T. J. Clark: Picasso and Truth

Special Lecture Series

Lecture One: Still Life in Front of a Window
Introduced by Kaja Silverman
Monday, November 2

Lecture Two: Three Dancers
Introduced by Judith Butler
Tuesday, November 3

Lecture Three: Guernica
Introduced by Anthony Cascardi
Wednesday, November 4
Reception to follow

All lectures at 7 p.m. in the Museum Theater, 2621 Durant Avenue, Berkeley (access via sculpture garden)

Registration for all three lectures has reached capacity. We do anticipate a limited number of  “rush” tickets becoming available the night of each lecture. A “rush line” will form on a first-come, first-served basis starting at 5:30 p.m. each evening.

These three lectures by renowned art historian, author, and professor T. J. Clark are extracted from a series of six delivered as the Mellon Lectures in Fine Art last spring at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. They treat three notable pictures by Picasso from the 1920s and 1930s: the so-called Guitar and Mandolin on a Table from 1924 (Guggenheim Museum, New York); the Three Dancers painted a year later (Tate Modern, London); and the mural of the bombing of Guernica done for the Spanish Pavilion in 1937 (Reina Sofia, Madrid).

Clark writes, “The main subject of the lectures is Picasso’s sense of space. Cubism—the great, maybe the only, shared language of the early twentieth century—possessed, beneath its brilliant surface changes, an immoveable sense of how space might offer itself as inhabitable and ‘human.’ In the three paintings the lectures deal with, humanness is under threat. The room, the window, the tiled floor, the table filled with familiar objects—all this previous Cubist world, steeped as it was in the Bohemian confidence of the nineteenth century, is coming to an end. The catastrophe of the new century is taking shape.”

T. J. Clark is George and Helen Pardee Chair and Professor of Modern Art in the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley. He is the author of a series of groundbreaking books, from early works such as The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 (1973) and The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1985) to the more recent Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2005, with Iain Boal, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts), and The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006).

Copresented by the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, Department of Art History, Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.