Conversation: T. J. Clark with Shira Brisman and David Young Kim

Conversation: T. J. Clark with Shira Brisman and David Young Kim

Eminent art historian T. J. Clark will discuss his newest book, Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (2018), followed by a conversation with Shira Brisman and David Young Kim of the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. The event will be followed by a book signing.

In Heaven on Earth, Clark investigates the different ways painting has depicted the dream of God’s kingdom come: Heaven descended to Earth. He goes back to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance—to Giotto in Padua, Bruegel facing the horrors of religious war, Poussin painting the sacraments, and Veronese unfolding the human comedy in his inscrutable Allegory of Love. Was it ultimately to painting’s advantage that in an age of orthodoxy and enforced censorship (threats of hellfire, burnings at the stake) artists found ways reflect on the powers and limitations of religion without putting their thoughts into words? Clark concludes by bringing us into the atomic age with Picasso’s Fall of Icarus, made for UNESCO in 1958, which seems to signal a time when all futures are dead.

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