Awards
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
The Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art, established in 2003, celebrates the career of an author of note and includes art criticism, art history, art biography, and/or art theory. The award is presented to an author who, among other distinctions, has demonstrated particular commitment to his or her work throughout a long career and has had an impact, nationally and internationally, on the field.
2013 Winner
T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (2013)
CAA recognizes T. J. Clark, professor emeritus of the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, as an influential, prolific, and inspired art historian and cultural critic. For over forty years he has written scholarly books, journal articles, exhibition reviews, and essays on the history of European and American art from the Renaissance to the present. Since the early 1970s, with the publication of two seminal books on French nineteenth-century realism—The Absolute Bourgeois and The Image of the People—his voice has been consistently recognized for its articulate, committed advocacy of the social and political significance of art. An enormously influential essay from that time called for “a new art history,” one founded on the responsibility of the historian or critic for situating aesthetic objects and approaches within the larger frame of cultural critique. From these early books and articles, with their Marxist and theoretical orientation, through subsequent studies of Impressionism and Édouard Manet (1980s), Abstract Expressionism (1990s), and Nicolas Poussin and Pablo Picasso (2000s), Clark has engaged the foundations and outcomes of the phenomenon of modernity in art. Over many years of writing on art, culture, and politics for the London Review of Books and the New Left Review, as well as his contributions to the collective Retort, he has provided us with a large body of work that addresses the significance of the expanded field of the visual arts in the world today.
Past Winners
Although the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art was established fairly recently, the award juries have honored the writing careers of notable luminaries in the field, including Hans Belting, Oleg Grabar, Georges Didi-Huberman, and, most recently, Mieke Bal.
Read a list of all winners of the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art from 2003 to the present.
Award Nominations
CAA has begun accepting nominations for the 2014 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art.
