Looking again at Picasso’s Guernica
Co-presented with the Power Institute at the University of Sydney and the National Institute for Expiremental Arts, College of Fine Arts (COFA) at the University of New South Wales
T J Clark
20 June, 2011
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Pablo Picasso painted his large scale Guernica (1937) in response to the bombing of the Spanish town by German and Italian forces during the Spanish Civil War. In his Sydney Ideas lecture art historian T J Clark discussed Guernica in detail, examining how a work of such enduring political resonance emerged from Picasso's deeply private and "difficult" artistic universe. He takes the audience through the step-by-step creation of Guernica, taking advantage of the set of photographs of the work in progress taken by Dora Maar.
Timothy J Clark is currently Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of York. He was a professor of modern art at the University of California, Berkeley from 1988 - 2010. He is one of the world’s foremost art historians. His work has combined an acute attention to the formal complexity of art works and a deep engagement with their complex and fraught social resonance, and has helped to shape our understanding of major modern artists and movements . Clark’s books include The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1985), The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006) and the forthcoming Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica.