Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  Clark’s populism is perhaps best remembered for the early opening on FA Cup final day in 1938. A gallery minute reads: ‘The provincial supporters of the Finalists…up early for the day in London, might have an opportunity of seeing some famous exhibitions instead of wandering about the streets.’ It was agreed to open the gallery at 8 a.m.: 279 visitors were recorded before 10 a.m., and 3,602 for the whole day.14 Neil MacGregor, a later gallery director, called this ‘a dazzling populist touch, and it doesn’t matter whether anyone ever did come to see the pictures. The fact that he thought of it, did it and announced it is just the kind of populist brilliance that did a great deal to put the gallery right at the heart of the nation’s affection.’15

  Clark saw the potential of the media for bringing his work to the attention of the nation, and MacGregor believes he was uniquely gifted as a director in the way he was able to handle and excite the press. He gave interviews about the gallery – the Daily Mirror ran a profile in a series called ‘Under 40’: at number four, ‘The man who may be called Britain’s art chief is a spruce, pleasant young organiser of 33, with a nice taste in ties, cool, business-like eyes, determined chin and an air that suggests Lombard Street rather than Trafalgar Square.’16 His strategy saw results: between 1934 and 1939 there was an increase of 100,000 visitors. However, this flair for publicity – which would land Clark an important wartime job – went strongly against the grain of the conservative gallery staff.

  Of enormous significance for Clark’s future, a heading in the minutes for 13 April 1937 reads ‘Television’. He had just visited Alexandra Palace, the early home of the BBC’s television broadcasts, and was clearly intrigued by the new medium’s potential for popularising the gallery, ‘if ever it attained the necessary degree of proficiency’. However, the first question was whether filming involved any danger to the pictures. Clark saw that the intense light that was required created great local heat, but felt that though television’s present image-quality was feeble in the extreme, the gallery should stay in touch with developments. Eight months later he made his first TV broadcast from Alexandra Palace, on Florentine painting.17

  Clark is usually given credit for starting up the National Gallery photographic department. As Neil MacGregor told the author: ‘When I joined the National Gallery, there were two contradictory legends about K; the first was that he was seen as contemptuous of the staff (probably untrue, but that is the legend) and arrogantly overconfident. He was also, however, revered for setting up the photographic department, which produced the first high-quality detailed photographs of any museum, certainly in Europe. It became the only source of high-quality photographs for textbooks, and put the National Gallery at the centre of art history studies. It also enabled the public to get closer to the pictures, and this was always K’s ambition.’18 In fact Clark did not set up the photographic department, but he greatly extended it, and found a brilliant way of using it that was both scholarly and populist.

  In 1938 Clark published One Hundred Details from Pictures in the National Gallery, a book that provided a delightful parlour game of guessing who the details were by, often with surprising answers. He had taken the idea from his friend Yukio Yashiro’s study of Botticelli, which used photographic details – although as he commented, it was odd that nobody had thought of the idea before: it was an inevitable result of the Morellian method. Ruskin had published detailed illustrations of his own drawings and photographs of buildings.19 Clark sent complimentary copies of the book to half the grand houses of England. It elicited praise from Logan Pearsall Smith, who wrote on Christmas Day that it ‘makes my Xmas, usually a dreary day, almost a merry Xmas’. Winston Churchill sent a telegram of thanks, and Sydney Cockerell called it ‘the cheapest and most exciting six shillings worth I ever saw. The selection is unassailable.’20 Details was reviewed admiringly by Roger Hinks in The Listener, who rightly felt that ‘the point of this selection lies, then, quite as much in the opposition of one detail to another as in the choice of the details themselves’.21 The critic Eric Newton thought that Clark’s notes about the plates were casual but brilliant.22 It is extraordinary how quickly the use of details caught on: Skira was one publisher which immediately began to introduce them into its architectural books. Clark’s book was reissued by the gallery in 1990 and 2008.

  One thing that Clark did set up (from the profits of the sale of postcards) was the gallery’s scientific department, for x-ray examination and analysis of paintings. This was under the care of a Cambridge radiologist named Ian Rawlins, ‘a kind, good, man, but one of the most relentless bores I have ever encountered, who fussed interminably over the most trivial details’.23 The information revealed by x-rays and infra-red radiography transformed decision-making over picture-cleaning, the subject that would provide Clark’s first public trial as director. When he approached the question of whether or not to clean, he admitted, ‘the primary question is aesthetic: will the picture look more beautiful restored or unrestored?’ – but he believed that science should assist the decision.24 In the comfortable remoteness of old age, he was able to write: ‘I do not regard cleaning controversies as of any importance. They are epidemics which take place about every twenty-five years.’25 The National Gallery was certainly no stranger to them – in 1853 a government inquiry into the gallery had paid special attention to the practice, so this was not a matter to be taken lightly. Clark used two principal restorers, W.A. Holder and Helmut Ruhemann: ‘I thought that different types of pictures needed cleaning by different characters. Mr Holder was an instinctive cleaner, who touched the canvas with the gentleness of a game-keeper picking up a baby partridge. Ruhemann was, of course, far more skilful and more scientific.’26

  The first salvo in the ‘cleaning wars’ was a letter from the secretary of the Royal Academy that Clark read out at a trustees’ meeting. It stated that a member of the RA proposed to ask public questions concerning the National Gallery’s cleaning policy.27 Clark was rattled, and wrote an exasperated letter to the RA’s president, Sir Gerald Kelly: ‘The quarrels which for some years had rendered the Gallery notorious have completely disappeared…now it seems that all our hopes are about to be shattered…[I] may be forced to resign, a press campaign against the Gallery may be instituted…once more the Gallery is to be dragged into the public eye as the scene of humiliating differences of opinion.’28 Part of the problem was that the Academicians thought that an artist should run the gallery (as indeed had usually been the case), rather than an art historian, and they actually enjoyed spats. The painting that aroused their feelings was the Velázquez portrait of Philip II, the so-called ‘Silver Philip’, that had just received the attentions of Ruhemann. The Daily Telegraph had been stirring up controversy by inviting well-known artists to voice their opinions on the subject. Critics included Alfred Munnings, William Nicholson and Frank Brangwyn, who preferred to view Old Masters through the golden glow of discoloured varnish, and even threatened the establishment of a Society for the Protection of Old Masters. A lot of ink was spilled on the matter of whether ‘glazes’ or varnish had been removed from the Velázquez. Clark defended the gallery on the letters page of The Times,29 and Sir William Rothenstein wrote to express approval of ‘the Silver Philip’, but advised in future bringing in two or three prominent artists for ‘sharing the blame’.30 Clark, however, preferred to rely on the science: ‘tastes differ, and therefore we are less open to attack on this score. Technical matters should be capable of proof, and if controversy should ever arise, as I fear it eventually will, we should be able to prove that no harm has been done.’31 The matter rumbled on for over a year.32

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  On the way home one evening in the summer of 1936, Clark saw a newspaper hoarding announcing ‘National Gallery Grave Scandal’. He had not the faintest idea what this could be, but probably imagined that it was the Academicians making mischief again. In fact the matter was much more serious – and a complete surprise, as he explained to Lord Crawford: ‘My holiday was delayed
for two most disagreeable days by the discovery that our accountant had been systematically robbing the till for some years. He had taken over £300 – hence the muddle in the accounts. I hardly knew him, but always thought him rather odd, but [the keeper Isherwood] Kay (and of course Collins Baker) always swore by him as a model of reliability. Apparently he had been drinking for some time. We have all the usual accompaniments – loaded revolver, scenes, confessions, screaming wife etc. Coming the day after the Gulbenkian party it showed the range of activities a director of the gallery may be called upon to undertake.’33

  Since Clark was the gallery’s director, he was technically responsible for the accounts – as Isherwood Kay gleefully pointed out. Clark felt exposed, as he had been travelling a great deal, leaving the day-to-day business to Kay. He wrote to Jane in Cannes: ‘Had to go to the Treasury about tomorrow’s interview with the…accounts committee which promises to be most disagreeable. Little Kay is wholly to blame but I must try to protect him.’34 The following day he reported: ‘Most disagreeable day. The interview with the public accounts committee took two and a half hours, during the great part of which I was violently attacked…It was a most humiliating experience and has left me a good deal shaken.’35 He was widely expected to offer his resignation, but thanks to solid support from his trustees he survived the crisis. The accountant was sent to prison for six months and the gallery staff were censured. The sum of money involved was £1,267.

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  If much of Clark’s work required him to be an administrator, answering letters and attending meetings, part of his role which he found much more enjoyable was the cultivation of art collectors. With a small annual purchase grant that could not compete with those of the gallery’s American rivals, he realised that one way of displaying great paintings he could not afford to buy was through loans – which with luck might even one day turn into bequests. As a collector himself, Clark was sympathetic to the breed, but reflected that they were often less than perfect human beings: ‘Three great collectors – Dr. Barnes, Sir William Burrell and Mr Gulbenkian – were my frequent companions before the war, and I recognised that they were terrible characters. They were ruthless…But let no one say they did not love art. They did.’36 Dr Barnes we will meet in the next chapter; William Burrell was equally reluctant to allow anyone to see his collection. It contained forty pictures by Degas and many magnificent tapestries and carpets, all kept at Hatton Castle, a baronial pile in Scotland. Clark gained his trust – no mean feat with ‘a man so singularly devoid of human feelings’ – and soon they were discussing the future of the Burrell collection. One of Burrell’s difficult conditions was for a personal museum to be built in a smokeless zone near a large city. Clark was therefore quite pleased to find a site in Hampstead, opposite Jack Straw’s Castle, which he almost persuaded the London County Council to help finance. Negotiations foundered, however, on who was going to pay for the site and the building, the spectre of death duties, and finally the coming of war.37

  These last two problems would also bedevil the plans of by far the most formidable of the trio. Calouste Gulbenkian was the most feared operator at the heart of the international oil business. Of Armenian origins, educated in England, he lived in Paris, but the Middle East was the source of his fortune. He once told Clark that his father advised him when he was young, ‘ “Calouste, do not look up; look down,” so I looked down and I found oil.’ In 1920 he had negotiated a 5 per cent share in the newly discovered oilfields of Mesopotamia (modern-day Syria and Iraq). This gave him the sobriquet ‘Mr 5 Per Cent’ and an income of several million dollars a year, which he spent the rest of his life protecting. Gulbenkian was intensely suspicious – ‘Always on the bridge, Mr Clark’ – and his constant refrain was ‘Check, check, check.’ As a collector he was a man of extraordinary discrimination, with a divided heart: one part lay in eighteenth-century France, the other in the arts of Islam. What united his works of art, be they Persian manuscripts, Mughal carpets or French bookbindings, was a desire to see the designs of nature transmuted into art – he was the creator of several beautiful gardens. Gulbenkian’s paintings were by any standards superb, and included several masterpieces whose acquisition he had personally negotiated with the Russian government between 1928 and 1930, including the Portrait of Hélène Fourment by Rubens, and Rembrandt’s Pallas Athene. He had a particular penchant for Guardi’s views of Venice. His collection of the decorative arts was also of the highest standard: furniture by Cressent, silver by Germain – but even they were overshadowed by the textiles, from Lahore and Bursa. The collection had – and still has – the rare distinction of bringing Eastern and Western elements to sit comfortably together.

  Gulbenkian housed his collection in a fortified residence on the Avenue d’Iéna in Paris. He rarely admitted strangers to see what he called ‘my children’ – when asked why he so rarely showed his treasures, he famously replied that Orientals didn’t unveil the women in the harem. Clark was invited to inspect the collection, probably in 1935, and took Jane to Paris with him. While they were waiting for their host, she sensibly warned her husband that everything they said would be relayed to him. Clark was at his best in such situations, when he could charm his interlocutor with his wit, knowledge and intelligence. He was impressed by the quality of Gulbenkian’s paintings and French furniture, and even more enchanted by the Persian roof garden.

  A few weeks later the telephone rang in his office: ‘This is Mr Gulbenkian. Would you like to take some of my pictures on loan at the National Gallery?’ Clark said he would, and when asked how many, suggested forty. A measure of how confident he felt in his authority may be gauged by his response to Gulbenkian’s query, ‘You do not ask your trustees?’ Clark thought that was unnecessary, and cannily left the selection of the pictures to their lender: ‘I have perfect confidence that you will send the best.’ Gulbenkian wrote to express his desire that his works of art ‘should have happy surroundings and procure public enjoyment. No one will understand me better than yourself and for this I am grateful.’38 The first batch of fourteen paintings was discussed at the next trustees’ meeting, at which Clark told the board of his acceptance of the loan under circumstances that did not allow for proper consultation. Since the pictures on offer included the Pallas Athene and the Hélène Fourment, the trustees acquiesced, just as Clark had predicted they would.

  Clark initially hung the group of Gulbenkian paintings together – as he told Samuel Courtauld, in order to make more of a réclame.39 The Times welcomed the loan, but in such terms that Clark felt compelled to write: ‘I should like to lay more stress on Mr. Gulbenkian’s generosity in lending us his pictures. To part with his greatest treasures, to see them exposed to all the risks of travel and a change of climate, involved a great sacrifice and should have earned more explicit gratitude.’40 It would not have been lost on Gulbenkian that he had a champion at Trafalgar Square, and Clark was extremely anxious that all the gallery staff should understand the importance of this new lender. He wrote to Isherwood Kay from his holiday: ‘We ought to do everything we can to please Gulbenkian. I write to him once a week – and usually in answer to a long letter from him.’41 Trust between the two men reached such a pitch that the collector began to rely on Clark’s judgement for all his purchases, having first ‘double checked to make sure that I was not being influenced by the vendor’.42 Over the next few years Clark was consulted on a wide variety of art, from Masaccio and majolica to Picasso, whose work Gulbenkian did not like: ‘I have been told by Rosenberg that you nearly fainted when you saw the Picassos…I regret that my education has not gone so far as to understand even the elementary side of this peculiar art.’43

  It was some months after the initial loan that Gulbenkian raised the matter that must have been uppermost in Clark’s mind: the question of the future of the collection. Surprisingly, the National Gallery negotiations for the Gulbenkian collection encompassed not just the paintings but also the superb decorative arts (about which it po
ssessed no expertise), with the endowment of Gulbenkian’s entire fortune. This would at one stroke have made the National the richest gallery on earth, and was the greatest prize that any museum could receive. To the trustees the opportunity presented by their young director was dazzling. At the June meeting in 1937 Clark reported Gulbenkian’s intention to leave everything to Britain, to be housed in a separate building attached to the National Gallery, and ‘demanded’ authority to continue negotiations concerning land hitherto earmarked for an extension to the north. The solution he put forward was ingenious: an annexe on then-vacant ground (roughly where the northern wing is now located), accessible from its own entrance in St Martin’s Street and also from the gallery. The decorative arts would be housed on the ground floor and the paintings on the first floor, connected via a bridge to the rest of the gallery. Clark was congratulated on the skill with which he had dealt with the matter. Gulbenkian seems to have been well pleased with the idea, and the conversation moved on to architects.

  By January 1938 Gulbenkian was looking forward to seeing the plans of Clark’s architects, but these evidently did not satisfy him, for a year later he was urging Clark to look at the architect of the American consulate in Paris – ‘the best example of the architecture of modern times I have seen. I have no confidence in any other architects.’44 Gulbenkian’s favoured architect was William Adams Delano, who worked in the conservative Beaux Arts style favoured by American millionaires. Clark wrote to Delano explaining the requirement for five or six galleries on two floors, each about forty by fifty feet. But now he had not only Gulbenkian to deal with; he also had to persuade the Office of Works to allow him to change its plans for the site, which also involved the National Portrait Gallery. Using an outside architect was another hurdle Clark had to overcome, and he was left to undertake all the negotiations between Delano and the Office of Works. A large architect’s model was eventually produced, which was somehow shipped across from America in 1940 during the Battle of the Atlantic. The model, which was later discarded, showed a ponderous building in the 5th Avenue millionaire manner.