Art historian T.J. Clark discusses Daniel Ward's work, reflecting on realism's role in art and politics.
About the speakers:
T. J. Clark was born in Bristol in 1943. He has taught art history in Britain and the U.S., and is presently Professor Emeritus at Berkeley, where he worked for over twenty years. His books have dealt mainly with the aesthetic character and social fate of art since the French Revolution. Among them are 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 (1984), Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999), The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006), Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (2013), Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life (with Anne M. Wagner, 2013), and If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present (2022). He has been associated with Retort, the Bay Area group of artists and activists, and in 2005 was part-author of Retort’s Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. Since 2000 he has written regularly for the London Review of Books, his latest contribution being ‘A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle’. His most recent book is Those Passions: On Art and Politics (2025) and his next one will be An Angel and Two Skulls: Eighteenth-Century Death.
Daniel Ward (Coventry, 1991) lives and works in Oxford. His work has been shown at HKW, Berlin, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and the Museum for Photography, Berlin, amongst others. He was the inaugural recipient of the Michael O’Pray Prize in 2018, an award for new writing on moving-image art supported by Art Monthly and Film and Video Umbrella. He was commissioned by City Projects to write The Politics of Production, a report examining the conditions for producing experimental film in the UK, funded by Arts Council England and published in 2019. His writing has been published in Artforum, Art Monthly, Texte zur Kunst and New Left Review: Sidecar, amongst others. He is currently a PhD candidate at University College London, writing on 20th century British art, politics and film from 1982 to 1997.
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