T. J. Clark and Anne Wagner to join the History of Art Department as Visiting Professors

Posted on 1 October 2010

Two of the world’s most distinguished art-historians, Professor T.J. Clark and Professor Anne Wagner, are going to be joining the History of Art Department as Visiting Professors from this autumn onwards, for an initial period of three years.

Professors Clark and Wagner, who currently teach at the University of California, Berkeley, will play an active role in the department throughout each academic year, presenting a series of research papers, teaching regular MA seminars and giving an annual undergraduate lecture.

The Head of the History of Art department, Professor Mark Hallett, says that‘it is a great honour to have two such internationally celebrated art-historians joining our community. Their presence will add immeasurably to our expertise across a wide variety of areas, and offer a unique opportunity for faculty and students to work with two of the greatest scholars in our discipline’. Professor Wagner says that ‘from my point of view, an affiliation with the Department seems full of enormous promise. Surely it would be hard to find another institution where the ongoing research of both faculty and students offers more of a complement to my own in sculpture, British modernism and twentieth century art.’ Professor Clark says that,‘without simply echoing Anne’s sentiments, I do immensely look forward to regular stints at York. My links to people there, and to the place itself, go back decades, and it will be great to see them renewed and extended’.

Professor Wagner is a celebrated historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century French and British sculpture and a highly influential scholar of both modernism and contemporary art. She has published widely in exhibition catalogues and in leading journals such as Art Forum andOctober, and her books include Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second Empire (1986), Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keefe (1996) and Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture (2005). Professor Wagner is currently the Class of 1936 Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has taught since 1991. This autumn she will be taking up the post of Henry Moore Research Foundation Curator at Tate.

Professor Clark is renowned in the discipline for fashioning a new social history of art and for his writing on both French art and modernism. His books include The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-51 (1973), Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973), The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1985) and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999). His more recent book, The Sight of Death: An experiment in Art Writing (2006), meanwhile, has initiated a far-reaching debate on the ways in which art-historians write about the art object. He has also co-authored Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2005). Currently the George C and Helen N Pardee Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Clark has formerly held Chairs at Harvard, UCLA and Leeds University.