John P. Clark

Word & Image, 2018

At the center of The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006), T. J. Clark delivers a polemic on the dissolution of the visual into the verbal. Clark's viewing of two Nicholas Poussin paintings attempts to see beyond the social history that Clark introduced into art history with Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973). In The Sight of Death, he halts the overt political discussion around art to emphasize another kind of looking. The journal format allows Clark to break out of a socio-political, art-historical discourse by offering an alternate writing style, one that permits uncertainty, confusion, meandering, rather than the battle cry of the revolutionary. The poems, likewise, contribute a language that accepts ambiguities. Expecting images to be revelatory ignores the way they also conceal, just as the very beauty of poetry is its work between indicative, conditional, and potential meaning. Writing the poems highlights the turn his writing takes from the pictures, to the political, to personal reflection, and back to the picture on the wall, linking these approaches rather than insisting on their distinction.

The Monroe Library Special Collections & Archives has recently finished cataloging the papers of Loyola’s distinguished professor of Philosophy, John P. Clark.... This collection consists primarily of correspondence and publications. These materials include correspondence with political thinkers and book publishers, independently published political pamphlets and zines, and serial periodicals. (More to follow)

J. Cooke, L. Roussillon-Constanty, F. Varallo (eds.), Nello specchio della scrittura. Autobiografia e storia dell’arte tra Otto e Novecento (Roma: Carocci editore), 2024

Journal of Art Historiography, 2014

This review focuses upon the art historiographical lessons to be learned from the ‘Kenneth Clark – Looking for Civilisation’ exhibition at Tate Britain. It considers the challenges represented by art galleries choosing to present displays centred on art historians generally and Clark in particular. The political contexts that existed during Clark’s career and the recent exhibition are mapped in order to explore both how the actions of this democratic patriarch were motivated by his understanding of the shortcomings of humanist and Marxist ideologies, and how an opportunity for reassessment has presented itself since the age of the New Art History.

University Printing Press, Delta' State University, Abraka., 2014

JP Clark is one African frontline dramatist whose works are usually steeped in culture but convey the power of indirection. The political messages of his creative works have not been adequately interpreted along political lines by scholars. It is against this backdrop that this chapter appropriates the literary methodological investigative approach to explore the political undertones in The Wives Revolt. The chapter holds that The Wives Revolt is a political drama in many fronts. It is political because it dramatises the conflict between men and women. It is also political because the subject of conflict is the bases of political struggle in Nigeria. From this premise, the chapter places The Wives Revolt as a metaphorical drama of the economic and political conflict between the Niger Delta and the Nigerian government.

The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the "crisis" of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s.

Journal of Art Historiography, 2014

This review focuses upon the art historiographical lessons to be learned from the 'Kenneth Clark – Looking for Civilisation' exhibition at Tate Britain. It considers the challenges represented by art galleries choosing to present displays centred on art historians generally and Clark in particular. The political contexts that existed during Clark's career and the recent exhibition are mapped in order to explore both how the actions of this democratic patriarch were motivated by his understanding of the shortcomings of humanist and Marxist ideologies, and how an opportunity for reassessment has presented itself since the declining dominance of the New Art History.