All Eyes Turn To T.J. Clark, Who Turns His To Picasso

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, pomposity and paranoia, with some florid insecurity thrown in.

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 were surprised when "Tim," as he introduced himself, gave us all his time, lunch to closing hour. (Of course, for Clark that's barely long enough to get warmed up: His last book, "The Sight of Death," was a diary of the three months he'd spent looking at two pictures.)

And we were amazed when our afternoon with the 65-year-old professor turned out to be as pleasant as it was illuminating.

We'd asked for our Picasso-time with Clark because he'll be spending the next six Sundays, starting today, 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. In 2003, people lined up for hours to hear Mellon Lecturer Kirk Varnedoe, dying of cancer, discuss abstraction. Earlier Mellon lecturers have featured art-historical legends such as Ernst Gombrich and Anthony Blunt, whose talks, once published, helped shift how we think about art.

Clark has already been doing that for almost 40 years.

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 themselves that helped create their culture's sense of time and place and class.

Take that prettiest and most colorful of paintings, 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. For now, here is some of what he came up with when we brought him, cold, to a 1918 still life by Picasso.