Life and work
Clark attended Bristol Grammar School. He completed his undergraduate studies at St John's College, Cambridge, obtaining a first-class honours degree in 1964. He received his PhD in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1973. He lectured at the University of Essex 1967–69 and then at Camberwell College of Arts as a senior lecturer, 1970–74.
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 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. He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1974–76. In 1976, he became a founding member of the Caucus for Marxism and Art of the College Art Association.
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 1980 Clark joined the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University, which angered some of the more conservative, connoisseurship-oriented faculty members, especially the Renaissance art historian Sydney Freedberg, with whom he had a public feud.
In 1982 he published an essay, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art", critical of prevailing Modernist theory, which prompted a notable and pointed exchange with Michael Fried. This exchange contributed to the debate between formalist and social histories of art.
Clark's works have taken art history in a new direction, away from traditional preoccupations with style and iconography. His books regard modern paintings as expressions of sociopolitical conditions in modern life.
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.
In 1991 Clark was awarded the College Art Association's Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Notable students include Thomas E. Crow, Michael Kimmelman, John O'Brian and Jonathan Weinberg.
As a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, he co-authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books in 2005. [3]
In 2005 Clark received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award. [4] In 2006 he received an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art. In 2007, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. [5] He and his wife Anne Wagner, who also taught art history at Berkeley, retired in 2010 and moved to London. He continues to be active as a guest lecturer, author, and now as a poet. [6] His book Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica is based on his Mellon Lectures in Fine Art delivered in spring 2009. [7] His most recent book is If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present (2022).
In 2020, he delivered the Gifford Lectures on Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come at the University of Glasgow. [8]
