Professor thinks best painters help us understand our culture

By: By Blake Gopnik | THE WASHINGTON POST
Published: April 05, 2009

WASHINGTON

T.J. Clark seems a nice guy. A really nice guy.

That wouldn't be worth mentioning, except that he's also one of our era's greatest thinkers about art, with the grand title of George C. and Helen N. Pardee chair and professor of art history at the University of California at Berkeley. His colleagues with such titles are often an exquisite mix of arrogance, and paranoia.

So we were impressed when Clark cheerfully agreed to make a special trip from New York, where he's on sabbatical, just to talk over a single Picasso at the National Gallery of Art.

We'd asked for our Picasso-time with Clark because he is spending Sundays through April 26 giving public talks on the painter, as the National Gallery's 58th A.W. Mellon Lecturer, one of the most exalted appointments in the business.

To come to grips with pictures, most of us rely on old wall-text cliches: That the French impressionists, for instance, were all about light and color. But every once in a while, someone comes along who blows up our cliches. As far back as the early 1970s, when Clark was still in his 20s and not yet out of grad school in London, he made a stir by arguing that the impressionists were much more than makers of pretty pictures. That their paintings, full of light or not, were also full of politics and ideology and visions of the newly modern world they lived in. In fact, he claimed, it was the paintings that helped create their culture's sense of time and place and class.

Take Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon at the Island La Grande Jatte. Clark concludes that it was meant to represent a novel mixing of new classes -- "a grand new ordering of the most important matters of the moment," as he writes in The Painting of Modern Life, his most famous book. Seurat used his color and light, Clark says, to help him spell out how the new, train-taking petite-bourgeoisie of Paris coexisted with a working class that also claimed the island.

You may have heard this kind of talk about impressionism lately, maybe even in museum wall texts. That's because Clark is one of those rare thinkers whose innovations are so potent that they go on to become the new cliches.

We'll see if that happens with Clark's thoughts on Picasso once his Mellon lectures are complete.