T.J. Clark, Chancellor's Professor of Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley and author of Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, will deliver the Idee Levitan IHC Endowed Lecture at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, November 7 in the Isla Vista Theater I. His free public lecture entitled, "The Monster Picasso," is being held in conjunction with the UCSB Art Symposium. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, copies of Farewell to an Idea will be available for purchase and signing at this event.

His lecture will focus on a series of monstrous heads Picasso painted in 1927-1929. It will aim to describe the pictures more closely than has been done previously, and to reconstruct Picasso's intentions in doing them. Toward that end it will enlist the aid of Picasso's most remarkable interpreter in the late 1920s, the marxist critic Carl Einstein, writing in the magazine Documents.

"Farewell to an Idea is an art history like no other, both in terms of conception and the amazing quality of reproduction."-- Tariq Ali, The Times

"With Farewell to an Idea, Clark joins modernism's truest spokesmen and critics: Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro, Leo Steinberg. . . . In explosive intellectual impact his work is without peer."-- Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner

T. J. Clark is Chancellor's Professor of Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley. After receiving his Ph. D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, he taught at Essex University, Camberwell School of Art, UCLA, Leeds University, and the School of Fine Arts at Harvard University, before joining the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-51, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, Jackson Pollock: Abstraktion und Figuration, and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. Currently he is at work on a project entitled, "Picasso and Mondrian, 1925-33," with support from an NEH Fellowship for 2001-2002.

This event is part of the Idee Levitan IHC Endowed Lecture Series at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It is being cosponsored by the UCSB Art Symposium, UCSB Bookstore, and UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.