Herbert Read rose to the challenge.6 As the champion of international modernism, this uneasy friend of Clark’s took the occasion of reviewing the painter Ben Nicholson’s show at the Lefevre Gallery in The Listener to provide an example of an abstract artist ‘who [according to Clark] has now contracted spiritual beri-beri and is about to die of exhaustion’. Read confidently defended ‘the artist’s reality underlying appearances’, and used the analogy of music to defend abstraction. Curiously, although he never fully appreciated Nicholson’s work, Clark had recently acquired one of his abstract white reliefs for his own collection. The Listener correspondence pages attracted contributions from Roland Penrose,7 who defended Surrealism, and most savagely from Douglas Cooper defending Cubism.8 Always possessive about Cubism, on which subject he was a leading expert, Cooper was a formidable opponent who from now on marked Clark down as an enemy: ‘the contemporary vision exists, and no amount of disapprobation from Clark can kill it’. Touchy, outrageous and fearless, he relentlessly enjoyed baiting establishment targets like Kenneth Clark. When Edith Sitwell was being attacked by the critic Geoffrey Grigson (who also enjoyed baiting Clark), Clark told her, ‘There is a gent in the world of painting called Cooper who is as bad – almost a replica. I wish someone could be found to deal with him as effectively.’9 Even at the end of his life, Clark mused sardonically to a friend, ‘I wonder which paper will be enterprising enough to get Douglas Cooper to write my obituary.’10
Clark’s final contribution to The Listener controversy was an exhibition review entitled ‘The Art of Rouault’,11 in which he lamented that (from the correspondence both for and against his views), ‘when I see how my article has been misinterpreted I am almost sorry that I wrote it. My attempt to view the future of painting with some detachment has been turned into an attack on modern art. I have been made the hired assassin of the Colonel Blimps of criticism.’ He pointed out that in his bedroom ‘hangs the work of Picasso, Braque, Henry Moore and Mr Nicholson himself’, but then spoiled the point by characterising Nicholson’s works ‘less as cosmic symbols than as tasteful pieces of decoration’ – which brought forth an inevitable protest from the artist.12 Many in the art world saw Clark’s attempt to pontificate about modern art as ridiculous. Charles Collins Baker, Clark’s predecessor at Windsor, told the Tate keeper Douglas MacColl: ‘K. Clark, as I read him in the Listener, exasperates me: not only by his damn superiority, which wants a well planted kick in the pants, but even more by his calm omniscience about things he really knows nothing about.’13
Herbert Read had at one point implied that Clark, in his denial of abstraction, would be forced to betray his generation and live in ‘a world without art’. Clark thought the situation was not quite so desperate, and pointed out the healthy state of architecture, photography, textiles, printing and posters. The year before he had made a speech at the opening of an exhibition of the admirable posters designed by artists to advertise Shell petrol, in which he linked the decline of art to the decline of patronage.14 Clark always believed that it took two people to make a picture: one to commission it, and one to carry it out. Where were today’s patrons? Not for the last time, he himself would turn out to be the answer to his own question.
Clark had been aware of the work of one of the emerging artists for several years, but it took time for him to see the complete picture: ‘Much as I loved them,’ he later wrote, ‘I realised that Duncan and Vanessa, and the whole Bloomsbury movement, was a local, not to say provincial, phenomenon. But in [1928] I saw in a gallery kept by an erratic amateur named Dorothy Warren a number of drawings and some pieces of sculpture which were emphatically not provincial. They were by a man named Henry Moore…nearly all the drawings were sold, but I managed to acquire one which I thought would be acceptable to my parents and it became the foundation of a fairly large collection.’15 He wrote in his autobiography: ‘I had recognised that something extraordinary and completely unexpected had happened in English art.’
Whether Clark really had the coup de foudre he later claimed is open to debate. But over the next few years he was to buy several more of Moore’s drawings, and a friendship slowly blossomed. In the early days he appreciated Moore’s drawings more than the sculptures, which according to Graham Sutherland’s wife Kathy he compared to hot-water bottles. Part of the problem was the very oddity of Moore’s existence, as Clark explained when the artist was eighty: ‘Henry Moore is a great English sculptor. That is an extraordinary, almost an incredible, statement, because, although the English have a genius for lyric poetry…they have been notably deficient in plastic sense.’16 During the war, Clark neatly expressed his feelings about Moore’s greatness in writing to the King’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, recommending the artist for the OM: ‘In my opinion, and that of many good judges, he is the greatest artist of his generation, not only in England but anywhere else…There is a largeness and nobility about all he does which puts him in a different class from a capable sculptor like [Eric] Gill.’17
Clark would famously hold a dictum – often repeated – about Henry Moore, that if it were necessary to send an ambassador of the human race to Mars, he would undoubtedly be his first choice. The equable miner’s son from Castleford and the privileged young director of the National Gallery did not become friends until 1937. According to Jane’s diary, the Clarks went to Moore’s Hampstead house one Saturday in December of that year, and early in the new year Clark went over from Bellevue to see Moore at Burcroft in Kent. Although Clark was five years younger than the sculptor, Moore was anxious about the visit, which had smacked of the grand patron inspecting the artist’s studio. He wanted his assistant Bernard Meadows to put on a demonstration of carving, but Meadows was too nervous.18 The visit was a success, however, and Clark saw the embryonic elmwood Reclining Figure, being carved for the Russian architect Berthold Lubetkin. This piece is often seen as Moore’s early masterpiece, and when Lubetkin had to relinquish the commission, Clark cabled Alfred Barr at MoMA in New York, suggesting a price of £300. Clark knew that no British museum at that date would take it, but as Barr was unable to inspect it, he did not buy it either. Clark later wondered why he did not acquire it himself, except for the fact that he had nowhere to put it.
He did better the following year. Another Russian architect, Serge Chermayeff, had returned Moore’s Recumbent Figure. Fortunately, Clark was that year’s buyer for the Contemporary Arts Society, a remarkable body that bought extremely well, covering the role of the National Art Collections Fund for contemporary art. Clark acquired the sculpture on behalf of the Society, but the problem was to persuade the Tate trustees to accept it from them. James Bolivar Manson had always said that Henry Moore would only enter the Tate over his dead body, but with a new director in John Rothenstein, the board voted by a majority to accept the work. Moore sought Clark’s advice on how much to charge, and not wishing to appear greedy, suggested coming down to £250, but Clark urged him to accept £300, which was the final price. Moore appreciated having so powerful and knowledgeable a friend, and he would write and tell Clark what he was doing. He was impressed by the way Clark could summon references from the past and make comparisons with the Old Masters, a habit he himself would follow.
The early letters from Moore to Clark during the late 1930s are respectful rather than intimate, and always begin ‘Dear Sir Kenneth’ until 1940. A deeper friendship developed during the war, when their paths crossed more often. An important ingredient was Moore’s admiration and affection for Jane, the necessary corrective to her husband: ‘K can sometimes put a glass screen between himself and someone he doesn’t want to be with. No, never with me. It’s probably a protection…But Jane was so kind and warm-hearted and outgoing. She had the human touch.’19 When Clark was asked if he had influenced Moore’s work in any way, he thought not at all. When Moore was asked the same question he replied, ‘Not enough to change one’s course, no. But one knows what an expert he is and one does take notice of people whose opinions one v
alues.’20 It would be truer to say that both men were to have an enormous impact on each other’s lives. The friendship, on Clark’s side, was to be among the most important in his life, rivalling even that with Maurice Bowra. Forty-five years later the wheelchair-bound Henry Moore would throw the first sod at Clark’s funeral.
When Clark wrote his memoirs he believed that he first met Graham Sutherland at the opening of the Shell posters exhibition in 1934, but elsewhere he wrote that it was at an exhibition of china at Harrods, while others dispute both accounts.*2 What is clear is that he immediately recognised a new talent in English painting: ‘Ever since Oxford I had been hoping to find an English painter of my own generation whose work I could admire without reserve.’21 In Sutherland, Clark had found an artist in the tradition of Blake, Samuel Palmer and Turner, who showed him ‘a way out of the virtuous fog of Bloomsbury art’. He found Sutherland ‘a fascinating contrast to our Bloomsbury friends – a quiet dandy, highly intelligent and completely independent. We immediately bought all the pictures he had brought with him to show us…Both he and his pretty wife enjoyed society, and in return were much admired by the social figures who met them with us. If artists were really like that, well, it might be possible to invite them to one’s house.’22 For Sutherland, it was an astonishing turn of fortune: ‘I was seeing the high life. Kenneth Clark had real charisma. I thought he was elegant, a Renaissance prince. But I was also frightened of him because he didn’t suffer fools gladly.’23
Apart from purchasing as many of Sutherland’s paintings as he could, Clark also introduced him to an international dealer who had a gallery in London, Rosenberg and Helft, where the painter was to have an exhibition in 1938 with an Introduction written by Clark. Sutherland was very grateful to Clark for arranging this: ‘a complete surprise to me, since the idea seemed so far beyond the bounds of possibility. Thank you a thousand times.’24 Clark had actually recommended a joint show of Moore and Sutherland, and wrote to Henry warning him, ‘there is a luxurious atmosphere about the gallery which rather annoys me’.25 Moore was however already committed to the Mayor Gallery, and could not oblige. Kathy Sutherland, whom Clark described as like a geisha (a very feisty geisha, as he was to discover), went to see Clark at the National Gallery to ask if he would lend them some money so Graham could give up teaching. Clark replied, ‘No I won’t, it ruins a friendship. But I will guarantee you an overdraft.’26 He did in fact also lend them the down-payment on their future house in Kent. When Gertrude Stein wrote to Clark to promote the mediocre talents of Francis Rose, he avoided offering an opinion but proposed, ‘I hope you will come and see our pictures…there is one young English painter called Graham Sutherland I think is outstandingly good.’27 Years later, looking back over his career, Sutherland told Clark that ‘one can almost say that not only were the “seed beds” prepared by you, but that the “seedlings” were nursed’.28
If the Sutherlands were beautiful and soigné, John and Myfanwy Piper were loveable and chaotic. They lived in a farmhouse in an empty valley near Henley, Fawley Bottom (‘Fawley Bum’), where the ingredients of life were so entrancing that Clark thought the mixture of books, laughter, conversation and Myfanwy’s cooking made it ‘the perfect antidote to London’. They would sing Revivalist hymns after dinner with John on the piano; it was a place where Clark, coming from the grandeur of Portland Place, recognised the authentic values of decent lives devoted to art and literature. He first met the Pipers when the sculptor Alexander ‘Sandy’ Calder brought them to tea at Portland Place in around 1938. John Piper was in a transitional phase, just emerging from abstraction and heading towards topography, architecture and landscape. Myfanwy had edited Axis magazine and was an apologist for abstraction, so it cannot have surprised Clark that she challenged his negative views on the subject – ‘being awfully schoolgirlish and brash about the whole thing’, as she recalled.29 Myfanwy remembered that ‘the whole set up was pretty grand. K was rather stately and very nice and I felt rather naughty for going for him.’30 She was if anything even more remarkable than her husband: a highly intelligent earth mother and an Oxford swimming Blue who would later write libretti for Benjamin Britten. She and Clark were to enjoy an amitié amoureuse, and she was one of the few women apart from Jane who could tell him off.
The year after their visit to Portland Place, Clark acquired John Piper’s Dead Resort Kemptown for the Contemporary Arts Society, a semi-abstract architectural painting that resembles the artist’s Brighton Aquatints. It was Piper’s first sale to an institution, and it went some way to lifting his reputation alongside those of Sutherland and Moore.31 That October John Betjeman wrote enthusiastically to Clark about Piper’s work: ‘He can do Gothic Revival or genuine Norman or the most complicated Geometric Tracery with equal facility, he gets all the texture of lichened stone and no niggliness and lovely deep recessions.’32 As Clark recognised, both Betjeman and Piper had made a similar discovery in the byways of English churches and topography. The Bloomsbury world had been Francophile in its preferences, and in Sutherland and Piper, Clark had found two artists who had deep English roots. In the words of one cultural historian, he thought it ‘increasingly important that art should be allowed to claim national allegiance and artists be encouraged to acknowledge their Englishness’.33
The mantle of Roger Fry and the pervasive post-Cézanne influence was taken up by Graham Bell and the Euston Road Group, of whom Clark wrote: ‘This group [Fry], so to say, bequeathed to me.’34 Bell was given a room at Portland Place, and he, William Coldstream, Claude Rogers and Victor Pasmore were to be supported by Clark, although (Pasmore apart) not with quite the same enthusiasm as he supported Moore, Sutherland and Piper. He funded the first prospectus of the Euston Road Group, and when they produced a pamphlet, ‘A Plan for Artists’, asking for ten patrons to guarantee a bank overdraft, Clark was the first to sign up, and persuaded Sam Courtauld to follow suit. Apart from commissioning paintings, Clark set up a trust fund to provide stipends to artists which supported, among others, Bell, Coldstream and above all Pasmore.35 Bell later put on record: ‘Your generosity in cash to Bill and me was more than we could have hoped: but your support of me when I had hardly a picture to my name was beyond that – an extraordinary act of faith.’36
Clark and Pasmore first met under surprising circumstances. One day at the National Gallery, Clark was rehanging a Turner which he had reframed in a silvery frame which did not work, when ‘a young man with bright black eyes came up to me and said “I don’t know who you are, but whoever you are you’ve no taste.” I agreed and the frame was hastily removed.’37 As Clark recognised, Pasmore was the most talented of the Group, and supporting him was probably the most useful of all his acts of patronage. It enabled the artist to leave his desk job at the London County Council and turn professional. As a result Clark owned at least twenty of his pictures, the cream of his early work, many of which he later gave to museums so that Pasmore’s paintings would be better-known.38
In the second half of the decade Clark had established a degree of ‘ownership’ of these two groups of artists – the Moore, Piper, Sutherland axis and the Euston Road Group. He believed he had identified the authentic voice of England, its landscape, poetry and weather, in contemporary idiom. Herbert Read led the dissenters, as he told Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth: ‘Sir Clark is very busy. But don’t place too much hope on him. I was present at a lunch the other day at which he gave it as his opinion – that abstract art, functional architecture “and all that sort of thing” was dead, & a damned good job too…We are in for a revival of “the picture with a story”. Nice clean healthy nature, the Coldstream Guards forming fours behind their Fuhrer…all we represent & have fought for is threatened by the most appalling reaction.’39 Read was right to be worried, for over the coming six years of war – camouflage apart – there would not be much work for abstractionists, while representational and narrative painting would never be so widely enjoyed by the general public, and Clark was to be its rin
gmaster.
* * *
*1 Clark was in discussion with R.R. Tatlock and the painter Alfred Thornton over an idea for a new exhibiting society of contemporary artists. He offered a ‘subvention’ and to finance any future show, but Thornton got cold feet at the thought that such a scheme would cut across two existing groups, the New English Art Club and the London Group. Robert Rattray Tatlock (1889–1954) was a critic and the editor of the Burlington Magazine. See letter Alfred Thornton to D.S. MacColl, 15 September 1929 (Glasgow University, Ms MacColl T63).
*2 The typographer Oliver Simon was sure that he had taken the artist to Portland Place, where they met for the first time. Simon resented the notion that Clark had ‘discovered’ Sutherland (see Grigson, Recollections, p.162).
17
Packing Up: ‘Bury Them in the Bowels of the Earth’
Bury them in the Bowels of the Earth, but not a picture shall leave this Island.
WINSTON CHURCHILL to Kenneth Clark, June 19401
The Great Clark Boom came to a natural close with the death of Sir Philip Sassoon on 3 June 1939. Jane’s diary recorded: ‘Philip is dead. Stunned by the news. Dear Philip who was fairy prince, godmother and magic carpet to all of us.’ Two days later she reported that Philip’s ashes had been scattered over Trent from his aeroplane.2 With Sassoon’s death the decade of parties and pleasure at Port Lympne was over, and it marks the beginning of the next period of Clark’s life and the imminent war. Clark was to accept the opportunities offered by the war, and use them brilliantly. The story has several interlocking episodes: the removal of the National Gallery’s paintings to safe storage in Wales, the setting-up of the War Artists’ Scheme, his work at the Ministry of Information both as head of Home Publicity and head of the Film Division, and his role on committees which were to have such an impact on the arts in post-war Britain. Clark was to emerge from the war a very different figure from the one who entered it, no longer the remote dictator of legend but a more collegiate figure who had put the National Gallery at the heart of what might be called London’s cultural resistance to Hitler.
Kenneth Clark Page 21
