The following year she was still yearning for more of Clark’s time: ‘If I am very important in your life – try to make me feel it again. Make me feel that you will sometimes avoid plans – for my sake – or if it’s going to be too difficult – or if anything else is more worth while than I am to you – tell me now. I don’t know what has happened – but something surely has which has made me feel my whole existence is a farce – and unworthwhile. Your life has fitted in with mine as an artist – I am an artist by your love – that’s the best way I can put it – I love you dearly – & I can’t go on – until I feel my foot on a rock again. Your Mary.’46 We do not have his replies, but when they did spend time together she could write with joy: ‘What a most perfect unforgettable evening. Quite one of the most lovely we have ever had. There is no one else in the world for me. You know, when I put my arms around you – I feel whole…God means us for one another.’47
Of all Clark’s lady friends, Myfanwy Piper was the most intelligent, wise and level-headed. She too complained of how little time they were able to spend together: ‘for years I have suffered from not seeing enough of you at a time and now it grows worse but I think of our – must I call it association, there seems to be no other word, with nothing but delight. Never let any of our arrangements become a burden to you my dear.’48 She would come up for the day from Henley and have lunch with Clark, and he would unburden his woes upon her. In all probability, theirs remained an amitié amoureuse. The Clarks would enjoy going to stay with the Pipers at Fawley Bottom, as he told his mother: ‘managed to go down to the Pipers for the day…it was heavenly down there. I love them, I am always perfectly happy in their company.’49 John Piper does not appear to have been jealous of the friendship – he was more irritated by Clark’s assertion of artistic omnipotence, and enjoyed being mildly facetious about him behind his back. When Clark felt depressed it was to Myfanwy that he turned: ‘it is really tragic that you are so much depressed. Much as I would like to think my dear that it is your fault for not being sterner and rougher I’m coming to the conclusion that you really are an angel…I think your only hope is to force yourself to be less vulnerable – it is against your nature I know to be indifferent – even to a goldfish…You know how much I believed, not only in your critical powers but in your creative powers, which are the ones that will be suffocated if you can’t develop the artist’s armoury of egotism…I love you more and more my dearest. K. May you be happy Myfanwy.’50
* * *
*1 This is unlikely, not least because Lady Wimborne, Walton’s other mistress and his patroness, was against such a move.
*2 Wilde (1891–1970), of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, was a Renaissance specialist. His wife was Jewish, which forced his exile from Austria, and he settled in England at the beginning of the war. Clark offered him £5 a week to go to Aberystwyth to help with work on National Gallery catalogues, but was not able to prevent him from being deported to Canada. After the war Wilde became Deputy Director of the Courtauld Institute from 1948 to 1958, and would frequently invite Clark to lecture there.
*3 He sold the remaining lease of 30 Portland Place in 1944. See letter from Clark to the estate agents John D. Wood, 4 May 1944: ‘I will accept Mr. Lawley’s offer of £7,000 subject to the proviso that I have nothing to do with the Howard de Walden Estate, the L.C.C., the War Damage claims or anything else connected with the property which could involve me in trouble or expense.’ (Tate 8812/1/1/3451–3500.)
22
The Best for the Most
A little island of civilisation surrounded by burning churches – that was how the arts seemed in England during the war.
STEPHEN SPENDER, World Within World (1951)
When James Lees-Milne referred to Clark’s ‘sense of mission’ he was articulating his Ruskinian desire to touch people’s lives with the power of art. The enormous success of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee was at the heart of this, and the National Gallery kept the flame of a populist high culture burning throughout the war. The credit was largely given to Clark. ‘Just how much culture would we have had without Sir Kenneth Clark?’ asked Cyril Connolly in Horizon.1 But there were other arrows in Clark’s quiver which would be aimed towards the future. Increasingly he thought about Britain after the war, and how art and design could improve people’s lives. He was not Utopian about this, and rejected giving a lecture for UNESCO of ‘the marching-together-towards-a-better-land variety’.2 He believed in the inspiration that art gives to the individual soul, and that access to good art is what matters. Central to this was a socialist viewpoint and the idea that the state could, with some reservations, support the arts. He had no doubts about his own role in this future.
When the critic Eric Newton interviewed Clark about patronage and the state, he was optimistic about the idea, depending on the ability of the individuals allowed to choose the art, and provided they were left alone, without interference. He added with jocular smugness: ‘The Government make a good choice of their individuals because they have chosen me!’3 He believed that major private patronage of artists was over, and correctly predicted that the post-war world, at least in Britain, would be one of specialist collectors. In this chapter we shall see some of the initiatives in which Clark was involved, and some of the influences that shaped his thinking. It tells of the transformation from ‘Clark the dictator’ to the man everybody wanted on their committee. In 1940 he still believed that the only useful committees consisted of one person of decided views and a lot of ‘yes-men’. The war modified that view, for this era (and its aftermath) was a period in which the committee took on an almost mystical importance. Clark’s strong belief in public service meant that he rarely refused to serve.
The limits of Clark’s populism were evident in a 1941 letter to The Times under the heading ‘The Eclipse of the Highbrow’, in which he took issue with a leader that had drawn attention to the fact that many of the most talented writers and painters have been appreciated by only a few people. This provoked a number of letters, including one from the poet Stephen Spender claiming to speak for the ‘middle-brows’. Clark responded: ‘Sir – The whoops of joy which accompany the hunting of the highbrow have distracted many of your correspondents from the purpose of my original letter…I am pleased that the responsibility for understanding works of art, and interpreting them to the average man, must rest with a small minority. In the end a few great works may win popular approval, though not always popular understanding (not many people understand Dante, for example), but in most cases this approval has been made possible by the penetration and faith of a few people who have recognized an artist’s merit in spite of the unfamiliarity of his style.’4 This received a cheer from E.M. Forster in his essay ‘Art for Art’s Sake’, in which he said: ‘Sir Kenneth Clark, who was at that time director of our National Gallery, commented on this pernicious doctrine in a letter which cannot be too often quoted. “The poet and the artist,” wrote Clark, “are important precisely because they are not average men: because in sensibility, intelligence, and power of invention they far exceed the average.” ’5
Despite a difficult relationship with the BBC while he was at the MoI, Clark had continuous access to the airwaves. A notebook at the Tate lists around twenty wartime broadcasts on subjects as diverse as ‘The English Weather’, ‘John Ruskin’ and ‘Films and Evacuation of National Collections’. He advised the BBC on a series of twelve talks under the title Art and the Public, with contributions from Eric Newton and his old Royal Academy adversary Gerald Kelly. Clark excelled in discussion programmes, and was invited to appear on the most prestigious of all radio programmes at the time, Any Questions?, subsequently renamed The Brains Trust. This was an unexpectedly successful wartime innovation in which five panellists (three permanent and two irregular) answered questions sent in by the public on philosophy, art and science. Audiences reached up to ten million. Clark joined as an irregular member in 1941, and was accurately described by the host, Donald McC
ullough, as one of the most efficient links between the state effort and the artistic mind in the country. The permanent members were Professor C.E.M. Joad, Julian Huxley and (in Clark’s view) a ‘genial imposter’ called Commander A.B. Campbell, whose presence Clark initially thought was a stroke of genius, though he later changed his mind and tried to have him dropped.*1 Clark was paid twenty guineas a performance, and made what was considered to be ‘a brilliant first appearance’.6 The programmes became Clark’s workshop for ideas as to how the arts could be used to improve national life. He made one particular personal revelation: that his favourite picture in the National Gallery was Piero’s Nativity. One young listener was Michael Gill, the future producer of Civilisation. He was dazzled by the intellectual energy and the wit, ‘but I did not like Clark…youthfully I judged him a cold, self-satisfied man’.7
Perhaps Clark’s most intriguing broadcast with the BBC was a radio play. Gestapo in England – reported in the Radio Times as being ‘from a story by Sir Kenneth Clark and Graham Greene’ – was aired at 9.35 p.m. on 7 August 1942. The play was set in a public school to which a London secondary school has been evacuated, in which class differences, evident at first, melt away under a common purpose. It was written to demonstrate ‘what might happen here if Germany won the war’, but no script or recording has surfaced. Clark in his memoirs records that in his MoI days Graham Greene wrote an excellent film script about ‘the Gestapo in England’, and we must assume that this was an adaptation.*2 In May 1942 Clark accepted an invitation from Roy Plomley to choose his Desert Island Discs, but then changed his mind on account of a wartime clause that would not allow the broadcast of any words in Italian or German: ‘an imbecile regulation’ (precluding most opera), as he wrote in protest to Harold Nicolson.8 He was never to do the programme, even after the success of Civilisation. Whatever his failings, bearing grudges was not one of them, so it seems likely that it was Plomley who decided never to ask him again.
The most lasting of all wartime arts initiatives was the formation of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the embryonic Arts Council. It is important to remember that before the war England had no state opera or theatre, no subsidised orchestras, and no government expenditure on living artists. During the war the state began to undertake patronage of the performing arts, thanks to a vision and a telephone call.9 The vision was that of Lord De La Warr, the president of the Board of Education, who had what Clark described as ‘Venetian visions of a post-war Lord Mayor’s show on the Thames in which the Board of Education led the Arts in triumph from Whitehall to Greenwich in magnificent barges and gondolas: orchestras, madrigal singers, Shakespeare from the Old Vic, ballet from Sadler’s Wells, shining canvases from the Royal Academy, folk dancers from village greens – in fact Merrie England’.10 As a foretaste of the end result, this was – the Royal Academy apart – not far from the mark. The telephone call was to the chairman of the Pilgrim Trust,*3 Lord Macmillan, who also happened to be Minister of Information, asking for £5,000 to realise the idea. Was he interested? He was indeed, but for his own reasons. For Macmillan, this was the answer to a minister’s prayer – a way of employing actors, musicians and singers as national troubadours to entertain weary Britons and prop up national morale, for which he felt responsible. ‘Supply and demand kissed,’ as Clark put it. He attended the first meeting, held at the MoI, at which the idea was lifted from the banks of the Thames to fall like a golden rain of good intentions over the whole country. The budget rose to £25,000, which the Treasury then matched, and matters developed rapidly.
A board was set up, dominated initially by two remarkable Welshmen, Dr Thomas Jones and W.E. (Bill) Williams; the latter – whose day job was with Penguin Books – was to play a significant part in Clark’s life. Williams had run the ‘Arts for the People’ scheme for the British Institute of Adult Education, which had sent small exhibitions into villages and towns. Clark had been closely involved in the scheme and its offshoots – he introduced one of the exhibitions with the arresting phrase: ‘One of the chief obstacles to a more widespread appreciation of art is the idea that art is cissy, and that the artist is a kind of Pekinese dog.’11
The conundrum that concerned CEMA in its early days was ‘Raise or spread?’ – the tension between local need and metropolitan excellence.*4 Clark stood for the latter, but Thomas Jones said, ‘I am making it a condition that they play and sing in the dreary Dagenhams of the country.’12 The economist Maynard Keynes succeeded Lord Macmillan as chairman of CEMA in 1942, just at the moment when the Pilgrim Trust’s initial grant came to an end, and it was he, with his knowledge of how to operate the levers of Whitehall, who persuaded the Treasury to continue the burden beyond the war. By 1944, Clark believed that the Labour Party might win the next general election, and considered inviting two senior Labour politicians, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison, to dinner in order to secure state support for the arts.13 In Maynard Keynes, Clark had an ally for excellence – ‘he was not the man for wandering minstrels and amateur theatricals’ – but he thought that Keynes used his brilliance too unsparingly: ‘he never dimmed his headlights’.14 It was Ivor Brown, the Observer drama critic, who when he joined CEMA’s board coined the slogan ‘The best for the most’, which papered over the professional-versus-amateur argument.
The historian of the Arts Council has commented that ‘If Keynes was to create the machine of the Arts Council, Kenneth Clark was its grease…the primal committee man of the war. It was he who translated the practices and retrieved the opinions of one committee after another.’15 Clark was unusual in his range of interests, capable of offering informed views on theatre and music, but his main role was to chair the distinguished Arts Panel, which included Samuel Courtauld, Duncan Grant, Henry Moore, John Rothenstein – and, conspicuously, no Royal Academicians. When Keynes died in 1946, Clark expected to succeed him as chairman, and was disappointed not to be offered the post. It went instead to a sound City man, Sir Ernest Pooley, who had no interest in the arts but was not going to rock the boat. Pooley’s refrain was, ‘I am not such a fool as I look, you know.’ He did one thing that Clark certainly thought was foolish – sacking the admirable secretary of the Arts Council, Mary Glasgow. Clark, feeling the need for a change, resigned from chairing the Arts Panel, but was to return as chairman of the whole organisation in 1953.
—
If exhibitions were the principal means of disseminating art during the war, thanks to the genius of Allen Lane, publishing was not far behind. The WAAC had given the publishing rights of War Artists to the Oxford University Press, no doubt for reasons of prestige. Pre-war art books were large, luxury items, but Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, had a vision of doing for modern British artists what the company already did for authors, by providing inexpensive and widely available editions of their works. He and Bill Williams turned to Clark to suggest an editor, and Clark responded: ‘I was very much excited by your proposal of doing Penguin monographs on painters, and I could not help thinking how I would enjoy editing the series myself.’ He pointed out how busy he was, and that his name was a red rag to a bull in some quarters of the art world.16 Lane, however, was not going to give up the chance of the Clark name, and delegated most of the work to a competent young editor, Eunice Frost. She would chivvy the authors, negotiate with the painters, deal with the owners of the paintings, and generally steer the books into print. Lane offered Clark £50 for each new title commissioned, which Clark protested was too much, given that most of the work was done by Miss Frost.
The first in the highly successful series to be published was Geoffrey Grigson on Henry Moore in 1944, and this was followed by eighteen more books over the next fifteen years, including Raymond Mortimer on Duncan Grant, Herbert Read on Paul Nash, and Edward Sackville-West on Graham Sutherland. Print runs were as high as forty thousand. Myfanwy Piper suggested Betjeman to write about her husband John, and Clark asked her to write about Frances Hodgkins – ‘She is delighted to be r
egarded as authoress by the noble Lord,’ John Piper mischievously told Betjeman. Clark argued with Herbert Read about the inclusion of Ben Nicholson; he gave way, but told that volume’s author Jim Ede, ‘I must warn you that I cannot have a preponderance of white squares and circles among the illustrations, as I cannot understand them.’17 He was against the inclusion of two foreigners, Klee and Braque, which he finally used as an excuse to withdraw from his role: ‘the old scheme seemed to me valuable because it helped people to understand painters whose work they could buy’. However, he thought the experience had been a good one, and when he resigned in 1946 he told Lane that it had done ‘a great service to modern painting’. Interestingly, when Nikolaus Pevsner proposed the scholarly Pelican History of Art series, Clark thought it a mistake, telling Bill Williams, ‘We are departing from our chosen function of cheap accessibility.’18
Kenneth Clark Page 29
