The Robert B. Silvers Foundation today announced art historian T. J. Clark and critic Tausif Noor as the winners of its second annual Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writers. Clark is professor emeritus of art history at the University of California, Berkeley, and most recently the author of If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present (Thames & Hudson, 2022). Noor is a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is studying global modern and contemporary art with a focus on South Asia and its histories of decolonization. A former Fulbright scholar, he was from 2017 to 2020 the Spiegel-Wilks Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Both are contributors to Artforum.
Clark, known for investigating art as an expression of social and political conditions, earned praise from the prize jury for offering “revolutionarily fresh and vivifying insights into subjects as diverse as Bruegel, Giotto, Courbet, and Picasso in a manner that is as notable for its deep humanity as it is for its uncompromising acuity.” Noor was lauded for his “exhaustively researched essays on a wide array of subjects” which “seamlessly intertwine considerations of aesthetics and production with an admirable sensitivity to the contexts of history and personality.”
The Dudley Prize is awarded annually alongside the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism and the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Journalism, with two recipients recognized in each of the three categories. A total of $135,000 is split between the six writers, each of whom will receive between $15,000 and $30,000.The Silvers-Dudley Prizes were established in 2022 to “recognize outstanding achievement in the genres of writing that Mr. Silvers and his late partner, Lady Grace Dudley, embraced and encouraged during Mr. Silvers’ tenure as founding editor of The New York Review of Books.”