Kenneth Clark

Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron Clark (13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983) was a British art historian, museum director and broadcaster. His expertise covered a wide range of artists and periods, but he is particularly associated with Italian Renaissance art, most of all that of Leonardo da Vinci. After running two art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television, presenting a succession of programmes on the arts from the 1950s to the 1970s, the largest and best known being the Civilisation series in 1969.

The son of rich parents, Clark was introduced to the arts at an early age. Among his early influences were the writings of John Ruskin, which instilled in him the belief that everyone should have access to great art. After coming under the influence of the art experts Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, Clark was appointed director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford aged twenty-seven, and three years later he was put in charge of Britain's National Gallery. His twelve years there saw the gallery transformed to make it accessible and inviting to a wider public. During the Second World War, when the collection was moved from London for safe keeping, Clark made the building available for a series of daily concerts which proved a celebrated morale booster during the Blitz.

After the war, and three years as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, Clark surprised many by accepting the chairmanship of the UK's first commercial television network. Once the service had been successfully launched he agreed to write and present programmes about the arts. These established him as a household name in Britain, and he was asked to create the first colour series about the arts, Civilisation, first broadcast in 1969 in Britain and in many other countries soon afterwards.

Among many honours, Clark was knighted at the unusually young age of thirty-five, and three decades later was made a life peer shortly before the first transmission of Civilisation. Three decades after his death, Clark was celebrated in an exhibition at Tate Britain in London, prompting a reappraisal of his career by a new generation of critics and historians. Opinions varied about his aesthetic judgement, particularly in attributing paintings to old masters, but his skill as a writer and his enthusiasm for popularising the arts were widely recognised. Both the BBC and the Tate described him in retrospect as one of the most influential figures in British art of the twentieth century.

Life and career Early years

Clark was born at 32 Grosvenor Square, London, In several years he had the gallery opened two hours earlier than usual on the day of the FA Cup Final, for the benefit of people coming to London for the match.

Clark wrote and lectured during the decade. The annotated catalogue of the royal collection of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, on which he had begun work in 1929, was published in 1935, to highly favourable reviews; eighty years later Oxford Art Online called it "a work of firm scholarship, the conclusions of which have stood the test of time". Another 1935 publication by Clark offended some in the avant-garde: an essay, published in The Listener, "The Future of Painting", in which he rebuked surrealists on the one hand and abstract artists on the other for claiming to represent the future of art. He judged both as too elitist and too specialised – "the end of a period of self-consciousness, inbreeding and exhaustion". He maintained that good art must be accessible to everyone and must be rooted in the observable world. During the 1930s Clark was in demand as a lecturer, and he frequently used his research for his talks as the basis of his books. In 1936 he gave the Ryerson Lectures at Yale University. From these came his study of Leonardo, published three years later; it too, attracted much praise, at the time and subsequently. Other important acquisitions, listed by Piper, were Rubens' Watering Place, Constable's Hadleigh Castle, Rembrandt's Saskia as Flora, and Poussin's The Adoration of the Golden Calf. He saw them in 1937 in the possession of a dealer in Vienna, The National Gallery in 2025 has two: The Adoration of the Kings, bought in 1884, and (The Sunset), bought in 1961. |group=n The trustees authorised the expenditure of £14,000 of public funds and the paintings went on display in the gallery with considerable fanfare. |group= n

Wartime The approach of war with Germany in 1939 obliged Clark and his colleagues to consider how to protect the National Gallery's collection from bombing raids. It was agreed that all the works of art must be moved out of central London, where they were acutely vulnerable. One suggestion was to send them to Canada for safekeeping, but by this time the war had started and Clark was worried about the possibility of submarine attacks on the ships taking the collection across the Atlantic; he was not displeased when the prime minister, Winston Churchill, vetoed the idea: "Hide them in caves and cellars, but not one picture shall leave this island." A disused slate mine near Blaenau Ffestiniog in north Wales was chosen as the store. To protect the paintings special storage compartments were constructed, and from careful monitoring of the collection discoveries were made about control of temperature and humidity that benefited its care and display when back in London after the war. He set up the War Artists' Advisory Committee, and persuaded the government to employ official war artists in considerable numbers. There were up to two hundred engaged under Clark's initiative. Those designated "official war artists" included Edward Ardizzone, Paul and John Nash, Mervyn Peake, John Piper and Graham Sutherland. Artists employed on short-term contracts included Jacob Epstein, Laura Knight, L. S. Lowry, Henry Moore and Stanley Spencer.

Although the pictures were in storage, Clark kept the National Gallery open to the public during the war, hosting a celebrated series of lunchtime and early evening concerts. They were the inspiration of the pianist Myra Hess, whose idea Clark greeted with delight, as a suitable way for the building to be "used again for its true purposes, the enjoyment of beauty." There was no advance booking, and audience members were free to eat their sandwiches and walk in or out during breaks in the performance. The concerts were an immediate and enormous success. The Musical Times commented, "Countless Londoners and visitors to London, civilian and service alike, came to look on the concerts as a haven of sanity in a distraught world." 1,698 concerts were given to an aggregate audience of more than 750,000 people. Clark instituted an additional public attraction of a monthly featured picture brought from storage and exhibited along with explanatory material. The institution of a "picture of the month" was retained after the war, and, at 2025, has continued to the present day.

In 1945, after overseeing the return of the collections to the National Gallery, Clark resigned as director, intending to devote himself to writing. During the war years he had published little. For the gallery he wrote a slim volume about Constable's The Hay Wain (1944); from a lecture he gave in 1944 he published a short treatise on Leon Battista Alberti's On Painting (1944). The following year he contributed an introduction and notes to a volume on Florentine paintings in a series of art books published by Faber and Faber. The three publications totalled fewer than eighty pages between them.

Postwar

In July 1946 Clark was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford for a three-year term. The post required him to give eight public lectures each year on the "History, Theory, and Practice of the Fine Arts". The first holder of the professorship had been Ruskin; Clark took as his first subject Ruskin's tenure of the post. (In 1961, by when the appointment was for an annual term, Clark was again Slade Professor at Oxford.)

Clark served on numerous official committees during this period, and helped to stage a ground-breaking exhibition in Paris of works by his friend and protégé Henry Moore. He was more in sympathy with modern painting and sculpture than with much of modern architecture. He admired Giles Gilbert Scott, Maxwell Fry, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto and others, but found many contemporary buildings mediocre. Clark had been among the first to conclude that private patronage could no longer support the arts; during the war he had been a prominent member of the state-funded Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. When it was reconstituted as the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1945 he was invited to serve as a member of its executive committee, and as chairman of the council's arts panel.

In 1953 Clark became the Arts Council's chairman. He held the post until 1960, but it was a frustrating experience for him; he found himself chiefly a figurehead. Moreover, he was concerned that the way the council went about funding the arts was in danger of damaging the individualism of the artists whom it supported. and although Clark's appointment reassured some, others thought his acceptance of the post a betrayal of artistic and intellectual standards. Although it focused chiefly on the visual arts and architecture, there were substantial sections about drama, literature, philosophy and socio-political movements. Clark wanted to include more about law and philosophy, but "I could not think of any way of making them visually interesting."

After initial mutual antipathy, Clark and his principal director, Michael Gill, established a congenial working relationship. They and their production team spent three years from 1966 filming in a hundred and seventeen locations in thirteen countries. The filming was to the highest technical standards of the day, and quickly went over budget; it cost £500,000 by the time it was complete. Attenborough rejigged his broadcasting schedules to spread the cost by transmitting each episode twice in a week. Scholars and academics had their understandable quibbles, but for the general public the series was something like a revelation. Art-museum exhibits in both England and the U.S. reported a surge of visitors following each episode. source= The New Yorker on Civilisation and he described himself on screen as a hero-worshipper and a stick-in-the-mud. He commented that his outlook was "nothing striking, nothing original, nothing that could not have been written by an ordinary harmless bourgeois of the later nineteenth century": I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. There was a widespread view among critics, including some unsympathetic to Clark's selections, that the filming set new standards. Civilisation attracted unprecedented viewing figures for a high art series: 2.5 million viewers in Britain and 5 million in the US. In 2016, The New Yorker echoed the words of John Betjeman, describing Clark as "the man who made the best telly you've ever seen".

The British Film Institute notes how Civilisation changed the shape of cultural television, setting the standard for later documentary series, from Alastair Cooke's America (1972) and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man (1973) to the present day. With the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC acquired copies of the series and distributed them to colleges and universities throughout the US. In 1973 he made Romantic Art Versus Classic Art for ITV.

In 1976 Clark returned to the BBC, presenting five programmes about Rembrandt.

Clark was chancellor of the University of York from 1967 to 1978 and a trustee of the British Museum.

Family and personal life In 1927 Clark married a fellow student, Elizabeth Winifred Martin, known as "Jane" (1902–1976), the daughter of Robert Macgregor Martin, a Dublin businessman, and his wife, Emily Winifred Dickson. The couple had three children: Alan, in 1928, and twins, Colette (known as Celly, pronounced "Kelly") and Colin, in 1932. She suffered severe mood swings and later alcoholism and a stroke. Clark remained firmly supportive of his wife during her decline. he became a Conservative member of parliament and junior minister, and a celebrated diarist. The younger son, Colin, became a film-maker, who among other work directed his father in television series in the 1970s. The twin daughter, Colette, became an official and board member of the Royal Opera House; she outlived her parents and brothers, and was the key source for James Stourton's authorised biography of her father, published in 2016.

During the Second World War the Clarks lived at Capo Di Monte, a "cottage" in Hampstead, or rather "three cottages knocked into one", before moving to the much larger Upper Terrace House nearby. They moved in 1953 when Clark bought the Norman Saltwood Castle in Kent, which became the family home. In his later years he passed the castle to his elder son, moving to a purpose-built house in the grounds.

Jane Clark died in 1976. Her death was expected, but left Clark devastated. Several of his women friends had hopes of marriage to him. His closest female friend, across thirty years, was the photographer Janet Woods, wife of the engraver Reynolds Stone; in common with Clark's daughter and sons, she was dismayed when he announced his intention to marry Nolwen de Janzé-Rice, daughter of Frederic and Alice de Janzé. The family felt that Clark was acting precipitately in marrying someone he had not known well for very long, but the wedding took place in November 1977. Mary Beard wrote in a Guardian article that Clark was a lifelong Labour voter. Shortly before his death he was received into the Roman Catholic Church.

Honours and legacy Awards and memorials State and other honours received by Clark included Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1938; Fellow of the British Academy, 1949; Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour, 1959; life peer, 1969; Companion of Literature, 1974; and Member of the Order of Merit, 1976. Overseas honours included Commander of the Legion of Honour, France; Commander of the Order of the Lion of Finland; and the Order of Merit, Austria.

Clark was elected a member or honorary member of the Conseil Artistique des Musées Nationaux of France; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the American Institute of Architects. the Swedish Academy; the Spanish Academy; the Florentine Academy; the Académie française; and the Institut de France. At the Courtauld Institute in London, the lecture theatre is named in Clark's honour.

Reputation In 2014 the Tate held the "Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation" exhibition, highlighting Clark's impact "as one of the most influential figures in British art of the twentieth century". The exhibition, drawing on works from Clark's personal collection and many other sources, examined his role as "a patron and collector, art historian, public servant and broadcaster ... bringing art in the twentieth century to a more popular audience". The BBC called him "arguably the most influential figure in 20th century British art". Clark's early and continuing insistence that Victorian architecture and art should be considered seriously contributed to a gradual change in public taste.

Clark knew that his broadly traditional view of art would be anathema to the Marxist element in the artistic world, and was unsurprised when he was attacked by younger critics, notably John Berger, in the 1970s. James Hall, in The Guardian, expressed a similar view, calling Clark "the most seductive writer on art since Ruskin and Pater ... " In The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture James Stevens Curl ranks Clark higher than Ruskin as a writer: "Although he claimed Ruskin was a major influence on his thought, he delivered his own messages with lucidity, elegance, and aplomb, never wallowing in purple prose or exaggeration (faults painfully evident in Ruskin's work)". Hall concludes, "Today, when most art historians write as joylessly as lawyers and accountants, such verve is sorely needed".

Books by Clark

The Gothic Revival (1928) Catalogue of Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle (1935) 2 vols. One Hundred Details in the National Gallery (1938) Last Lectures by Roger Fry, edited with an introduction (1939) Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of his development as an Artist (1939) revised ed. 1952 and 1967 Constable's Hay Wain (1944) L. B. Alberti on Painting (1944) Florentine Painting: The Fifteenth Century (1945) Introduction to Praeterita (1949) Landscape into Art (1949) adapted from his Slade Lectures Piero della Francesca (1951) "complete" ed. 1969 Moments of Vision (1954) the Romanes Lecture for 1954 The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956) A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, delivered in 1953 Looking at Pictures (1960 and 1972) Ruskin Today (1964) Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance (1966) A Failure of Nerve (1967)

The Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle (1968–1969) with Carlo Pedretti, 3 vols. Civilisation: A Personal View (1969) book version of the television series The Artist Grows Old (1972) Rede Lecture Westminster Abbey (1972) Blake and Visionary Art (1973) Romantic versus Classic Art (1973) The Romantic Rebellion (1973) book version of the television series Another Part of the Wood: A Self-Portrait (1974) vol. 1 of autobiography Henry Moore Drawings (1974) The Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante's Divine Comedy (1976) The Other Half: A Self-Portrait (1977) vol. 2 of autobiography Animals and Men (1977) The Best of Aubrey Beardsley (1978) An Introduction to Rembrandt (1979) What is a Masterpiece? (1979) Feminine Beauty (1980) The Art of Humanism (1983)

Source: Who's Who.

Notes, references and sources