T. J. Clark (art historian)

He completed his undergraduate studies at St John's College, Cambridge, obtaining a first-class honours degree in 1964.

In 1973 he published two books based on his PhD 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 in 1976 when he was appointed professor and head of the Department of Fine Art at the University of Leeds.

In 1988 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he held the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair as Professor of Modern Art until his retirement.

[6] His book Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica is based on his Mellon Lectures in Fine Art delivered in spring 2009.

[8] In "World Upside Down,"[9] Belgian social theorist Daniel Zamora critiques Clark's late affirmation of Cold War liberal interpretive politics in his 2024 collection On Breugel.

Clark in his 80s maintains the fatalistic Counter-Enlightenment postwar consensus that bridged emancipatory liberalism and socialism back to Antienlightenment inequality,[10] proscribing democratic progress to most nations.