Kenneth Clark

The reputation acquired by Kenneth Clark for his television series Civilisation (1969) made him a household name and gave him considerable international celebrity, particularly in North America. But soon after his death in 1983, the balloon of fame gradually deflated. Today, a younger generation of art-history students will know his name but do not perhaps read his books. Others will view him as a titled arts supremo from a distant historical period; or even, perhaps, as the remote father in the diaries of his son Alan Clark MP. It will thus be of great interest to gauge the reaction to Tate Britain’s exhibition Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation running from 20th May to 10th August.1 This will explore the various aspects of Clark’s career as museum director and art historian, as collector, writer and communicator. Will the balloon refloat, once visitors have been engrossed in this remarkable and influential figure, perhaps the last cultured Grand Tourist in the twentieth-century Age of Anxiety?

Against this background of public acclaim, it is sometimes overlooked or conveniently forgotten that Clark was by nature a scholarly art historian whose life’s work was founded in his youth on research, attribution (the pursuit of which he was later to term ‘a virus’), chronology and stylistic analysis. He was, of course, pre-Courtauld Institute but he carefully chose his mentors and he learnt how to write flexible, expository English prose. Combined with his broad cultural appetite (in evidence, early on, as a single-minded only child) and Oxford intellectual bearings, oiled with a fine component of social aplomb, his gifts were soon recognised, and in his late twenties, the balloon took off. After a period at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, he was appointed Director of the National Gallery, aged thirty in 1933, and the following year he became the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. In the 1920s he had led the relatively untroubled existence of an aesthete with considerable inherited wealth, had married and started a family and indulged his passion for collecting works of art from across the centuries. He was that rare thing, a true scholar with real aesthetic sense, a combination that gave him a freedom of outlook denied to some of his fellow art historians. This was evident from the unlikely choice of subject for his first book, The Gothic Revival (1928). It was begun in the mocking spirit of Strachey’s Queen Victoria (1921) but, like that book, it ended with considerable warmth of appraisal (and was, incidentally, admired by Strachey).

Clark was the oldest of that group of Italophile art historians who came to prominence through the 1930s in Britain, among them Anthony Blunt, Denis Mahon, Ellis Waterhouse and John Pope-Hennessy; a little later came Benedict Nicolson on the direction of whose early career Clark had an invaluable impact, as he had with Pope-Hennessy. To this group one might add John Betjeman, not, to be sure, an art historian, but an Oxford contemporary who was impressed by The Gothic Revival, with immense consequences to the preservation movement and the founding of the Victorian Society. Two of Clark’s early mentors were Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, two extra­ordinarily contrasting figures who, between them, provided Clark with a concept of the history of art as a wider intellectual discipline in which old-fashioned connoisseurship was beginning to have a diminished role.

Clark writes about Berenson’s great plan, which never came to fruition, of a study – part historical, part moral tract – of ‘the decline of classical and rise of medieval art’. Such an enterprise, mediated by aesthetic experience and principles, surely lies behind Clark’s Civilisation. Aimed at a different audience and more sweeping than Berenson would have been, it is nevertheless a work of similar synthesis (from what we know of Berenson’s concept), battened down by the relations of objects and events often far apart in time.

Fry was in his sixties when a warm friendship established itself with Clark and his wife; it lasted scarcely five years before Fry’s unexpected death in 1934. But it was during that time that Fry was broadening and revising his views, a change that may well have been inflected by conversations with the younger man. For Clark, Fry’s earlier strict formalism was never a creed but he was sufficiently susceptible to formal values to make dialogue with Fry possible. They also had in common – or did Clark follow Fry in some manner? – several particular enthusiasms – Piero, Castagno, Rembrandt, Seurat, Cézanne and Matisse, as well as African masks and French Renaissance Gothic. They shared too a distinct coolness for German painting, save for Holbein, and a dislike of Surrealism.

Interestingly, Clark’s private collection echoed Fry’s more modest acquisitions (the bulk of which are in the Courtauld Gallery); if Fry had been wealthy he would have bought along similar lines, particularly among late nineteenth-century artists. And Clark’s absorption in contemporary British art echoes Fry’s of a decade or more earlier. The Tate’s exhibition will show Clark’s breadth of taste in this respect and its influence on mus­eum acquisitions, in the Contemporary Art Society (of which Fry was a founder) and later through the British Council. His editing of the series Penguin Modern Painters in the 1940s shows this broad taste in action, through the artists who were selected and their astute pairing with appropriate writers to introduce their work. It was a truly democratising enterprise and the handy, landscape-format paperbacks reached a new audience for some of the younger painters in the series such as Victor Pasmore and Graham Sutherland (and introduced Edward Hopper and Ben Shahn, alongside Klee and Braque, among the predominantly British contingent). It also put a spotlight on some older, lesser-known artists, such as the poet and painter David Jones. Clark was gradually smitten with Jones’s work and helped him in numerous ways, such as giving him an allowance of £100 a year and supporting grant applications for this relatively poor man whom Clark called ‘absolutely unique, a remarkable genius’. Jones’s Petra im Rosenhag of 1931, which Clark owned, is in the Tate’s exhibition. For his part Jones was puzzled by his benefactor whose interest and charm delighted him but whose apparent diffidence he could not account for: ‘Kenneth is a funny chap, a funny chap’.

By the late 1940s, Clark’s interest in contemporary art flickered and the acquisition muscle, across all centuries, virtually ceased. In 1947 he told Benedict Nicolson that he thought Francis Bacon ‘first rate’ but no purchases resulted; the last of his Pasmores was an abstract collage of 1949–50. By 1953 he wrote to a correspondent that he had ‘almost ceased to collect’. It had been a tremendous journey from his early, schoolboy acquisitions of Japanese prints, taking in ceramics, sculpture, books, illuminated manuscripts, Italian drawings, English watercolours and outstanding paintings by Turner, Renoir (Fig.I), Seurat and Cézanne. There was little conflict of interest between his own purchases and works acquired for the National Gallery.

Clark’s directorship of the Gallery is chiefly remembered for two things. First, his expensive mistake in 1937 when he bought four panels which he closely associated with Giorgione, the subject-matter identified by E.H. Gombrich, and published as such in this Magazine. They were swiftly attributed to Andrea Previtali by George Martin Richter in a reply to Clark (January 1938). Because they cost the then substantial sum of £14,000, Clark’s error, when revealed, was splashed over the newspapers and there was a considerable show of hostility to him (particularly by his ‘friend’ Tancred Borenius). Amends were made, however, by Clark’s enterprise and imagination in the conduct of the Gallery during the Second World War when it became a cultural beacon in the heart of London. With the evacuation of the collection to various stores in Wales, overseen by Clark, alongside the move, also, of the Royal Collections to safety, he set about making the Gallery a place to visit for concerts, temporary exhibitions and the showing of a single work from the collection each month. It should also be remembered that he had earlier had an impact on the Gallery’s public profile with its increased publications and postcards, its lectures and the establishment of a ‘scientific’ department. Above all there were outstanding acquisitions of works by Giovanni di Paolo and Bosch, by Rubens and Rembrandt, Hogarth (The Graham children) and, not least, Ingres’s Madame Moitessier, hunted down by Clark to a wardrobe in a lawyer’s shabby office in Paris.

By 1945 Clark had had enough of official life and stepped down as Director to concentrate on writing and lecturing (the origin of several books). That he continued to keep abreast of art-historical scholarship is apparent from a file of corres­pondence in this Magazine’s archive. It was nearly all conducted with Benedict Nicolson, who was appointed Editor in 1947. Clark had been a contributor since the early 1930s and from late 1934 a member of the Magazine’s Consultative Committee. Among his last contributions were the address he gave in Florence in 1960 following Berenson’s death, and a short essay on Rembrandt’s Good Samaritan in the Wallace Collection (1976). His earlier writings in the Magazine are nearly all concerned with Italian art, especially Leonardo, Piero and Masaccio. The correspondence, much of it routine and familiar in content to this day – how to obtain photographs, the return of proofs – is revealing as showing Clark as a wary reviewer, picking his way through the books Nicolson offers him, nearly all of which were potential minefields. This had begun even earlier when Herbert Read had asked him in early 1938 to review – a little tactlessly? – G.M. Richter’s book on Giorgione. He refused: ‘I have learnt to my cost that there are a number of people who wish to twist anything I say or do to my disadvantage, and I fear that some of the things I said in the review might be given an unpleasant construction and used to prolong and embitter the present controversy’. Clark was perfectly aware of the eyes trained on him for any slip or sign of parti pris. In June 1948 he wrote to Nicolson to refuse the offer of Oskar Fischel’s book on Raphael, partly because ‘it is nebulous and ecstatic, like the worst kind of nineteenth century book on Shakespeare’. There is only one later letter, from Nicolson to Clark from 1972, when the former was about to introduce Clark before a lecture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, referring to their forty years of friendship and collaboration.

In Britain, Clark and Ernst Gombrich are the two most celebrated names in twentieth-century art history. If Gombrich had by far the superior intellect and influential reach, Clark was the great purveyor of appreciation, the master of the illuminating dart, almost excessively readable in his suggestive synthesis of art and human motivation. He can perfectly balance sweep and detail. He has been easy to pillory for the more patrician and worldly aspects of his character; his hostility to contemporary art in the post-War period, frequently expressed in Civilisation, is now of little importance. He remains fresh and provocative, manicuring or even overturning received opinions and ideas in such a way that he makes readers feel more original and thoughtful than they might be. In this respect alone, he does not date.

1    Other signs of a revival of interest in Clark include a conference held at Tate Britain a year ago (with reference to Clark’s papers held by Tate); the Folio Society’s republication last year of Landscape into Art; the commissioning of a forthcoming biography; and an edition of Berenson’s and Clark’s correspondence (forthcoming, Yale University Press). But it is regrettable that the two volumes of Clark’s autobiography have been long out of print.