The Eye, the Mind, and the Heart: In Honor of Clark Poling

During his thirty-three years at Emory, Clark Poling served as professor and chair of Art History and director of the Michael C. Carlos Museum (formerly the Emory University Museum of Art and Archaeology), and faculty curator emeritus of Works on Paper.

As director of the Carlos Museum, Poling managed the major reorganization and reinstallation of the collections, worked alongside architect Michael Graves to design the 1985 renovation of the old Emory Law School building, and developed the museum’s first series of special exhibitions.

Poling was an internationally recognized art historian whose work in early twentieth-century French and German art and theory was highly regarded in the field. He published widely on the Bauhaus and artists Vassily Kandinsky and André Masson, among others. He curated innovative exhibitions at the Carlos and the High Museum of Art, and forged partnerships with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Musée National d’Art Moderne, The Centre Pompidou, and Musée Picasso in Paris, Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin.

Clark Poling was a generous and gentle man, a brilliant scholar, and a beloved teacher. His legacy endures not only in the works of art he acquired and the body of research he contributed, but also in the lives and careers of the countless undergraduate and graduate students who thrived under his tutelage.

This exhibition recalls the many that Poling organized for students in the Art History Department’s foundational course, ART/CULTURE/CONTEXT II (ART HISTORY 102), reflecting his deeply held belief that studying works of art in person was essential to develop the eye, the mind, and the heart. These works are drawn from the museum’s collection of Works on Paper, and many were acquired during Poling’s tenure.