That aesthetic discernment can exist entirely on its own, devoid of human warmth, is demonstrated by the lives of the art connoisseurs Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark. As leading arbiters of taste in their day, both enjoyed all the trappings of success. Berenson, the oracle on Italian Renaissance paintings who had gotten his start by helping Isabella Stewart Gardner build her collection in Boston, held court at his Tuscan villa, I Tatti, in the hills above Florence. This was the fulfillment of his youthful fantasy of a monastery whose inhabitants could live lives of exquisite contemplation, admired by the rich and powerful.
His protege Kenneth Clark, whose meteoric career in Britain included becoming director of the National Gallery at the age of 30, was that rare specimen: an art critic who could translate complex ideas into easily understandable terms. Books such as Landscape into Art and The Nude, and his 1969 television series Civilisation, had the reviewers cheering. Ennobled as Baron Clark of Saltwood, he, too, ended up owning his private paradise, Saltwood Castle in Kent, complete with its very own moat.
But beneath the elegant façades, there were cracks: Known for his poisonous tongue, Berenson was intensely resentful of his colleagues in the art world, particularly German scholars, many of whom happened to be Jews. “Truly, German Jews do make a Nazi of me,” he wrote to Clark in 1936, and compared their writings to the stench of “the bat droppings at the Ajanta caves in West Central India.” Transplanted at the age of 10 from a Lithuanian shtetl to live among better-off German Jews in Boston, he was left with a permanent scar which no amount of Harvard polish could cover.
In Clark, the combination of an unresponsive mother and a public school upbringing also had psychological consequences. This was a man who once confessed that storms at sea held no terror for him since he was too unfeeling to be scared. Upbraided by Berenson for his reserve, Clark answered that he came from “an undemonstrative family” and his feelings were “as stiff as an unused limb.” For him, art provided the surrogate.
My Dear BB . . . contains their correspondence from 1925 to the autumn of 1959, a few months before Berenson’s death at 94, and comes with excellent chapter introductions by its editor, Robert Cumming. The two first met in 1925 when Berenson was 60 and Clark was 22, just out of Oxford. Clark was to help Berenson with an update of his Drawings of the Florentine Painters (1903), which together with his four books on the Italian masters had cemented Berenson’s name. Though Clark was let go after two years, they remained in touch.
The letters reflect the rarefied atmosphere of connoisseurship and are crowded with estimable names: the Oliviers, Margot Fonteyn, Edith Wharton, Somerset Maugham, Calouste Gulbenkian, the Aga Khan, and assorted British royalty. Shop talk and pet peeves abound. As the celebrator of clarity, order, and harmony, Berenson feels ill at ease in the 20th century: He deservedly dismisses Picasso as “an academic draughtsman of genius” who, when not finding buyers, “deliberately took to the woods.” Clark is somewhat more attuned to the modern—although whether from a need to conform, or from inner conviction, we don’t know. Both see abstract art as a dead end, amounting to what Clark elsewhere has called “tasteful pieces of decoration.”
Berenson’s bêtes noires, German art historians, make repeated appearances: “The Talmudic Hegelian writings . . . turned out by the phonies of Central Europe.” Berenson was inspired by the late Victorian aestheticism of Walter Pater, with his stress on pure enjoyment. To Berenson, only the painting mattered, and his expertise was based on an intuitive feel for the artist; the Germans favored a broader, less subjective, approach, stressing context and iconography. Clark’s strength, notes Cumming, was his ability to combine the two approaches.
In addition to his gifts as critic, Kenneth Clark also possessed a prodigious organizational talent. With war looming in 1938, as director of the National Gallery, he oversaw the removal of its paintings to safe storage, providing a dress rehearsal for the real thing: “I now feel confident that I could move an army corps,” he writes to Berenson.
Their correspondence was cut off by the outbreak of hostilities. Clark, whose sangfroid made him ideally suited for the challenges of wartime, had an excellent war. Since Winston Churchill had nixed any idea of moving the National Gallery’s paintings to America—“Bury them in the bowels of the earth but not a picture shall leave this island”—Clark had them removed to a slate quarry in North Wales. To keep up public morale among Londoners, he arranged lunchtime concerts and exhibitions of contemporary artists, and had one painting a month brought in from Wales.
Berenson chose to stay in Italy, and when America entered the war, he and his wife were no longer protected as citizens of a neutral country. Thanks to his reputation, however, his belongings were not seized, merely inventoried. Things got difficult with the German occupation in 1943: The Berensons and their most valued effects were hidden in a villa belonging to the San Marino ambassador. Miraculously, I Tatti escaped with only a few broken windows.
After the war, the correspondence resumed. With Berenson getting frailer, most of the news concerns the progress of Clark’s books, articles, and lectures, including his Washington lecture series on The Nude, which, we learn, the sponsors had initially announced without a title for fear of upsetting the prudish! Berenson is generous in his praise for Clark’s work—“you can write as none of us since Ruskin or Pater”—while worrying about the prose in his own books.
At some point, the protestations of mutual affection become tiresome; so, too, does (in Mary Berenson’s words) Clark’s “queer mixture of arrogance and sensitive humility.” The one topic I would like to have known more about is studiously avoided: money—and the role of Joseph Duveen, the interwar years’ most successful (and unscrupulous) dealer in Renaissance paintings. To maintain his lifestyle, Berenson had, for decades, been authenticating paintings for Duveen and receiving 25 percent of the profits for his services. This left him open to accusations of conflict of interest, but Duveen is hardly mentioned here.
So what do they say elsewhere about each other? In the first volume of his memoirs, Another Part of the Wood (1975), Clark’s tone had become decidedly cool, which, Robert Cumming suggests, may be because he knew that critical biographies of Berenson were in the works, notably Meryle Secrest’s Being Bernard Berenson (1979), which highlighted the Duveen connection. Clark wrote of Berenson as sitting “on the pinnacle of a mountain of corruption.”
For his part, in his diaries, Berenson carried a sizable chip on his shoulder regarding Clark: “K. C. not only inherited his fortune, but increases it. He buys and sells works of art, and that counts only as a gentleman ‘exchanging’ a good thing for a better one. If I sold any picture I should at once be put down as a ‘dealer’ because I started poor.”
Blamed as they are by today’s art crowd for all manner of sins, ranging from elitism to Eurocentrism, why should we care about Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson? Whatever their personal flaws, both had a keen sense of the fragility of cultures, and both were convinced that, above all, beauty matters. And while Berenson’s books may be tough sledding, Clark’s writings remain models of clarity.
Henrik Bering is a journalist and critic.
