Vol. 160 / No. 1381
Vol. 160 / No. 1381
It is an uncomfortable thought – at least it is to the
editor of this Magazine, who was allowed to stay up past his bedtime to watch
the programmes – that only people over sixty can remember the enormous impact
of Kenneth Clark’s BBC television series Civilisation when first broadcast, in
1969. As Clark’s biographer writes, in words that are themselves a snapshot of a
bygone age, ‘Evensong was rearranged in some parishes so the congregation could
see the programme on Sundays, and Civilisation parties were held in the homes
of those who owned a colour television’.1 It might also be observed that no other
television programme in the 1960s was thought worthy of a twopage Editorial in
The Burlington Magazine, only partly explicable by the fact that the then
Editor, Benedict Nicolson, was an old friend of Clark: ‘it represents the
mature response to things that matter of a man who is perceptive, sensitive and
wise’.2
It seems unlikely that reports will come in of postponed Evensongs
for the sake of the BBC’s new series Civilisations, broadcast in March and
April this year. That is a reflection not on the quality of the programmes, but
of the way that broadcast media are now consumed – the existence of on-demand
online services such as Netflix or BBC iPlayer means that we can no longer use
television as an excuse for not going to church. Civilisation was such an
immense success partly because it had so little competition (there were then
only three television channels) and because in the United Kingdom it was the
first major documentary series to be broadcast in colour – the programme was
conceived partly to persuade people to buy the very expensive new colour
television sets.
In a multi-platform digital age, and without the advantage of
showcasing a major technical advance, Civilisations was never going to achieve
anything like the vast audiences who tuned in to its predecessor (nor can the
accompanying publications hope for more than a tiny percentage of the
multi-million sales of Clark’s Civilisation book). In the United Kingdom the
series has been received with polite enthusiasm, although early indications suggest
that the figure of 1.7 million viewers for the first episode has not been
sustained. The most telling aspect of the critical response has been the way
that the programmes have been compared in every detail to Clark’s, a measure of
the hold that his account of ‘civilisation’ still has on the public
imagination, and not only of those over sixty. The major difference is that in
place of a single authorial voice, that of an eminent white British man who can
never escape the label ‘patrician’, there are three very varied presenters.
Simon Schama presented five of the nine programmes (Clark had thirteen) and
Mary Beard and David Olusoga were given two each. In place of his chosen focus
on western Europe and America theirs is a global vision that brings to bear on
the story of art such issues as feminism and colonialism that were barely, if
at all, evident in Civilisation.
Clark’s series had the subtitle ‘A personal view’ and the
new series takes that approach further, for in place of his chronological movement
from the Dark Ages to the nineteenth century, each episode is, in effect, an
essay on a particular theme – ‘How do we look’, on the body in art, and ‘The
eye of faith’, on religion and art, in the case of Beard’s two episodes. This
approach gives focus to what would otherwise be an unmanageably protean subject,
the global history of art. It also means, however, that the series eschews the
over-arching themes that knitted together Clark’s programmes. His emphasis on
the ideals of sanity and proportion as persistent goals for artists throughout history
was evident to the earliest critics – Nicolson, for example, saw it as a result
of a philosophy derived from Bloomsbury and E.M. Forster – and it is challenged
in the present series by Beard in particular. In her programme on the body, for
example, Beard includes a clip of Clark describing the Hellenistic ideal of
harmony as embodied in the Apollo Belvedere, an attitude that she traces back
to J.J. Winckelmann and finds ‘distorting and divisive’.
Clark’s programmes also emphasised the fragility of
civilisation, a point explicable in part by the historical context in which his
programmes were made, of not only Cold War and revolutions but also natural
disasters – as when Clark stands in the cloister of S. Croce to describe the
effects of the 1966 floods in Florence. Simon Schama opens the series with an
even more powerful meditation on the frailty of civilisation, by describing the
murder in 2015 of Khaled al-Asaad, Head of Antiquities for Palmyra, at the
hands of ISIS. Yet the theme is not developed and Beard in particular seems
dubious about the very idea of civilisation, concluding her programme on
religion and art by saying that our admiration for the concept is simply
another form of religious belief.
This comes quite close to stating that we substitute art for
religion – a reasonable argument, perhaps, but it draws attention to one of the
main contrasts between Civilisation and Civilisations. The first was written
and presented by an art historian, the second by historians who write about
art. The difference is perhaps more profound than has been acknowledged.
Clark’s series was based on an intellectual foundation derived ultimately from
John Ruskin, as set out in his 1877 book St Mark’s Rest: The History of Venice:
‘Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of
their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of
these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three
the only trustworthy one is the last’. Clark surveyed art and then deduced from
it a history of human society. The new series does not support such an absolute
value for art, which its presenters use primarily in the service of
historically-based arguments. This poses the question of why a historian should
look to art for evidence in preference to any other form of material culture.
The new series deliberately replaces confidence about the importance of art
with a form of cultural relativism. That will surely be a disappointment to
most of its audience, and not just those who recall Clark’s eloquently
persuasive certainties.
1 J. Stourton: Kenneth Clark, Life, Art and Civilisation,
London 2016, p.340.
2 Editorial: ‘Clark on civilization’, the burlington
magazine 111 (1969), pp.331–32.