Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  Clark was not blinded by the Victorian cult of a superhuman Leonardo. He was anxious to create a non-mythical artist: ‘We must admit that the early pictures are less good than we should expect them to be. Only one of them, the Liechtenstein portrait [of Ginevra de’ Benci16] is a wholly successful work of art.’ However, for Clark Leonardo was the standing refutation of the comfortable belief that all great men are simple. No more complex and mysterious a character ever existed, and any attempt at simplification would run contrary to the whole direction of his mind. The Windsor drawings of The Deluge, for instance, he thought were ‘more complex than anything in European art. They are so far from the Classical tradition that our first term of comparison might be one of the great Chinese paintings of cloud and storm, for example the Dragon Scroll in the Boston Museum.’17 He happily quotes King Lear in this connection: ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout.’

  The Gordian knot of Leonardo scholarship is the dating of the two versions of The Virgin of the Rocks in Paris and London. This is a subject of unusual interest, because we can see the development of Leonardo’s style and ideas through two of his major works. Initially Clark accepted the conventional view that the Paris picture was commissioned in 1483 for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception of San Francesco Grande in Milan, and therefore came first. His eyes told him that with its soft, warmer tones, the Paris version is perfectly finished in Leonardo’s early style, whereas the London version is in his later style. But then Clark allowed himself to be persuaded by an eccentric article published in 1937 by Martin Davies, ‘whose thorough and inflexible examination of the documents’ convinced him that he was mistaken, and that it was the London version that was commissioned in 1483. Modern scholarship favours the earlier view, and the probability that the Paris version was sold to a third party after a dispute over money with the Confraternity in the early 1490s. The London version may have been a replacement, begun around the same time for the Confraternity but not finished until 1508, when the final payment was made.18 Years later, in refusing to write a two-hundred-word article for Picture Post about the London Virgin of the Rocks, Clark responded wearily: ‘As to the relation of the picture to the Louvre Madonna, the subject has become so hopelessly involved that two hundred thousand words would be nearer the mark.’19

  When he came to the Mona Lisa, Clark tells us, ‘the surface has the delicacy of a new-laid egg’. With Pater’s description ringing in his ears,* he reminds us that anything he writes will be poor and shallow by comparison. He makes the point that in essence the Mona Lisa smile is a Gothic smile, the smile of the queens and saints at Rheims or Naumburg. He was to return to the Mona Lisa on several occasions over the next forty years. One of the best lectures of his late years was a radio talk in which he calls her the ‘submarine goddess of the Louvre’, describes the painting as an objet de culte akin to the riddle of the sphinx, and compares the problem of the identity of the Mona Lisa to Shakespeare’s dark lady, the embodiment of the mysterious, a femme fatale.20

  Leonardo da Vinci remains arguably the most readable introduction to the subject. Roger Mynors called it ‘an archipelago book – the tops of buried mountains’, and Vita Sackville-West wrote to Clark: ‘I have delighted in your style, both your form of expression, and the combination of an imaginative approach with true authority and scholarship. The expert is so apt to grow dry!’21 Raymond Mortimer in the New Statesman said that Clark ‘reminds us that it is possible to combine erudition with elegance’.22 Berenson wrote to Clark that it was ‘the most rational yet sensitive interpretation of a great genius I have come across…What a blessed contrast to the Talmudic Hegelian writings…turned out by the Germano phonies of Central Europe.’23 The most thought-provoking commentary on Clark and his subject, however, had to wait until his death, when Michael Levey wrote a particularly penetrating obituary in the Proceedings of the British Academy in which he referred to Leonardo, suggesting that ‘the suavity, stylishness, aloofness, and elusiveness of the artist found echoes in the personality of his biographer’.24

  —

  Clark’s articles and lectures from the 1930s have not worn as well as the books. In his autobiography he remarked that ‘looking through them I am agreeably surprised to see how bad they are. The intervening years have not been entirely lost.’25 It was not until the post-war period that he gained the reputation of being the best lecturer in England. Nikolaus Pevsner was infuriated by a Clark lecture on Leonardo: ‘I detect a lot of work on the originals – but the tenor of it is an arrogance for which I could box his ears, “Leonardo shouldn’t have done this”, “That was a waste of time”, and then his rather blasé jokes in between to make the students laugh.’26

  The range of Clark’s writings was already wide: he wrote several pieces of the ‘Art and Democracy’ and ‘Is Art Necessary?’ type. They still read quite well today, and are more lucid than most expositions of this kind. Interestingly, he reviewed the 1936 Royal Academy exhibition of Chinese painting under the title ‘Chinese Painting as it Appears to an Authority on European Painting’.27 He is faintly patronising about the conformity and lack of excitement in Chinese painting, which he found limited in both means and aim. He returned to the theme a few years later in a much more carefully-thought-out piece, ‘An Englishman Looks at Chinese Painting’, coinciding with the Aid China exhibition at the Wallace Collection.28 In this lecture Clark sees compelling echoes of British artists and art collecting in China, observing the main interest of both cultures in landscape painting and a shared passion for illustrators. They were both ‘gentleman cultures’.

  Clark did not only address the metropolitan elite, but felt that it was important to give lectures in the regions, as he told Clive Bell: ‘Of course I don’t go lecturing in Manchester for the sake of fame or fortune – in fact I am never paid, I go from a vague feeling that it encourages people to take an interest in the National Gallery and in painting generally…I daresay this is all a delusion – a sort of pathetic fallacy.’29 He was particularly keen to get pictures out of the National Gallery basement, and promoted the renewal of a loan scheme for regional museums. While he found the response disappointing, nevertheless seventeen of them accepted paintings.30 Clark actually became the adviser to Southampton City Art Gallery, where he is credited with creating one of the most interesting of all regional collections. His policy there was to acquire good paintings regardless of who the artist might be, which led to the purchase of original masterpieces such as Sofonisba Anguissola’s Portrait of the Artist’s Sister Disguised as a Nun. His visits to the regions were to be of enormous importance in the future, not only for his wartime thinking about the arts and who they were for, but also, crucially, in his approach to the foundation of Independent Television in the 1950s, which was regionally based.

  —

  Clark’s broader influence across British intellectual life, and the committee work which would so characterise his later career, were already becoming apparent in the 1930s. Sometimes he used his authority with boards to assist a colleague such as the Marxist art historian Frederick Antal, whose work he described as ‘of great value as it proceeds from a wider knowledge of the conditions under which works of art are produced than any other scholar known to me possesses’.31 In 1934 he joined the newly formed Royal Mail Advisory Committee with the Shell art patron Jack Beddington,32 which commissioned Barnett Freedman to design the George V Silver Jubilee stamps, among the most interesting British stamps ever made. It was presumably Clark who persuaded the King to accept the series’ proto-Festival of Britain design. Clark was invited on to the Spoken English Committee of the BBC, and in 1937 wrote at length on ‘the decadence of language’, adding that ‘the work of the Committee has always interested me profoundly’.33 In the same year he joined the Public Relations Committee of the embryonic National Theatre, the beginning of a thirty-five-year relationship in which he would play an unexpectedly significant role. A happier story, of equ
al longevity, was his joining the Mint Advisory Committee in 1936, an important year owing to the requirement of new designs for coinage, medals and seals for the new reign. He enjoyed his time on this committee, which met in the Tapestry Room of St James’s Palace, finally severing his link with it in 1975.

  —

  In working on Leonardo, Clark became fascinated by that uomo universale Leon Battista Alberti, in whose written works he detected an influence on Leonardo. Alberti was the hero of one of Clark’s early gods, Jacob Burckhardt, in his book on the Renaissance.34 He was a daunting subject because of the range of his activities – architect, artist, humanist philosopher, poet, and more – whose motto Clark might have adopted: ‘A man can do all things if he will.’ Alberti had no loyalties and no religion, and this chimed with Clark. The difficulty in writing about his range of interests appealed to Clark, whose reading took him into some very unexpected corners. Above all, he saw Alberti as the quintessential early Renaissance man, and was pleased to be entering more fully into that period of art, where he felt most at home. For almost a decade he worked on Alberti, believing that he would be the subject of his next scholarly book. But the war intervened, and like most of Clark’s unfinished books it became a quarry for lectures and other studies. He gave a lecture on Alberti’s book on the theory of painting, which he regarded as ‘the first time that his influence on Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting is firmly established’.35 In his autobiography Clark wrote: ‘Alberti, in spite of his multifarious talents and splendid profile, turns out to be a slightly unsympathetic character.’36 ‘However,’ as he told Jane, ‘it has got him out of my system and has taken (more) time to write than Carlyle’s Frederick the Great, the Idylls of the King and similar mistakes of direction.’37 Even so, he never entirely got Alberti ‘out of his system’. Thirty years later he was still writing lectures on ‘The Universal Man’,38 inspired by Alberti, and found much in him to enthuse about in Civilisation.

  * * *

  * In The Renaissance (1893), Pater famously wrote of the Mona Lisa: ‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants.’

  15

  Director versus Staff

  The currency of museum staff is knowledge, not vision, and at the Gallery the staff could not acclimatise themselves to a director who addressed Leon Battista Alberti and Philip Sassoon on equal terms.

  JOHN POPE-HENNESSY, at Kenneth Clark’s memorial service1

  In April 1939 the National Gallery hosted a glamorous reception for a thousand guests – at which there was neither food, drink nor music, according to the Evening Standard (although the next day the Daily Telegraph reported that the Clarks had given a dinner party for thirty people beforehand at Portland Place). But all was not well at the gallery. Clark had many detractors, both inside and out, who were biding their time and waiting for him to make a mistake. Throughout the 1930s he was travelling frequently to exhibitions and museums, keeping in touch via bulletins from his keeper, Harold Isherwood Kay. There was barely a month when he was not at Hyères staying with Edith Wharton, visiting an exhibition in Brussels, seeing dealers in Paris (where he always stayed at the Crillon), looking at drawings in Bayonne, recovering from a bout of illness in Biarritz or visiting Prince Paul in Belgrade.

  Even Clark’s detractors must have been surprised by the scale of the opportunity that presented itself when in July 1937 he convened a special board meeting at which he reported the capricious purchase of ‘four Venetian pictures’. He had rushed the sale through – without adequate consultation with his curatorial staff – at £14,000, twice that year’s annual purchase grant. The year before, he had confessed to an audience: ‘Every time I enter a picture dealer’s I feel confident that I am going to discover at least a Raphael or possibly a Giorgione – and almost certainly the latter.’2 Now he seems to have believed that this moment had arrived.

  The pictures were four panels that Clark had encountered in the Viennese apartment of ‘an entertaining but equivocal expert on Venetian sculpture named Planiscig’.3 He told his board that they might or might not be by Giorgione, but they were ‘as near as we were likely to come to the sound of Giorgione’s music’. The trustees were as bewitched as Clark, and Sir Robert Witt of the National Art Collections Fund offered to present the pictures to the gallery on the condition that they should be labelled as by Giorgione. As the gallery’s future director Nicholas Penny put it: ‘When senior potentates permit themselves to be tamed by golden youth, they like the world to know how golden he is.’4 In the minutes of the October board meeting the panels had duly become attributed to Giorgione. When the curator Neil MacLaren protested at the purchase, Clark replied, ‘Perhaps you are deaf to that particular music.’5 Clark asked the Warburg Institute to unravel the paintings’ iconography, and a young scholar who had newly arrived in England from Austria, Ernst Gombrich,6 identified the subjects from the second Eclogue of Tebaldeo. Clark told Samuel Courtauld that ‘this does not add anything to the beauty of the pictures but it will no doubt weigh heavily with the public who as Canova said “see with their ears” ’.7

  Clark wrote to the then dying Edith Wharton: ‘Most thrilling purchase for the gallery: Nothing less than four pictures by Giorgione. They are completely unknown or else we should not have been able to afford them.’8 To Berenson he was hardly less guarded: ‘Personally, I think these little pictures are of supreme beauty, the purest expression of humanist or pantheist poetry I have ever seen in painting, and I find it difficult to resist the belief that they are by the painter of the Tempesta in an earlier phase.’9 When he was finally able to send BB photos he added, ‘For some reason they defy the camera, and you cannot judge the beauty of the pictures until you see the originals. I am sure you will like them: they are full of poetry. Of course I do not expect you to think or say that they are by Giorgione. When my Trustees bought them I told them that they must do so purely because of their beauty and that there would never be agreement or certainty as to their authorship. They accepted this very well but rather unfortunately have insisted on the pictures being published as Giorgione. It does not greatly matter as they certainly are all that the ordinary educated man means by that name…if Giorgione didn’t paint them I have no idea who did. Perhaps one can say that they have the spirit of Giorgione without the letter.’10 Berenson was non-committal, but confessed that he could not see that the panels had much to do with Giorgione.11

  Clark’s enemies in the art world now saw their chance. It was his old friend Tancred Borenius who fired the first shot, in The Times on 21 October 1937, denying the Giorgione attribution and pushing the claims of Palma Vecchio instead. Clark wrote a woefully inadequate justification for the Burlington Magazine which did nothing to persuade the sceptics.12 In what must have been a particularly wounding letter, his old mentor C.F. Bell then wrote to The Times: ‘Snobbery in Art: The Giorgione Panels…These little paintings are scarcely suitable acquisitions for the National Gallery. At the root of the matter lies the snobbery of assessing the importance and value of pictures by the renown of their real or reputed authors.’ He went on to assert that the panels were really no more than decorative furniture: ‘it has been generally agreed that the proper place for such things is in the furniture courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum. That surely is also the place for these most charming little sportelli…’13 Clark responded: ‘It is curious that Mr. Bell should have chosen this purchase as an example of snobbery. Here were four pictures, with no pedigree, no provenance, no name, nothing to recommend them except their beauty.’14

  By December the row over the attribution, orchestrated by Borenius, was in full swing. In the same month Lord Balniel was appointed chairman of the trustees, and it would be his first task to deal with the growing clamour. The press and the trustees were in fact less concerned about th
e attribution than about a damaging rumour that the panels had been offered to a collector eighteen months earlier for only £10,000, which Clark told the board was erroneous. In December the Daily Telegraph reported that Dr G.M. Richter, an expert on Giorgione, ascribed them to Previtali,15 an attribution which the four panels still bear today. This was actually first proposed by one of Clark’s own junior curators, Philip Pouncey, who did not want to contradict the director publicly. A small ray of hope for Clark came with the discovery of the provenance, which as he told an old school friend was ‘the best which any Giorgione could have, no less than the old Manfrin collection which also contained the Tempesta’.16 But this turned out to be false.

  The criticisms did not abate, and in January 1938 the row over ‘the four Venetian pictures’ was still dominating board meetings. The new chairman conceded that it was not without grounds. They had paid too much for the panels, but he took responsibility (no doubt to shield Clark) for having advised the trustees that there was a chance they might be by Giorgione. The trustees sincerely hoped the controversy would go away, but they would, if necessary, reaffirm their confidence in Clark as director. Clark was fortunate that the other subject that dominated the gallery meetings was Mr Gulbenkian – a source from which Clark derived much trustee capital. By February the matter of the panels had reached the House of Commons, with a question put down, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain even came to look at them for himself. Fortunately he liked them, and was impressed by Clark’s article, which he had taken to read at Chequers.