In 1970, in a review of Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, John Russell, art critic of the New York Times, grandly prophesied that “the civilization that Clark describes is one which has had its day and will not be seen again.” In acknowledging the learned brio with which Clark came to the defense of that beleaguered civilization, Russell was reminded of something the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt had said in the early 1840s: “If I am to perish, at least I wish it to be known what it is that I am perishing for—the old culture of Europe.”
At the time Russell’s review appeared, I remember my father asking two lively questions across the dining room table: If, as Russell predicted, Clark was “a well-bred passenger on a sinking ship,” who would succeed him after he went to his watery grave? And more important, what would become of the sinking ship?
Clark’s successor would be Simon Schama, the celebrity don whom no one could ever fault for being overly fond of “the old culture of Europe,” the contributing editor of the Financial Times who never runs afoul of political correctness. As for the ship of civilization: It may be seriously listing, but it is still afloat. And one proof can be found in the fact that Schama himself is slotted to present a new multicultural series called Civilizations—with the classicist Mary Beard and the historian David Olusoga, an expert on (you guessed it) colonialism, slavery, and racism.
The Face of Britain and its accompanying film can be seen as fanfare for the more bolshie view of culture that will doubtless be center stage in Schama’s upcoming television series. Nevertheless, the idea behind the book and film—to see what the portraits in London’s National Portrait Gallery have to say about Britain’s historical and cultural development—is a good one. By rights, with such rich material, Schama the historian should have produced an absorbing book.
Instead, he allows his left-wing prejudices to overrun the festivities at nearly every turn. For example, in a chapter on Graham Sutherland’s infamous portrait of Winston Churchill—which Churchill’s secretary destroyed in a bonfire in her back garden—Schama claims that the portrait was great art not for any aesthetic reasons (in Schama’s world objective judgments about aesthetics are not possible) but because it pleased Labour members of Parliament: “[Aneurin] Bevan and Jennie Lee thought the portrait a masterpiece,” he declares. It was only antediluvian Tories who hated it, not to mention Churchill and his wife Clementine and “the tabloids,” which “competed in howls of execration and proposals for destruction.”
That Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, a sensible, cultivated, and discerning man, should have taken issue with the painting for misrepresenting his patient (whom he never lionized) is dismissed by Schama as philistinism. After all, as Schama asks, “Who was to say what the look, the aspect, of the ‘real’ Churchill was?” And if these arguments do not convince, Schama invokes the argument from authority, calling in two “great figures of British art”—Ben Nicholson and William Coldstream—both of whom “were . . . struck by its power.” So that decides the matter: Capturing Churchill’s wit and exuberance, his courage and bonhomie, might do for the representational portraiture of philistines; but for true art, we have to have denigration, even a little malice, especially when it comes to so dubious a creature as Britain’s savior.
This might seem forgivable posturing from an historian who cannot let his readers forget that he is a man of the left, but it is when Schama attacks the National Portrait Gallery itself for “triumphal self-congratulation” that one begins to lose patience with him. Here, the disdain for the imperial British and all their achievements so de rigueur amongst left-wing historians becomes patent. For Schama, when the NPG opened its doors in 1859, it was not to celebrate the portraits of Britons who had animated the country’s impressive history; it was to take Britons’ minds off the threats of Chartism, the Sepoy Mutiny, and the Crimean War, an odd charge to level at the founders of the gallery—Thomas Carlyle, Lord Macaulay, and the 5th Earl Stanhope, none of whose motives were political. Yet for Schama, “there was nothing like imperial swagger as a bromide for discontent.”
Nevertheless, it has to be said, and precisely because of his cynical view of his subjects, that Schama is excellent on James Gillray, the 18th-century caricaturist, whom he rightly recognizes had “a genius for turning polemics into an art form.” While it might be true that Gillray churned out too many satirical prints of only middling effectiveness, Schama is right to argue that “when he was truly stirred—which, after the French Revolution went violent, was often—Gillray could dig deep and come up with mirthless jokes; ferocious unmaskings that were as potent and unforgiving as anything produced by Francisco Goya.” His example nicely makes his point.
While Schama is incisive on the venomousness of party politics in George III’s reign, he is unaccountably dismissive of Victoria, whom he sees simply as an unbalanced widow, who only left off mourning to dally with her Scottish servant John Brown. What makes this view so baffling is that it is included beside the splendid photograph of the queen taken in 1897 by Alexander Bassano, which cries out for more careful study, showing as it does the toughness and vulnerability of the woman whom Elizabeth Longford, her finest biographer, described as “incurably shy and superbly poised, every ounce a bourgeoise and every inch a queen.” Schama writes of the photographs of the queen in widowhood as death masks “plastered on the living matriarch, the face rigid with solemn resignation.” Does the Bassano portrait offer no other counterbalancing insights? “She slept with the cast of Albert’s hand on her pillow,” Schama writes, “his shaving tackle neatly laid out for the morning. Life was a mausoleum.” The queen’s devotion to Albert notwithstanding, no one who reads her brilliant correspondence, or the impressions she left on others, would ever credit such a caricature.
If Simon Schama is impatient with Winston Churchill and Queen Victoria, which Britons engage him? He lavishes an inordinate amount of space on photographs of suffragettes, whom he dutifully praises for opposing the “trousered powerful.” There is a great deal on Gwen John, though most of it focuses on her infatuation with the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. There are passages about what Schama sees as the imperial absurdities of William Shakespeare and David Garrick. There are some fascinating pages on portraits of fishermen and their fishwives, which the photographers Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill took on the Firth of Forth in the 1840s.
Apropos our own age, Schama is undisturbed by the dehumanization that has come from our increasing ignorance of the dignity of the human person. He is particularly fond of Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Ever Slept With, and her My Bed, which he describes as the “stage-sets of her erotic playground.” Some readers—your humble reviewer included—might recoil from such pathological displays, but Schama sees them as part of a brave new aesthetic: “Baring the soul has been replaced by baring everything else,” he writes.
Encountering this muddled sentence, one wonders what Kenneth Clark would have made of those who treat their bodies as though they were hustings on which to advertise their “wounded journeyings.” In The Nude (1956), his greatest work, Clark observed how the “expression of reverie” in Rembrandt’s Bathsheba (1654) “is so complex that we follow her thoughts far beyond the moment depicted: and yet these thoughts are indissolubly part of her body, which speaks to us in its language as truthfully as Chaucer or Burns.”
Here, the reader is spared the incoherent modishness that too often distorts Simon Schama’s view of history and art, and receives instead a glimpse into the true dignity of art. Given a choice between the old and the new Kenneth Clark, I’ll stick with the old.
Edward Short is the author, most recently, of Adventures in the Book Pages: Essays and Reviews.
