Timothy J. Clark, George C. and Helen N. Pardee professor of modern art at the University of California at Berkeley, will give a free public lecture at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, April 18, in the Palmer Lipcon Auditorium, Palmer Museum of Art, University Park. His lecture, "Picasso's Monsters," is sponsored by the Penn State School of Visual Arts' John M. Anderson Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series.
Clark has written some of the most provocative and influential books on modern art in recent years. His "Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution" and "The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851," published in 1973, brought Marxist art history to the fore. His latest book, "The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing" concentrates on an almost-daily meditation on two paintings by the 17th-century artist Nicolas Poussin.
Clark has taught at UCLA, Leeds University and Harvard University, among others. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served as a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute. Clark holds a doctorate from the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London and a bachelor's degree from St. John's College at Cambridge University.