The End of ‘Civilisation’

Civilisation: A Personal View first aired on the BBC in 1969. Given the intellectual currents of the time, it was probably inevitable that in a few years Beard, on her way to becoming an accomplished classicist, would start to feel queasy. She became “decidedly uncomfortable with Clark’s patrician self-confidence and the ‘great man’ approach to art history—one damn genius after the next—that ran through the series.” Clark’s depiction of “barbarians” sacking Rome made her especially uneasy. Barbarians? By the mid-1970s, people did not use such language in polite company.

To this day, however, she remains grateful to Clark, who died in 1983, and to the documentary that made him internationally famous. “Civilisation had opened my eyes, and those of many others; not only visually stunning, it had shown us that there was something in art and architecture that was worth talking, and arguing, about.”

Civilisation became the most influential television documentary ever made, and here we are, decades later, still talking and arguing, although the arguments about art and architecture tend to be pretty one-sided nowadays. You’ll take the point when you watch—as you should—a brand-new nine-part documentary from the BBC called Civilisations. (Note the plural, signifying expertise, used much the way gourmets refer to “cheeses” instead of just cheese and woke scholars of ancient history refer to “multiple Christianities.”) It debuts this week on PBS and grinds along into early July.

Beard is one of three “presenters” (or hosts) of the series, joining the historians Simon Schama and David Olusoga for a round-the-world, millennia-spanning tour of human hustle and bustle. The series has its faults of pacing and plotting, but it offers plenty of opportunities for Beard-like tingles, too. It could hardly be otherwise, given the technological advances of the last 50 years and a budget at least as lavish as Clark’s. We swoop on camera-mounted drones from the jungles of Central America to the misty mountains of Japan and deep into the darkest caves of southern Spain. The art and architecture are lovingly photographed, even when they’re unlovely. And much of it is unexpected: The few minutes Schama spends in the Villa Barbaro, in an episode on landscape art, would be worth busting any budget for.

The producers say their show isn’t a sequel to Civilisation, nor a continuation or reimagining of the original series. But the promotional material links it decisively to Clark’s and admits his inspiration. The new program is best understood as a kind of delayed rebuttal, sometimes quite explicit, to Clark and his view of history. The association is all to the good, and to Clark’s benefit, if it leads audiences back to civilization, and Civilisation, all 13 episodes of which are playing 24/7 at your neighborhood YouTube.

* * *

The original series wasn’t Clark’s idea. Already by the mid-sixties he loomed large in the cultural life of Great Britain, at the top of the heavily subsidized tangle of councils and commissions and boards of directors that hoped to keep high culture alive. Heir to a textile fortune—his parents, he said, were among “the idle rich,” and although “many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler”—Clark received the inevitable Oxford degree and spent two years studying at the feet of the great art historian Bernard Berenson. By the time he reached 30, Clark had written a popular book on Gothic architecture and gotten himself appointed the youngest director in the history of the National Gallery. He was professionally ambidextrous: a discerning and readable art critic and an able arts administrator. During the Blitz he oversaw the removal of the gallery’s collection to abandoned mines in Wales. He kept the gallery open anyway, bringing out a handful of paintings every month as a sort of encouraging treat for the public. With London’s concert halls dark, he joined with the great pianist Myra Hess to stage regular noontime concerts that, over the next six years, drew hundreds of thousands of listeners to the gallery.

His work during the war brought him immense public good will as well as fame. Clark was a highbrow and a popularizer and thought the two callings were perfectly compatible. An example of his method was a book the gallery published called 100 Details from Pictures in the National Gallery. Clark wanted to draw the attention of untutored viewers to specific elements in each work and place them alongside similar details from other works, with the aim of building up knowledge and interest piece by piece, element by element. Not surprisingly, he early on saw the potential of television in his work of evangelizing fine art to a wide public. “I cannot distinguish between thought and feeling,” he wrote, “and I am convinced that a combination of words and music . . . and movement can extend human experience in a way that words alone cannot do.”

In the 1950s and ’60s Clark made several black-and-white TV programs that, as one viewer said, were almost unbearably awkward to watch. (A wonderful BBC documentary on Clark a few years ago confirmed this assessment in the cruelest way possible, by showing clips.) He wasn’t a natural TV star, but he was an accomplished lecturer, a brilliant stylist, and an unrivaled historian of art. When, in 1966, the BBC decided to produce a series on the history of European culture, Clark was the unanimous choice for presenter.

The impetus for the series was color television, then practically unknown to British households. In the United States—or so it was thought by professionals in the U.K.—experiments in color-TV programming had been disastrous, overwhelming the screen with ill-chosen and lurid palettes. The job fell to the broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough to introduce color to the BBC audience. He got the idea to film a survey of the greatest artworks of Europe, as a way of bringing color into British living rooms as tastefully and vividly (and cheaply) as possible.

Attenborough and his colleagues took Clark to lunch. In passing, Attenborough dropped the word “civilization,” and Clark, by his own account, fell into a reverie. “In a very few minutes, while the lunch of persuasion went cheerfully on around me, I had thought of a way in which the subject could be treated, and from that first plan I departed very little.” Clark wrote the script over the next year while two experienced documentary directors were signed up. Filming began in August 1967 and ended, after an extended break, in May the following year. The budget was quickly busted, owing in part to Attenborough’s decision to shoot the show in 35 mm film rather than the more conventional (for TV) 16 mm. There was no stinting on travel either. By the time they were through Clark and crew had visited 118 museums and 117 other locations in 11 countries.

It is hard to imagine, at this remove and with the conventions of documentary TV so well established, how strange Civilisation must have seemed 50 years ago. Color was just the first of the technological innovations, and the range of subjects and locales was unheard of. No one had seen a single presenter so dominate a nonfiction program of such length as Clark did. Unprecedented too were the long stretches in which Clark disappeared, leaving the camera to move tenderly over the surface of something beautiful. Music came and went like a recurring character. The narration, full of anecdote and grand pronouncements, was pitched at the highest level, without condescension or pedantry. It was television of an intensified kind, meant to seduce a mass audience.

The success or failure of Civilisation rested on Clark himself. Later, after the show’s huge popularity inspired publishers to expand his scripts in book form, Clark agreed only reluctantly. (The offer of a generous cut of the profits weakened his misgivings.) As a master stylist he was too aware of the difference between spoken narration and prose that is meant to be read. He was wrong and the publishers were right: The book has served as a model for the fat knockoffs that are now indispensable to museum and TV extravaganzas. Clark’s ability to strip an anecdote to its essentials survives on the page, as does his ability to sketch even obscure characters with a few skillful strokes. The offhand humor and ironic asides carry over: “. . . the Oxford which welcomed Erasmus contained a few (not very many) pious and enlightened men.” And so does the (half-serious) eccentricity of some of his opinions: “In the nineteenth century people used to think of the invention of printing as the lynchpin in the history of civilisation. . . . On balance, I suppose that printing has done more good than harm, and early presses . . . do give the impression of instruments of civilisation. Perhaps one’s doubts are due to a later development of the craft.”

* * *

About that word civilization, the mere utterance of which set Clark off on his great televised adventure. He confronts it in the first episode’s opening moments, as he stands on the banks of the Seine with Notre-Dame Cathedral rising up behind him. “What is civilization?” he asks us. Then, amazingly—this is, after all, the title of his TV show—he shrugs! “I don’t know,” he says. It is a shrug at once amused, modest, and perhaps genuinely baffled. “I can’t define it in abstract terms. But I think I can recognize it when I see it.” He turns to look over his shoulder at the cathedral. “And I’m looking at it now.”

Clark was endowed with the traditional English distaste for abstraction and preference for the particular. He is more inclined to show than tell. But a sense of civilization’s meaning, by his lights, forms soon enough. Throughout the programs certain words come up over and over: enlarge, deepen, extend, broaden, expand, and above all, life-enhancing. An act or piece of art that is life-enhancing—that allows us to have life, and to have it more abundantly—is civilized; one that isn’t isn’t. The word is not even a measure of craftsmanship or artistry. In the first episode Clark compares the ornamental prow of a Viking ship, showing a fearsome animal head, with the head of a once-celebrated sculpture from antiquity known as the Apollo Belvedere. The prow is “a powerful work of art,” he acknowledges, and “more moving to most of us” than the Apollo.

Each expresses a cultural ideal. The prow emerged from “an image of fear and darkness” while the Apollo, the product of “a higher stage of civilization,” emerged from an ideal of harmony and perfection, justice and reason and beauty held in equilibrium. This is the civilizing ideal that Western Europe inherited from Greece and Rome. (Both civilizations, needless to add, were responsible for numberless acts of barbarism themselves.) The Greco-Roman ideal, he says, was “without doubt the most extraordinary creation in the whole of history.” It was nearly lost with the sacking of Rome—by barbarians, did he mention?—in the 5th century and then barely survived the advance of Islam in the 8th. It lay dormant, tended by monks, until the millennium, when it began to manifest itself in a variety of ways in Europe.

That variety is the subject of the story Clark tells over 13 episodes. It comes to us through the achievements of individuals. As Beard says, his “great man” theory of history was even then at odds with the prevailing academic view, which saw (and sees) history as a process swept along by technology, economics, and shifts in the balance of brute power. Clark liked technology but said he didn’t understand economics, and power dynamics interested him only as the conditions to which the great figures of civilization had to adapt themselves. He was a confessed “hero worshipper.” “I believe in genius,” he said. When an excellent biography of Clark was published a year ago—Kenneth Clark: Life, Art, and ‘Civilisation’ by James Stourton—nearly all reviewers mentioned this hoary defect. Clark’s approach was “scandalous,” “outrageous,” and of course it was stuffed with dead white males—the fish kill of the modern university.

Now, it’s hard to see how any survey of European high culture up to the First World War could include large numbers of nonwhite non-males, since it was produced almost exclusively by persons who had the temporary advantage of being white and male. In any case, lack of diversity is not a charge that can plausibly be made against a show that stars Charlemagne, Leonardo, St. Francis, Wordsworth, and dozens of other idiosyncratic Alphas. And Clark was too sophisticated, too honest to be a cheerleader. Alongside the glories he shows examples of what happens when civilization goes wrong. He declined to film at Versailles because, he said, its shameless ostentation made it “anti-civilization.” Classicism, he knew, grows stale and boring through endless repetition; the mannerism of Renaissance painting became inhibiting rather than liberating and led later generations of artists into a dead end.

Clark was acutely aware of his program’s shortcomings and omissions. He regretted not dwelling more on philosophy and law, but he “could not think of any way of making them visually interesting.” Goethe—one of the great men of history, as Clark would put it—makes only a brief appearance. The show is top-heavy with the Baroque and light on classicism. Incredibly, Spain scarcely rates a mention. “Other scholars could make mincemeat of [Civilisation] if they wished,” Clark told an interviewer at the time.

Critics too often forget the subtitle of Civilisation: A Personal View. “Obviously,” Clark wrote, “I could not include the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Syria, Greece and Rome, because to have done so would have meant another ten programmes, at least.” Ditto India, China, and “the world of Islam.” He reckoned that any misunderstanding was worth the risk. “I didn’t suppose that anyone could be so obtuse as to think that I had forgotten about the great civilisations of the pre-Christian era and the East.” Yet the charge against Clark hasn’t been that he was forgetting non-Western cultures but that he was willfully dismissing them, committing an act of denigration.

The omission did not bother viewers, whose number was beyond Attenborough’s and Clark’s dreams. The head of the BBC exulted to friends, “What a relief to be standing in gold,” which seems like a very un-BBC thing to say. The reaction was even more enthusiastic in the United States, where the recently formed Public Broadcasting Service used the series to establish an audience and its own credibility. Eventually Civilisation was translated and televised around the world—even in offended Spain. Clark’s biographer Stourton tells us that curators saw a surge in museum attendance after the shows aired; there was a similar spike in tourism at the historical sites Clark had filmed. The book that Clark was reluctant to publish sold more than a million copies in hardcover. And TV documentaries were never the same. On the heels of Civilisation came an entire genre of personally hosted (called “authored” in the trade) nonfiction shows: Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, Cosmos by Carl Sagan and later Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Attenborough’s own Life on Earth. The influence extends to the present day. The films of Michael Moore can be traced, stylistically, to the breakthroughs of Civilisation—surely a crime worse than ethnocentrism.

* * *

Mary Beard is still irked about Clark’s insult to the barbarians. In a companion book to the new series, she tries to slay him with quotation marks. “One of [civilization’s] most powerful weapons has always been ‘barbarity,’ ” she writes:

This relativism—a term that Beard and her costars would reject as right-wing cliché—is the motive force behind the series. A variety of academics, plus a narrator, are brought in to reinforce the presenters in their judgment that it is wrong to make judgments. The narrative style itself underscores the point. The story Clark wanted to tell was relatively straightforward—one critic cleverly compared Civilisation to a relay race, with one great man passing the baton to another. Civilisations, by contrast, does a great deal of jumping about, forward and backward and sideways, not merely in geography and chronology but in the sequence of ideas. It’s as if (to continue the metaphor) one of the relay runners suddenly started hopping in reverse while another took off across the infield and a third stopped for a swig of Gatorade, and everyone forgets who has the baton.

But it always gets picked up, and then somebody pokes us in the ribs with it. In the second episode, we are taken to Tabasco state in Mexico. We are asked to assess a small, ancient Olmec figuri-ne, called the “Wrestler.” What was it for? we are led to ask. Where did its stylistic peculiarities come from? We don’t know; scholars don’t know. It’s a mystery. Thus, says our narrator, we need to ask further: “Is this object mysterious because of the way it looks or the way we have been taught to look at it?”

The answer is: We’ve been taught to look at it that way. The ancient figur-ine, it transpires, is probably a forgery. This sort of question-and-answer combo recurs throughout Civilisations. It has a dual purpose: It’s meant first to rattle our confidence in our objective judgment—hey, that figurine is pretty!—and then to turn our attention back on ourselves to discover the cultural conditioning that has manipulated us into the illusion that our judgments are objective—that we have good reason to think the figurine is pretty. “Different eyes behold different things,” we are told. Then we’re off to Thebes to see the Colossi of Memnon, and then to the vast field in which a Chinese emperor buried thousands of terracotta warrior figures to defend him in the afterlife. The images are stunning, worth every moment a viewer can devote to them, even as the narrator’s voice goes on and on, saying things you might hear from your roommate when he stumbles back to the dorm at 3 a.m., “How we look changes what we see.”

To the extent Civilisations treats particular pieces of art, it dwells on their function—to what purposes were they put? Mostly, it turns out, art was about projecting and protecting the power of an elite. “The dominance of a particular type of aesthetic vision in high fine art in the modern West,” we hear, “is an expression of a particular kind of power”—the power of imperialism and colonialism, of the strong (the West) over the snookered (everyone else). In the hands of our narrators, art is reduced to an instrument of oppression. If you are uncomfortable with this approach—seeing the glories of human creativity reduced to tools for class warfare—too bad. Like many academic theories it is impossible to disprove. “No vase painter [in ancient Greece] sat down and said, ‘I’m going to reinforce social norms by painting a picture,’ ” says one expert from UC Berkeley. “But that is maybe the unintended consequence.” Actual vase painters from ancient Greece were not available for comment.

There are brief respites. Schama’s episode on landscapes is downright sequential, almost Clark-like, and full of observations that have nothing to do with politics. He begins with Ansel Adams and then turns back to the earliest days of Chinese landscape painting. From here he goes to the mesmerizing patterns of Islamic carpets, which served as substitutes for landscapes owing to Islam’s ban on pictorial art. From the gardens of the Villa Barbaro we move north for an explication of the meaning of windmills in Dutch painting. (They have more to do with God than politics.) Across the channel to Britain and the miracles of Constable and Turner, and then across the Atlantic to Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt in the American West, where we are led back to Adams and Yosemite.

It’s a pleasing arc and a story beautifully told, a taste of what Civilisations might have been without the intellectual browbeating. But then Schama closes on the work of the contemporary photographer Richard Misrach. We are meant to see Misrach as Adams’s worthy successor. In fact he’s a misanthrope. His works are unfailingly stark, gleaming images of human failure: flooded trailer parks, stacks of rusted cars in junkyards, and the scorched earth of forest fires—but, Misrach reminds us, he only photographs the aftermath of manmade fires, intentional acts of malice or stupidity.

But this too is kind of Clark-like—a catalogue of glorious creations followed by a vision of an art form in an advanced state of spiritual exhaustion. The difference is that the decline of an art form saddened Clark. Each of the episodes of Civilisations that I’ve seen ends with a celebratory profile of a contemporary artist. Invariably their work suffers in comparison with what’s gone before—how could it not?—but the moments serve a summary purpose.

The episode called “How Do We Look?” closes with Kehinde Wiley, the artist who recently completed the official presidential portrait of Barack Obama. The narrator describes Wiley as a practitioner of “the modern art of the body,” which “draws its power” from “challenging the tradition of classical art.” Of course he lives in Brooklyn but “he has traveled all over the world to explore the legacy of colonialism and the different ways we see.” Suddenly we see him in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, moving from masterpiece to masterpiece. A tinny ensemble plays Vivaldi—a fusty reminder of the distant past. “I love the history of art,” he tells the camera. “I love looking at these beautiful images. But I also recognize that there’s something quite sinister about their past.”

* * *

“Sinister” sounds judgmental, doesn’t it? So judgmental indeed that I don’t think even Clark used it at all in his Civilisation. But it nicely summarizes the attitude toward the West that viewers of the new Civilisations will find unavoidable, even if they’re confident enough to find it unpersuasive.

Next to life-enhancing, the most important word in Clark’s account of civilization was confidence. Several things came together to make a civilization, Clark said: a measure of material prosperity, a sense of history, a range of vision, and a feeling of permanence, of being situated in a particular moment between past and future, that makes it worthwhile to construct things meant to last.

“But far more,” he said, “it requires confidence—confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, confidence in one’s own mental powers.” His program was an effort to persuade his audience that confidence in their inherited civilization was well-earned.

In the closing moments of the final episode of Civilisation, Clark intended to strike a note of optimism. “When I look at the world about me in the light of these programs, I don’t at all feel as though we are entering on a new period of barbarism,” he said. He shows us the campus of the then-new University of East Anglia. Apple-cheeked college students pop in and out of classrooms, labor over books—the baby boomers as Clark hoped they were in 1969. “These inheritors of all our catastrophes look cheerful enough. . . . In fact, I should doubt if so many people have ever been as well-fed, as well-read, as bright-minded, as curious, and as critical as the young are today.”

Watching at home, we can assume, was the 14-year-old Mary Beard, all a-tingle and raring to go to college herself, where she could use her curiosity and reading and bright-mindedness to prove the great man and his theory wrong.