Of Arts and the Man

The excitement hadn’t been sparked by the fame Clark had garnered from the armload of well-received books on art he had penned over the previous 45 years, nor could it be credited to his having been the youngest man ever appointed director of the National Gallery in London, in 1933, who later helped to save its collection of paintings and artifacts from the Luftwaffe by having it all carted off to a cave in Wales for the duration of the war. The capacity crowd packed the halls that day to see the man who had written and hosted, to that date, the most unexpectedly popular series on culture in the annals of television: Civilisation: A Personal View, a set of programs produced by the BBC for a British audience in the late 1960s but which had, by happenstance, also been shown in America over the fledgling Public Broadcasting Service.

The subject of the series, ostensibly, had been the history of Western art; but the public reaction could not be explained by any native enthusiasm for art in the United States. Clark had unwittingly tapped into dark, furtive fears of the day that the social fabric of civilized life in the West was being rent asunder by endless war, random violence, moral decadence, and the ennui that can seep into any social order achieving a fuller measure of material prosperity. Many beyond the dyspeptic hell-in-a-handbasket crowd and happily inhaling hippies wondered if their children might be doomed to live in a lesser, more dangerous, world than the one in which they had been raised. Was it worthwhile to carry on? What had history to teach a jaded generation but the lesson that history had few lessons to teach?

Now, from a tweedy avuncular figure more at home in a country house than squinting in the limelight of celebrity, came a sudden shaft of hope.

James Stourton spends the ample length of this biography tracing the stream of Clark’s ideals and persuasive powers, and reveals a man who was not an obvious candidate for apostle to the people. His life was lived on a higher plane, at once intellectually arduous and socially expansive. Born as an only child to a newly rich mercantile family that had made its fortune in textiles, young Clark had had the run of their several large houses (one of them in the south of France) and first sensed his devotion to the created image when he took up the hobby of rearranging the paintings hung along their walls. As a schoolboy he had nursed hopes that he might, himself, become an artist someday; but finding only competence, and no genius, he resolved to dedicate his life to the preservation of the works of geniuses past.

While Stourton adds relatively little to the information that Clark himself divulged in the two volumes of his memoirs, one gains by seeing the mass of material placed in a different, more neutral setting—a metaphor Clark might have appreciated—and finding Clark’s versions of certain events more roundly examined and, in the case of a few stray facts, corrected.

From Winchester College he went on to read history at Trinity College, Oxford, where his time coincided exactly with the undergraduate days of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, neither of whom he seems to have known well. (One cannot help imagining Clark walking into their fictional pages and engaging in conversation with Charles Ryder, a fellow artist whom he probably would have liked, and the hyper-aesthete Anthony Blanche, whom he probably wouldn’t have.) This was the Brideshead generation, too young to have fought in the Great War but destined to set new tones in literature and culture over subsequent decades.

The Oxford of this period was a conversable world; essential things were to be tossed about over drinks and bowls of tobacco when reading for the week’s essay could wait—and often when it could not. It was here that Clark took on friendships, such as that with the future warden of Wadham College, Maurice Bowra, which would last without interruption until the end of their lives. Here Clark learned to articulate ideas, to make them live in words apprehensible to others. He developed tact. He learned the civilized art of what has been called “expressing assent and dissent in graduated terms.” He learned, in a word, subtlety.

It was also here that he took in the works of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, both great influences. All told, he seemed to get more work done there than many of his classmates, and it may have been Oxford where he learned the difference between creatively and dissipatedly wasted time. He became a man who filled his hours. Oxford also confirmed him in his choice of vocation.

During this period he traveled to Italy, a place of pilgrimage as Clark had decided that the Italian Renaissance was his period; and it was there, on an early visit to Florence, that he met and fell under the sway of Bernard Berenson, art expert par excellence, and dallied with the idea of staying on to help Berenson revise an earlier set of books. But the work, Clark decided, would be too tedious, and he longed for greater range.

Back in England, he was invited to become keeper of fine art at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, but his tenure was cut short when he was unexpectedly invited to take on the directorship of the National Gallery. Simultaneously, he was courted by an acquaintance at Windsor Castle to take on the position of Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, a demanding job Clark turned down because he didn’t think he could do justice to both positions at the same time. (It took the gruff intervention of George V himself to persuade Clark to take up the post anyway, a moment hilariously recounted in his memoirs.) Clark became a man nicely linked, from a young age, to the upper reaches of British society.

By this time Clark had married Jane Martin, a young woman both fashionable and exceedingly intelligent, and together they presided over the years of (as her husband later called it) the “Great Clark Boom.” They knew everyone, and everyone came to dinner. Owing to Clark’s independent income, he could afford to live in large houses with a staff to maintain them, prepare meals, and care for their three children. Through their doors, for these formal evenings, came the Prince of Wales and Mrs. Simpson, prime ministers—Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain—members of the glitzy beau monde, including “Larry” Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Noël Coward and Arthur Rubinstein, writers like Max Beerbohm, H. G. Wells, Edith Wharton, and to top them off, Winston Churchill. Not to mention the great London hostesses Sibyl Colefax and Lady Cunard. If you didn’t know the Clarks, you might not have been worth knowing.

By most accounts, however, these evenings were marked not by snobbishness but by easy good cheer, and only one with Clark’s exquisitely good manners would know how to navigate among the shoals of those egos. Conversation had to be kept lively, with no one allowed to commandeer the sparkling talk around the table. For Clark, as Stourton says, “terror of bores was only exceeded by the fear of becoming one.” (Not that Clark’s life and marriage were perfect: Stourton performs the task expected of all contemporary biographers of probing into the state of fidelity in the Clark marriage and finds, especially during the tension of the war years, straying on both their parts.)

Still, it was art that Clark cared most about, not society. As 1939 loomed, he sensed what was about to happen to his country and, possibly, to the National Gallery. Believing that the world would be immeasurably impoverished if it were to lose artifacts attesting to human greatness, Clark arranged for the mass exodus of most of the gallery’s collection to safety in Wales with all the gusto of a general. Afterwards, he opted (at the prompting of Dame Myra Hess) to use the gallery space for daytime concerts to relax nerves and raise spirits during the Blitz, and no musician, famous or obscure, declined an invitation to perform for free. The National Gallery concerts proved to be immensely popular and mark an early effort by Clark to extend the blessing of art to as many people as possible.

The close of World War II brought an end to Clark’s days as director. He later claimed not to have been an especially effective leader, sometimes running afoul of gallery staff, and records are mixed. But Stourton treats Clark’s tenure generously, for his efforts in acquisition and improved techniques of preservation, and his championing of contemporary artists like Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, and John Piper.

The 1940s and ’50s were enormously productive times for Clark, as he sat on one committee after another that sought to enhance life for the average Briton, including his participation with the National Theatre and in helping usher Great Britain into the age of television as a founder of the Independent Television Authority. Even more important, he wrote books, almost all of which are still in print—among them The Gothic Revival, Landscape into Art, Leonardo Da Vinci, The Nude, Ruskin Today, Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance, Looking at Pictures, and later, The Romantic Rebellion—impressive not only for their meticulously sifted content but their felicity of style as well, for Clark wrote not as a scholar but as a writer determined to be read.

Had Kenneth Clark’s contributions to culture ended around 1965, his reputation as a public servant of the highest order would be secure. But they did not. The project that was to win Clark his greatest acclaim began over a lunch in September 1966: David Attenborough, the newly appointed controller of BBC Two, was searching for a vehicle to show off the potential for color television and asked Clark to mull over his proposal to have him host a set of programs on art. The idea was unpromisingly generic, but as Clark later recalled, Attenborough offhandedly uttered the word “civilization,” which set Clark to scratching down ideas on the back of his menu while his luncheon companions talked over coffee.

Clark almost took a pass on the proposal; but finally, and despite reservations, set to work on the scripts for a 13-part series.

Civilisation would take over two years, and many miles by air and van, to produce. Clark had initially preferred shooting his speaking segments in a studio while the crew would travel far and wide to film in the field. But fortunately, Michael Gill, the chief director brought on to the project, vetoed that idea and decided that Clark should traipse around the locations along with everyone else—an inspired call. The production, often over budget but always stalwartly backed, was a happy, serendipitous blend of talents: crisp and evocative writing, brilliant techniques of filming seldom used in television at the time, superb programming of period music to complement images.

The series aired in Britain early in 1969 and stirred a kind of frisson now difficult to fathom. Some churches changed their evensong times to accommodate parishioners who wished to be home to watch each installment. Those with color televisions, still a small minority, held Civilisation parties. The series yielded a book that would sell 1.5 million copies. Eventually the fervor crossed the Atlantic, and although CBS turned down the series as one that would not interest Americans, it got picked up by PBS and found even greater fame here. Kenneth Clark may be the last art historian to have appeared on Meet the Press.

Does the series hold up? Probably better than anything akin to it. We can see now that Clark was the ideal man to remind us of the solid foundations on which we remain standing. He wasn’t telegenic, and he didn’t bounce all over the set assuming he was speaking to antsy fools requiring constant stimulation. He remains the ultimate adult in the room, perhaps the last art critic who could use the word “vulgarity” with conviction. He spoke simply as an informed, curious man with the tone of voice he used in a sitting room. He loved art, but never forgot what art was about, which is human beings. And although he was considered preeminent among art historians, he was more keen to evangelize for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful than to make scholarly inroads, or otherwise elevate himself on a par with his subjects.

Clark was always in a self-consciously subservient position in the face of great artistic accomplishment. He believed that while criticizing the past is the right of every thinking man and woman, we have a prior duty to try to understand before we judge, and that judgments made today ought to carry the heaviest burden of proof. He showed that we have a duty to approach the past sympathetically, not because crime and guilt don’t reside there but because the faculty of understanding is unlikely to kick in if not sparked by humility. He also believed that eras could be better summed up with individuals than by abstractions. This made him a target of academic ridicule, but Clark was a man too well educated to be bothered by the charge of popularizing. In an era of cultural strain and educational collapse, what greater service could anybody render than to point out anew what is, and has always been, worth knowing?

Stourton notes that Clark was a popularizer without being a populist: He wished to help the untrained and uninitiated to grasp whatever was marked by goodness, wherever and however long ago it was created. In this way, he was closer both to artists and to the people for whom they created than he was to critics more eager to widen that gap than to close it. Thus did this man of elite sympathies—he did believe that some people and some things are superior to others—become, for a long moment worth remembering, an advocate for the common man and woman who yearned for something beyond their commonness.

Tracy Lee Simmons, who teaches in the Westover Honors Program at Lynchburg College, is the author of Climbing Parnassus.