 1973 he published two books based on his Ph.D. dissertation: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851. Clark returned to Britain from his position at the University of California, Los Angeles and Leeds University to be chair of the Fine Art Department in 1976. In 1980 Clark joined the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University. Chief among his Harvard detractors was the Renaissance art historian Sydney Freedberg, with whom he had a public feud.
Books in order of publication:
Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.
Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. With Iain Boal, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts. London: Verso, 2005
The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. Yale University Press, 2006.
The Painting of Postmodern Life?. Barcelona: MACBA, 2009.
Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013
Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018
If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present. London: Thames & Hudson, 2022
T.J. Clark on Bruegel. London: Thames & Hudson, 2024
Those Passions: On Art and Politics – 2025
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