Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  Anthony Powell claimed that the Clarks were famously ruthless on their way up in society. Those who replied late to invitations were told that their places had already been filled.30 His automaton-like, often terrifying, efficiency gave Clark a bad name in some circles, and he frequently caused offence. It would be difficult to exaggerate how busy he was during the 1930s, travelling, lecturing, writing, entertaining, as well as fulfilling two important jobs, with the result that he could be off-hand and impatient. Occasionally this was misleading: when Ben Nicolson went up to him at a private view at the National Gallery to find out about his internship, ‘K refuses to shake hands or address one word to me. This distressed me for the rest of the evening because I thought probably it meant that I had been refused for the NG. I cannot put on any other interpretation of his extraordinary behaviour.’31 This was followed by a letter from Clark: ‘I am so sorry I didn’t have a chance of speaking to you at our Gulbenkian party on Wednesday. I was being torn in pieces by the most ferocious bores who always victimize one on an occasion like that. If I could have spoken to you I should have said how much I hoped you would be able to come here as honorary attaché next January.’32 St John (Bobby) Gore used to tell a story of being invited to a white-tie dinner at Portland Place at which Ben Nicolson was a fellow guest. Notoriously dishevelled, Nicolson arrived late, having struggled into a black tie. As he was shown into the room, Gore noticed Clark slip out, to return minutes later having changed into his dinner jacket with a black tie. He cited this as an example of Clark’s impeccable manners.33

  The Clarks were taken up by two of the great hostesses of the 1930s, Sibyl Colefax and Emerald Cunard. Lady Colefax lived at Argyll House on the King’s Road, dubbed the ‘Lions’ Corner House’. There she introduced the Clarks as ‘my young people’ to the likes of H.G. Wells, Max Beerbohm and the influential American political commentator Walter Lippmann. They were only supplanted in this role after she ran into Clark one day lunching with a ravishingly beautiful woman at Wheeler’s – always his favourite restaurant. With an impish tease, Clark failed to introduce Vivien Leigh (then married to Laurence Olivier). Sibyl rang up later to enquire who his companion was. Ten days later the Clarks were invited to meet the Oliviers at Argyll House, and were greeted with, ‘Have you met my young people?’

  Emerald Cunard mixed music, literature and politics at her lunches in Grosvenor Square, ‘a rallying point for most of London society’ where the conversation was quick-witted and ‘brilliant’; it glided from subject to subject in an exchange of epigrams and bons mots. Clark felt that this was a diet of hors d’oeuvres, and preferred to linger over a subject, ‘to the fury of the other guests; but Emerald forgave me’.34 Something of this slick brilliance, however, did enter Clark’s bloodstream. Many found his gift for summary to be glib, especially when it was witty. A little of it crept into his lecture style – what the German émigré architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner,35 brought up in a more rigorous school of art history, described as ‘thrown away to the flippancies of the amateur’.36 For Clark, terror of bores was only exceeded by the fear of becoming one.

  With the ascension to the throne of George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the Clarks reached the zenith of their influence. In early 1939 the royal couple came to luncheon at Portland Place. Jane wrote to BB about the visit: ‘He is difficult to rouse but she is charming…they liked the magpie mixture in the house…she had never seen a Cezanne before, and thought them v.g.…the King gazed at the large early Matisse but was too polite to say anything.’37 Alan recalled the visit years later: ‘I remember once George VI came to lunch and I was produced in my short trousers and satin shirt, and he was very splendid and he offered me some ice cream, which was extremely good as I was never allowed ice cream because my mother had this puritan side, believing one shouldn’t indulge in the pleasures of the flesh. So that made me a Royalist forever.’38

  When Clark came to make the last episode of Civilisation, he told his audience, ‘One mustn’t overrate the culture of what used to be called the “top people” before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were ignorant as swans.’39 This prompted a protest from one American listener, whom Clark answered as follows: ‘My remark about society people being as ignorant as swans was based on fairly extensive experience in the 1930s. If I may give one example: I went to Glyndebourne to see The Magic Flute and found myself sitting next to Lady Diana Cooper, who was the queen of society for 50 years. Half way through she said to me in a loud voice, “What is this incredible nonsense?” I replied, “I will tell you in the interval.” She said she had remembered hearing about it from Tommy Beecham. I said to her, “What on earth made you come?” She replied “To see darling Oliver’s (Messel) sets, of course.” Does this convince you?’40 This uncha­racte­risti­cally ungallant letter reflects, as much as anything else, Clark’s ambivalence about Diana Cooper.41 If one part of Clark was in society, the other half of him despised it, an example of Graham Sutherland’s characterisation of him as the divided man. As he later wrote, ‘I had a front row seat at Vanity Fair, but a back row seat in Bartholomew Fair might have done me more good.’42 His increasing sense of mission, and the coming of war, were to be his escape route.

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  Towards the end of the 1930s Clark embarked on a new course that would characterise the rest of his life: he started being unfaithful to his wife. Jane noted in her diary ‘a sudden change in K’s attitude’ – evidence, she believed, that her husband was having an affair. She took to her bed and confided to her diary, ‘decide no use floundering in a sea of surprise, must try and forget and then see what happens, but this is difficult’.43 Often Clark would merely have lunch with beautiful, unobtainable women such as Vivien Leigh,*4 and have passing dalliances with those around him. One such affair was with his and Jane’s elegant secretary Elizabeth Arnold, who after a brief sojourn working for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor was to follow Clark to the Ministry of Information. On one occasion Jane came home and found her husband in an embrace with ‘Stempy’ – Elizabeth Stemp, the very pretty maid at Portland Place.

  But at the end of the 1930s the story changes. Clark fell in love with Edith Russell-Roberts, the sister of the choreographer Frederick Ashton. Many years later he was to write to his then amour, Janet Stone: ‘I have been IN love only twice – once with Jane, and once with Freddie’s sister, little Edith who was so gentle with me in 1939, when Jane was being bloody.’44 Edith was small, neat and fair, with a warm and sentimental character, but according to Colette Clark not as clever as her brother – ‘an adorable sweet hopeless little goose’.45 She was married to a choleric naval officer, Douglas Russell-Roberts, who was frequently away, during which times Clark and Edith would meet at her house in Lennox Garden Mews. There are two undated letters from her at I Tatti: ‘My darling heart, I feel a lovelorn lass this evening…’ and ‘Last night at long last a divine sunset, awakening all my longings for you, and all the happiness that I feel in your presence…’ Clark evidently told Jane about his feelings for Edith; she was baffled, and hoped he would get over it. He even gave Edith a Henry Moore drawing. Edith was later to claim that Clark was ‘the love of my life who taught me everything I know’.46 Contrary to what Clark later wrote, he was certainly to fall in love on many more than two occasions.

  Jane idolised her husband; she had oriented her life in every way to serve his needs, so the revelation that he was less than perfect was a hard shock. In those days it was far from unusual for couples of their class to take lovers after ten years or so of marriage – the Berenson household was not untypical – but Jane bitterly resented the change. She was already prone to tantrums when she and Clark were alone, and took refuge in alcohol and prescription drugs in an attempt to control her temper. How much these tantrums were aggravated by Clark’s behaviour is not clear: Colette believes that they were a part of her mother’s character, with or without the provocation of his affairs. Jane discovered a fashionable Harley Street doctor, Bedford Russell
, who gave her a nasal spray containing morphine and cocaine, and from then on she would reappear after a puff, puff, puff ‘in a beautiful haze’.47 Her husband meekly accepted her outbursts as the price for his misdemeanours, but the more she tormented him, the more he sought solace elsewhere. But on only one occasion was the marriage actually in crisis. Neither of them ever seriously contemplated divorce – they believed in marriage, and had established mutual bonds that went too deep to separate.

  * * *

  *1 One personality Clark met at Lympne was T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), who he described as ‘scrubby, donnish, or rather school master-ish’. Diary, 20 March 1934 (I Tatti).

  *2 The two women were both remarkable. Sybil Cholmondeley became a brilliant châtelaine of Houghton Hall, Norfolk, and a musical patroness. Hannah Gubbay was a collector of porcelain; her collection is housed at Clandon Park in Surrey (National Trust).

  *3 Ben Nicolson, diary, 29 December 1936 (private collection, copy at Burlington Magazine). Clark later explained to Nicolson his fondness for using surnames: ‘No: Lady C is impossible. So is Sir K. Try Jane & K, or if the latter sticks in your throat the Doric surname unadorned, a form I like to use.’ Letter to Ben Nicolson, 3 February 1938 (private collection, copy at Burlington Magazine).

  *4 Leigh was acting in George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma at the Haymarket, and on matinee days she would drop in between performances. Clark’s friendship with her began in 1939.

  13

  Running the Gallery

  Stand close around ye artist set

  Old masters sometimes will forget

  With dear K to your shores conveyed

  The pictures that they never made.

  CYRIL CONNOLLY1

  Kenneth Clark was the first director of the National Gallery to become a household name. Although his tenure there was marked by controversy, it nonetheless constituted eleven years of steady achievement in which the gallery moved from being a very inward-looking organisation towards a far greater engagement with the needs of the visiting public. Many of the previous directors had been artists who sought to improve the appreciation of painting in Britain, but Clark was an unlikely populist with a Ruskinian desire to open the nation’s eyes to works of art. Indeed, the predecessor with whom he most identified was Charles Holmes (director 1916–28), who like Clark was interested in contemporary art, held fund-raising concerts at the gallery, and wrote an accessible book on Rembrandt. Holmes brought the gallery into the twentieth century by acquiring modern French pictures (for the Tate with the Courtauld Fund), including three works by Van Gogh (Sunflowers among them). Clark once refused to alter an erroneous attribution, explaining: ‘My motive for not changing the label is simply that my predecessor, Sir Charles Holmes, has always behaved most generously towards me and would no doubt regard it as a personal insult if I were to do so.’2 What separated Clark from his predecessors was the way he grasped the extraordinary opportunity offered by World War II to turn the gallery into (in the words of the Observer) ‘far more genuinely a national possession than ever before’.3 But long before the war began, he initiated a modernising agenda that was to delight some and appal others.

  Inevitably, Clark’s priority on arriving at the gallery was to rehang the pictures. He always felt that the institution was fortunate in having been created before museum buildings became grandiose. Its galleries had human proportions despite Victorian enlargements. But at the same time it lacked the variety of room sizes necessary to hang both the Venetian pictures, for which it was well suited, and the small Dutch cabinet pictures, for which it was not suited. Clark never believed that it worked to have the best of all periods and schools jostling together, nor to introduce sculpture and furniture ‘to give the illusion that pictures were in something resembling their original settings’.4 He enjoyed a crowded picture hang, but regarded it as a self-indulgence.

  Although Holmes had started the process of decluttering the galleries, Clark’s rehanging was close to the spirit of the gallery today, keeping the schools apart in a hang that was uncrowded compared with those of his Victorian predecessors, but rich by comparison with later museum hangs of the 1960s, when greater emphasis was placed on the individual paintings. Ultimately he thought pictures should ‘look at home and show us all they have to show without interruption or distortion’.5 Clark believed picture hangs could not be planned on paper, and that paintings must be placed next to each other to see if they sang together or clashed. There is no doubt that he had a flair for hanging pictures, and his arrangements were much admired. John Pope-Hennessy later wrote that ‘the Gallery looked beautiful while he was there’,6 and Helen Anrep wrote to Clark: ‘It’s a completely new Gallery…the whole place seems full of a new gaiety and fragrance.’7 He took great trouble choosing the background colours, telling the keeper Harold Isherwood Kay, ‘At present my chief preoccupation is with the colour for Room 1. I have managed to get a grey which seems far kinder to the Pieros than the present colour…I should like to have a set of paints and about twenty boards…and then spend several weeks making experiments by myself.’8 All this was done with virtually no consultation with his curatorial staff, whose resentment was, for the time being, carefully concealed.

  Lighting was next on Clark’s list. He felt that unvarying artificial light was unpleasant and deadened the pictures, but that top lighting was wrong for Dutch paintings, which benefited from being side-lit – a conundrum he eventually solved by opening three rooms downstairs as side-lit cabinets for the Netherlandish cabinet pictures. The very late introduction to the gallery of electric light in 1934 meant that opening hours could be extended for three nights a week to allow the working public to enjoy the paintings after office hours, till 8 p.m. Electric light also made glamorous evening events possible all the year round. As Clark wrote to Jane, ‘At 6.30 I went to the gallery. I saw the revised lighting. It is enormously improved: in fact I can truly boast of it, and I think the party will be a huge success. The PM is coming: it will be a new experience for him to enter the National Gallery. We are also getting the Yorks, and all the ambassadors and all the cabinet ministers.’9

  When Clark took up his appointment at the gallery, all the pictures were glazed. This was a response to London’s polluted atmosphere and, to a much lesser extent, to memories of the vandalism of the Rokeby Venus, which had been slashed by a Suffragette in 1914. The argument over glazing raged at meetings of the trustees from the day Clark arrived. He was personally against glass because of the reflection it produced. The matter came into focus again when Duveen presented Hogarth’s The Graham Children on condition that the picture remained unglazed. In October 1935 the board discussed glazing in detail, and although Sir Robert Witt pointed out that ‘protection from Sulphur may be obtained by adopting the American system of conditioning the air’, it reluctantly accepted the need for ‘glasses’, as they were called. Clark had already discussed the idea of air conditioning – or ‘air washing’, as he referred to it – with the Office of Works, but insufficient money was available to equip even half the gallery. Queen Mary became involved, and ‘laid it down as a rule that, apart from the improvement in appearance, glasses in London were an absolute necessity’.10 Air conditioning was introduced only after the war, and the glass was then removed from the paintings.

  The National Gallery – at the insistence of the Treasury – charged the public for admission two days a week, a practice which Clark urged the trustees to abolish (entrance charges were eventually dropped during the war). Another of his earliest acts was to appoint a PR firm to give advice on attracting more visitors and to examine their needs and preferences. The new evening openings were advertised in Underground stations, and became the subject of the first gallery press view. Public lectures were reduced in length from two hours to one, and a series of new publications were designed as hand guides rather than catalogues. Clark argued for a room to be set aside in which women could sit and rest, but failed to achieve this – there seems to hav
e been a perpetual fear on the part of the trustees that tramps might take advantage of the gallery’s facilities. Sometimes the board’s minutes verge on the comic, such as one headed ‘The Nuisance caused by singing Welsh Miners’, who apparently pestered ‘nervous provincial or colonial’ visitors as they entered or left the gallery.11 Clark had an important ally in David Ormsby-Gore,12 First Commissioner of Works, who told him, ‘As to my own part I am always ready to do anything you personally like – neither less, nor more.’13 Ormsby-Gore was to smooth many bumpy paths in future, including pushing the Overseas Loans Bill through the House of Commons sub silentio – which made exhibitions abroad possible, including the 1938 Paris exhibition of British art.