Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  Clark painted an equally vivid picture of his life to Jane, safely at Upton, in September 1940. He described sleeping on a camp bed at the MoI and having dinner most evenings with John Betjeman and the Chinese scholar Arthur Waley at a nearby restaurant at 7 p.m. because the raids started, with German punctuality, between 8.15 and 9 o’clock: ‘The military think invasion next week a 10 to 1 chance. The PM still thinks it even chances. I am working hard on posters…Also I am trying to think of ways of preventing class bitterness which is the natural reflex of the East End being bombed. The papers and wireless are silly about this unless one watches them all the time…Goodnight my dear love. I know you will hate feeling so isolated, but you must try to think that I am in the navy. I will write often. The children must think of me as in the fighting forces and not worry. Your devoted husband, K.’48 Clark’s last comment was hardly calculated to set his children’s minds at ease, and is a curious sidelight on the way he wished them to perceive him.

  Clark was heavily involved in planning for the anticipated German invasion of Britain, chairing all the meetings concerning ‘Publicity about Invasion’ and ‘How We are to Prepare the Public for Invasion’.49 The answer was a leaflet, ‘If the Invader Comes’. ‘I wrote this useless document,’ he claimed, but so did Nicolson, and probably like so much committee work it was the result of several hands. Clark thought that what the public would want was not so much words of comfort but of command; however, as he pointed out, ‘the difficulty was to think up enough technical instructions’.50 The first draft, entitled ‘If the Germans Invade Great Britain’, contained seven rules telling the public what to do and what not to do: stay put, do not believe rumours, do not give the Germans anything, etc. The document is covered with corrections in Clark’s handwriting.51

  Part of German propaganda was to foster the idea that the burden of war was falling upon Britain’s working people, a point Clark had touched on in his letter to Jane. The MoI was seriously considering a campaign to point out that wealthier people were also playing their part, and Clark wrote a memorandum on the subject: ‘I am afraid I think it would be very dangerous for us to support any propaganda on behalf of the wealthier classes…If we are caught out putting their case there would be a fearful rumpus.’ He felt that ‘A certain amount of patting on the back for workers is desirable, if a form can be found free of patronage.’52 Another of his concerns was the image of the USA in Britain – the sceptical public needed to be shown that America was a nation of friends, and eager to help, but it was perceived, Clark thought, ‘as being a country of luxury, lawlessness, unbridled capitalism, strikes and delays’. He believed the public needed to know that the average American was ‘a kindly, simple, honourable character’, that the US was not a country of rampant private capitalism and that it was on our side.53

  One of the most interesting aspects of Clark’s war was his prescient appreciation of the importance of post-war planning. As early as 1940 he was persuading Edward Hulton, the owner of Picture Post, to devote a special number to ‘The Britain We Hope to Build When the War is Over’. Julian Huxley was brought in as editor, and the forty-page special issue was published on 4 January 1941, with pieces by Maxwell Fry on planning; A.D. Lindsay, Master of Balliol, on education; J.B. Priestley on culture and recreation; and Huxley himself on ‘Health for All’. It might have been – and arguably was – the blueprint for post-war Britain.

  The same month, the ministry asked Clark to prepare a memorandum on whether Germany was immutably wicked. His paper was entitled ‘It’s the Same Old Hun’. The most striking thing about it is his opinion that, in contrast to the situation in 1914–18, ‘all the best elements of German culture and science…are outside Germany and supporting us’.54 Clark, as we shall see, was much involved with helping to settle many German refugees, notably the scholars of the Warburg Institute from Hamburg.

  Clark was by his own account frequently off to see Churchill, and he describes the consequences of one visit: ‘I chanced to be lunching at Downing St when the Air Chief Marshal said to me (very indiscreetly), “that old leaning tower of yours is going to take a beating”. I said “Do you mean that you are going to bomb Pisa?” He nodded and I got hold of the bombing unit that was going to do the job and showed them how they could bomb Pisa station without going near the cathedral or baptistery.’55 He later told his secretary, Catherine Porteous, ‘I wish I could have known in advance about Dresden,’ but he conceded that by that stage of the war Bomber Command had become so bloody-minded that they would not have listened. According to his memoirs, Clark undertook a mission on behalf of Churchill to see the Irish Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, in 1941 to discuss the Irish ports. Quite why the Prime Minister would send Clark on this major diplomatic mission, and why it came under the MoI, is a mystery, but he went, with Jane. Given Ireland’s isolationist policy, de Valera was never likely to grant the British the use of Irish ports, but the meeting was a success at a human level, and Clark found him sympathetic – ‘like a priest for whom the idea of progress has no meaning. No doubt that is why I liked him.’56 While they were in Dublin they saw John Betjeman, who told John and Myfanwy Piper, ‘K and Jane came over here – thank God for them, they worked very hard with the Irish and created the most wonderful impression and talked to Dev for two hours.’57 In all probability Clark was invited to Ireland by Betjeman to lecture, and it was he who arranged the meeting with de Valera (at which Dev himself may have brought up the subject of the ports), which Clark then reported back to Churchill.

  By mid-1941 Clark had two powerful enemies at the MoI in Colonel Scorgie and Duff Cooper, and he realised that his useful time there was over. In July he made a serious gaffe, telling the Home Defence Executive that the MoI had no control over the BBC. The BBC’s neglect of MoI directives had been a running sore, but the matter was taken seriously. In December 1940 the ministry’s director-general, Walter Monckton, was forced to step in and tell the Privy Council Office that ‘Sir Kenneth Clark is unlikely to remain much longer in the Ministry.’58 In fact Clark had already tendered his resignation. Harold Nicolson saw him afterwards: ‘Lunch with Kenneth Clark at the Travellers. He has resigned from the MoI and is glad about it. Or not wholly glad. He says that it is like leaving a Transatlantic liner. One is glad to be home yet one says goodbye to the ship with some sadness.’59

  Cooper himself was fired the same month (May 1941), and under his successor Brendan Bracken the MoI became a more respected institution. As Clark put it, ‘I belonged to the old, amateurish, ineffective, music-hall-joke Ministry, and had long been an unnecessary member of that ramshackle body.’60 After the war Duff Cooper, reflecting on his lack of success, declared, ‘there is no place in the British scheme of government for a Ministry of Information’. Clark would probably have agreed, but the later successes of the MoI were built on the troubled foundations of those early years. They mirror Britain’s war effort. The frustration Clark felt there, which so soured his view of the MoI, was that of an activist mired by bureaucracy. The ministry did, however, give him the chance to develop and run his greatest legacy of the conflict, the War Artists’ Scheme.

  * * *

  *1 The Victorian architects William Butterfield, John Loughborough Pearson and William Burges.

  *2 In their memoirs, both Clark and the fashion writer Ernestine Carter (wife of the bibliographer and diplomat John Carter) claimed to have introduced Betjeman to Joan Hunter Dunn. Their accounts are not entirely incompatible. Clark first mentioned her name to Betjeman, but the actual introduction, according to Miss Hunter Dunn, was by Michael Bonavia, who summoned her to his room to meet the poet (see Hillier, New Fame, New Love, p.180). The cash register she used is preserved in Senate House by the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

  20

  Artists at War

  I hate all forms of organisation and think them particularly tiresome when applied to artists and men of letters but something of this sort is necessary now.

  KENNETH
CLARK to John Betjeman, 20 September 19391

  In the first empty week of the war Clark had gone into action on behalf of living artists. As he explained, ‘I thought it would be a good thing to have a record of the war by artists for two reasons: one that they could give some feeling of events which a mere camera could not do, and secondly that it might be a means of keeping artists out of active service.’2 Or as Jane put it more bluntly: ‘to save our friends’.3 It is surprising that Clark felt this was his responsibility; one might have expected the director of the Tate or the president of the Royal Academy to take such an initiative, not the director of the National Gallery. It is a measure of his personal identification with contemporary art that he should be the instigator of the scheme.

  In August 1939 Clark made a proposal to the Ministry of Information recommending the formation of a body roughly comparable to one which Canada had set up during World War I. One of his earliest exposures to modern painting was the War Artists exhibition in 1917 (including work by Wyndham Lewis and William Roberts), and the connection had made a lasting impression on him. He also went to see the Treasury: ‘Early in the war everybody was in a helpful and somewhat excitable condition, and I did not have to prepare the ground for my scheme. It was accepted immediately.’4 His scheme started out at the Ministry of Labour, but was soon passed back to the MoI, on the grounds that war pictures were classified as publicity. That Clark was to attain high office in the MoI was a blessing – and the scheme certainly became more difficult to maintain after he left the ministry.

  Clark at once began to form a committee and to prepare a list of artists for its consideration. He later told Augustus John how that autumn he received about twenty-five letters a day from artists asking if he could help them; he somehow found time to answer them all, and was always at pains to point out – somewhat disingenuously – that it was not he who was compiling the list, but a committee of which he was a member. The artist Paul Nash attempted to set up a rival ‘self-constituted’ committee – which irritated Clark, as he told John Betjeman: ‘I wish that Nash would go on painting and repress his insatiable appetite for organisation.’5 Clark easily outmanoeuvred Nash, and on 23 November 1939, when the war was not yet twelve weeks old, a meeting of the newly formed War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC) was held at the National Gallery under Clark’s chairmanship. It was carefully constructed: Muirhead Bone, Clark’s old friend and ‘a most sweet character’, who had been part of the World War I scheme; Percy Jowett of the Royal College of Art; E.M. O’Rourke Dickey to act as secretary; and a representative of each of the armed services. The Admiralty and the War Office had already conceived plans of their own, but were reluctantly marshalled under Clark’s umbrella in an uneasy compromise whereby each service could request certain artists that it favoured. The Royal Academy posed its usual problem for Clark, but he decided that it would be better to have it inside the tent than complaining on the outside: the keeper, Walter Russell, accepted a place on the committee.6

  By the beginning of 1940 there were over two hundred artists on the list. Clark anticipated that they would be used in three ways: to paint camouflage, to devise propaganda, and to create a record of the war itself. It was the last that he was interested in; he was always dubious about the value of propaganda art, which he saw as unhealthy for the artist, because likely ‘to coarsen his style and degrade his vision’.7 Although many artists signed up for camouflage, others saw it as a lower form of life – as Edward Bawden told Clark: ‘The difference between being a camouflage officer & being given the opportunity of recording war scenes, is simply between making myself an efficient & conscientious servant & being allowed to rise on the wings of my profession.’8 Clark would have agreed, but at this stage it was simply a question of keeping the artists out of the armed services and giving them work. Most found that with the coming of war, commissions had dried up, so this was a lifeline.

  Clark certainly saw the scheme as a chance to articulate national values and beliefs at a time when they were most needed; he argued that there was ‘no use in fighting to preserve free functioning of intelligence and sensibility, if we abandon the arts in the process’.9 No doubt he also hoped that the scheme would educate and improve public taste. Above all it was a way of ennobling the mundane tasks of war and engaging the interest of ordinary people by allowing them to see themselves through art. For this, recognisable subject-matter and a degree of clarity in execution were crucial, and so abstraction was ruled out. Moreover, the criterion of acceptance could not be aesthetic quality alone. For instance, Clark recognised the merit of David Bomberg’s drawings, but considered ‘his work looks artificial and done for effect, which is the last thing that we want our war records to be. I would rather they were a little dull and naïve.’10 As he wrote to Cecil Day-Lewis: ‘Thank you for Laura Knight’s Introduction, which in its hearty, gym-mistress style I rather like. Like her painting it has the courage of its own commonplaceness.’11 Commonplace or not, Knight’s painting of a munitions worker, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring (1943), caught the public imagination and became one of the most popular images of the war.*1 At its most basic, War Artist work was reportage of one kind or another, and whether good or bad it attained a documentary value. But as Clark often repeated, such paintings would also show posterity what the war felt like. In his October 1939 article in The Listener, ‘The Artist in Wartime’, an early apologia for the scheme, he wrote: ‘There are certain things in life so serious that only a poet can tell the truth about them.’ Henry Moore’s shelter drawings were to prove the truth of that assertion.

  Not the least interesting aspect of the WAAC was that it established a framework for state support of the visual arts. A distinction was made between salaried artists, whose war works belonged to the committee, and ‘artists working on commission’, whose work was bought by the committee only if they liked it. There were thirty-six salaried artists, six of whom might be seconded to the Admiralty, eleven to the army, seven to the Air Ministry, etc., and for the most part they were given honorary ranks. Fees were generally not problematic, although Paul Nash was an exception: Clark had to write him a long explanatory letter on behalf of the committee offering him fifteen guineas for a drawing, and twenty-five or fifty for an oil painting, depending on size.12 During the fiscal year 1939–40 the WAAC received £5,000 for purchasing works of art. In the following year this was raised to £8,000, and despite the Treasury’s doubts, the year after that to £14,000.13 Clark’s departure from the MoI in May 1941 made the situation more precarious, and the finances were never as certain again: the scheme’s administration was moved to the National Gallery in 1943, and the MoI continued to dispense a reduced grant, with growing reluctance.

  Matching artists with appropriate subjects often turned out to be a matter of trial and error. John Piper was a case in point. Piper had not even asked to be a War Artist, and had signed up for the RAF, but no doubt Clark talked him out of this. Initially, on the basis that Piper liked seaside subjects, Clark suggested he might prefer a job with the Admiralty. In the event he was sent to paint the Bristol Air Raid Control Rooms, which did not bring out the best in him. In October 1940, when Clark must have been one of the busiest men in England, he intervened and recommended that Piper go and paint the recently damaged church at Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire. Piper excelled at this kind of subject-matter, and while he was there he received a telephone call with instructions to go immediately to Coventry, where the notorious night raid of 14–15 November had just taken place and the cathedral was in ruins. Whether Clark was behind this call is not clear, but it certainly resulted in the artist’s most powerful war work.

  Even better known than Piper’s paintings of Coventry Cathedral are his views of Windsor Castle painted in late 1941. These were not part of the WAAC scheme, but the result of the Queen visiting a ‘Recording Britain’ exhibition at the National Gallery. As Jane told Lord Crawford: ‘K has persuaded HM to commission John Piper to do 15 watercolours of
Windsor (for £150) like the Sandby series which should be interesting?’14 Both Clark and Owen Morshead thought the castle should be recorded in case it was bombed. Morshead wanted something topographical, in the manner of Paul Sandby’s graceful eighteenth-century watercolours, and did not like Piper’s dark and dramatic interpretation. Clark was anxious about the Queen’s reaction, but after initial doubts – and presumably persuaded by Clark’s advocacy – she became very fond of the set. When the King was shown the drawings he famously turned to the artist and said, ‘You don’t seem to have much luck with the weather, Mr Piper.’ The story of the commission brought forth one of John Betjeman’s most delightful fantasies, a series of ten pen-and-ink drawings which he sent in a personal letter to the Pipers, showing Clark as ‘a great magician who lived in a beautiful office surrounded by Cézannes, pointillists, pens, abstracts, soft carpets and all manner of lovely things. This magician had a magic wand. Many a down-and-out artist came and slumped into one of his comfortable chairs and he had only to wave his wand and the artist’s dream was realized.’15 Such was the way Clark was viewed by most, if not all, of the artistic community.

  Probably the artist whose reputation was most enhanced by the war was Henry Moore. Clark had failed to recruit him as a salaried War Artist; not only had Moore seen too much of war in 1914–18, but as a sculptor it was difficult to see how he could contribute. Clark then tried to persuade Moore and his wife Irina to move to Gloucestershire, but they could not be dislodged from London. This turned out to be fortunate, for one night in the early weeks of the Blitz the artist unexpectedly stumbled on his most celebrated subject, the underground shelters. The sight of people sleeping on the platforms of the London Underground made him think of the rows huddled together in African slave ships, and discreetly he began to sketch. He took his first batch of drawings down to Upton one weekend to show Clark. Jane enthused to David Crawford: ‘Henry Moore and wife have just been staying with us and he has brought such lovely drawings of people in shelters, really magnificent, that K bought the lot for £50 for his war artists committee.’16 In his memoirs Clark wrote that these sketches ‘always will be considered the greatest works of art inspired by the war’,17 and he was finally able to convince Moore that he could be a useful War Artist. Moore was to give one of his shelter sketchbooks to Jane; eventually the Clarks passed this on to the British Museum. After the success of the shelter drawings the WAAC proposed that Moore, who was a coalminer’s son, should tackle a series of drawings down the pits. ‘It wasn’t a bad idea,’ Clark thought, ‘but for some reason the spectacle didn’t move him.’18 One of the problems of such subject-matter was that there was nothing recognisably of the war about it. Moore thought little of the drawings that resulted, but Clark disagreed, and even acquired one.