The Slade Professorship at Oxford which Clark held for three years, from 1946 to 1948, was probably the most rewarding position he ever occupied. He was lecturing in apostolic succession to the founder of the series, John Ruskin, whose declared mission had been so much Clark’s own: ‘To make our English youth care somewhat for the arts.’ Accordingly, Clark’s opening lecture was entitled ‘The First Slade Professor: Ruskin in Oxford’ – a difficult subject, and a considerable act of pietas, since by the time Ruskin assumed this role he had in fact begun to lose his powers.9 The Slade Professorship gave Clark licence to develop whatever subjects took his fancy, and the resulting lectures were to become the bedrock of nearly all his subsequent art historical essays; indeed, the first year was dominated by a series of lectures on landscape painting that he later reconfigured into one of his finest books, Landscape Into Art.
At that time the University of Oxford did not teach art history, and Clark’s Slade Lectures, which were open to all, created intense excitement. With their growing popularity his audience swelled from twenty-five to five hundred, necessitating a move from the Taylorian Institution, and eventually bringing him to lecture at the Oxford Playhouse, the public theatre opposite the Ashmolean Museum. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper observed that Clark had made art lectures in Oxford fashionable with the beau monde; certainly Jane’s hats were a special attraction of their own. Clark established a routine of always taking her with him and delivering the lecture on a Monday at 5 p.m., then staying overnight with Maurice Bowra at Wadham. The following day he might go to the Ashmolean to show drawings to pupils (having first asked the keeper to put out the relevant works), or he might be found at his old college, Trinity, which lent him a room in which to see students. He later said: ‘I never thought of myself as a teacher. The Slade Professorship was exactly right for me going down once a week.’10 It gave him the perfect degree of engagement, and just as importantly, disengagement.
His second series of lectures, in 1947–48, dealt with the Renaissance, and included ‘Brunelleschi’, ‘Donatello’, ‘Masaccio’, ‘Alberti and Uccello’, ‘Piero della Francesca’ and ‘Mantegna’. The third year he moved on to ‘Raphael’, ‘The Young Michelangelo’ and ‘The End of Humanism’. In the Michaelmas term of 1948 he explored Rembrandt (whom he pronounced ‘Rumbrundt’), and he believed these lectures to be his finest: Berenson had always maintained that Rembrandt was the artist Clark understood best. He then started to explore the dance between Classicism and Romanticism that culminated in the work of Ingres and Delacroix, a subject he was to revisit for his television essays later published under the title The Romantic Rebellion (1973). The last series was given to Leonardo and to Venetian art; he finished it with ‘Art and Photography’*2 and, unusually for the Slade, a lecture about a living artist, ‘Henry Moore’. Some lectures did not quite come off: ‘Error in Art’ was a not particularly successful attempt at explaining aesthetics and why certain works of art fail. Nor would Clark have claimed to be providing fresh scholarship, although he took the trouble to keep abreast of new developments – ‘They will mean that I can overcome the first difficulty of teaching, which is to start one step ahead of one’s pupils’;11 for instance, he requested proofs of Oskar Fischel’s new book on Raphael. His audiences were so delighted with everything they heard that few noticed his lack of sympathy for the Northern Renaissance, or the eighteenth century, ‘that winter of the imagination’.
There was certainly a magic in Clark’s lecturing; everybody testified to his eloquence and urbanity. The Warburg director Gertrud Bing called him ‘the Toscanini of the diapositives’, and Stephen Spender told Clark that the ‘lucidity and certainty with which you speak gives one a sense of the greatness of the art’.12 He was never theatrical, but knew when to bring the audience into the freemasonry of the profession – for instance, drawing people’s attention to the only area in Giorgione’s Castelfranco Madonna that has never been repainted. But the point of the lectures had been, as Clark put it, to open windows for the students. One young attendee who – largely in response – started writing about art was the historian of the Renaissance John Hale.13 Another young member of his audience was John Hayes, who went on to become director of the National Portrait Gallery, and dedicated his book on Graham Sutherland to Clark, who ‘when Slade Professor at Oxford first made me aware of the history of art’.
When Clark was asked to suggest his successor as Slade Professor he made the imaginative proposal of John Betjeman – but only for a year: ‘He soon gets tired of a job and then is apt to exploit a vein of paradox which has made him popular but would appeal disastrously to undergraduates.’14 After Tom Boase, who was on the Slade committee, vetoed the idea, Clark advocated the architectural historian John Summerson, who had to wait eight years to be appointed.
The main legacy of the Slade Lectures was the publication of Landscape Into Art by John Murray in 1949, and thenceforth the firm, under Clark’s good friend Jock Murray, was to remain his principal publisher. Jock was the quintessential ‘gentleman publisher’, operating from his august premises in Albemarle Street with their famous Byron room and relics. An immensely likeable man whom Clark once described as ‘sepia toned like the subject of a Fox Talbot photograph’, Jock’s priorities were literary and commercial in equal measure; although he was not really an art publisher at all, he served Clark well for the rest of his life. Clark found the Slade Lectures unusually difficult to turn into a book, and Jock would anxiously enquire for news of the typescript, adding, ‘I hope that a slave-driver can keep the friendship of his victim.’ Rosalys Torr of the Courtauld assisted Clark with the collection of images, an onerous task as every photograph and slide had to be sourced, requested and paid for individually. The greatest problem, however, was the title of the book. Nobody liked Clark’s suggestion of Landscape Into Art, and no fewer than sixteen variations were considered. Jane favoured a long title in the eighteenth-century style – ‘An Inquiry into the Principles of Landscape Painting’. Colin Anderson advised Clark to stick to his guns: ‘I’m rather inclined towards “risking” your title because it is attached to your name. I wouldn’t advise it for an unknown.’15 The American co-publishers, however, refused it, calling it a ‘trick’ title, and using Landscape Painting instead. Clark always maintained that this was why the book sold over thirty thousand copies in the UK and only three hundred in the US.16 He invited Graham Sutherland to design the cover. The cost made Murray anxious, as it entailed five printings, but – as Clark put it – ‘It will certainly be the most striking wrapper of the year.’ He dedicated the book to Maurice Bowra.
Traditionally, books on landscape painting had been strictly organised by either school or chronology, but Landscape Into Art offered a different and original approach that struck a happy balance between the two. Clark arranged his subject thematically across the centuries: ‘The Landscape of Facts’, ‘Landscape of Fantasy’, ‘Ideal Landscape’, ‘The Natural Vision’, ‘The Northern Lights’ and ‘The Return to Order’. He covered artists from van Eyck to Cézanne, showing how ‘in spite of Classical traditions and the unanimous opposition of theorists, landscape painting became an independent art’. It was a book in the best English literary tradition of art history, but was also informed by Clark’s wide reading and interest in German art history, a synthesis that was a peculiar Clark invention (and that would be repeated with even more interesting results in The Nude). John Walker, writing in the Burlington Magazine, described Clark as belonging ‘among the analytical and interpretive critics who have been the glory of art history from Sir Joshua Reynolds to Roger Fry. Theirs is a different tradition from that which has determined the metaphysical approach of the Germans, or the rhetorical style of the Italians, or the epigrammatic incantations so popular in France, or the sociological studies of the Marxists, or the fashionable allegories of the iconographers. Their approach is empirical…and motivated by love of the actual works of art.’17 However, Landscape Into Art did not convince everybody
. James Lees-Milne recorded that John Pope-Hennessy was condescending about the book, ‘which while admitting the excellent style, he thinks twists facts to bear out the author’s preconceived theories on the progression of the subject throughout the ages’.18 Foreign art historians felt that it grossly underestimated German artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, and considered it too English in its bias. Clark writes with a special frisson about Constable and Turner, and even the French artist Nicolas Poussin is aligned with the English poet John Milton – Clark found in both ‘the same early delight in pagan richness…the same strenuous and didactic middle period, and the same old age of renunciation and remoteness, giving a new depth of poetic vision’.19
Landscape Into Art ended on a curious note, which Clark would later revisit in the final episode of Civilisation – the faint optimism of a pessimist who has been profoundly depressed by the horrors of recent history: ‘As an old-fashioned individualist I believe that all the science and bureaucracy in the world, all the atom bombs and concentration camps, will not entirely destroy the human spirit; and the spirit will always succeed in giving itself a visible shape.’20 The adverb is the killer.
Punctilious readers sent in about two dozen minor corrections, mostly spelling mistakes, because as Clark confessed to Murray (and as all his secretaries were surprised to discover), ‘the trouble is that I cannot spell in any language’.21 The most wounding criticism came from Clive Bell, who took Clark to task for admiring Turner; but most readers agreed with Berenson that the book was a delight. It has remained in print ever since, and is still read by specialists and non-specialists alike.
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Clark had never been in such high demand as a lecturer, and although he tried to satisfy the requests from Bangor to Hull, he had to turn most of them down. Some lectures, such as the story of the Warburg Institute, he gave over the radio.22 In London his lectures attracted grand ladies, as John Pope-Hennessy observed: ‘When he talked at the Royal Institution on Alberti or Piero della Francesca, a line of smartly dressed ladies would be found walking up Albemarle Street, and inside the lecture theatre voices were lowered as Emerald Cunard and Sibyl Colefax and Hannah Gubbay were shown to their seats in the front row.’23 Turner became a more frequent subject, and Clark’s theme was always the same: that Ruskin and the Victorians had wrongly preferred the early work, and it is in the later paintings that Turner speaks most directly to us. He conceded, however, that Turner could be very bad, and once said: ‘a piece cut out of one of his academic pictures framed in a maple veneer and hung in a county hotel would, I am sure, pass unnoticed by any member of this audience’.24 He also once told Ernst Gombrich that the English ‘are such a literary people that the best way of persuading them to take an interest in a picture is to find that it has its origins in a poem’.25 One of the most original and admired lectures he ever delivered was the 1954 Romanes Lecture in Oxford, ‘Moments of Vision’, which identified moments of intensified physical perception in art as in poetry.*3 It demonstrated his ability to entwine art and literature, although he himself was not sure whether it would come off, telling a friend beforehand that the lecture ‘remains dubious – not at all my best, but I think I shall squeeze through, on account of the quotations’.26 The lecture brought together Blake, Newman, Yeats, Wordsworth, Rembrandt, Coleridge and Ruskin.*4
In 1951 Clark published Piero della Francesca. It was one of his few books that did not start out as a series of lectures, and from a literary point of view he believed it to be his finest. He certainly found it his most satisfying. It opens with an explanation as to why Piero became so talismanic to the twentieth century: ‘his rediscovery is part of the new classicism of which Cézanne and Seurat were the living manifestations’. Roger Fry had turned Piero into a proto-Modernist, and he had been celebrated by major literary figures such as Aldous Huxley and T.S. Eliot; although there was ‘a brilliant but eccentric masterpiece’ on him in Italian by Roberto Longhi, there was very little in English.27 Clark’s book was commissioned by Dr Bela Horovitz, the founder of the Phaidon Press. He contacted Clark, who had written a highly critical review of a book that Phaidon had published, inviting him to show how it should be done. Horovitz, whom Clark called the Duveen of publishing, had never heard of Piero, but agreed to Clark’s terms to rephotograph the frescoes in Arezzo. Piero della Francesca was not intended to be a full scholarly monograph, but a guide to the appreciation of Piero’s work. Clark was fully aware of its limitations – as he told Horovitz, ‘a proper learned work would have to be twice as long, and include many questions of authenticity which are not discussed’.28 He had also not spent enough time researching in Florence, and by one of those terrible coincidences that happen not infrequently to those who write books, it emerged that a Professor Salmi of Florence University was also planning a book on the artist, based on the documentation in Florentine archives. Clark was discomfited about his rival, and turned to Colette one day: ‘Can you believe it? No book on Piero for ages and suddenly two books coming out in the same week.’ His fears were groundless, as Salmi never published his monograph on Piero.29
Clark’s Piero della Francesca has been described as ‘an extended version of a Fry lecture’, and indeed Roger Fry’s book Giovanni Bellini (1899) is a plausible model.30 If Fry’s formalism was his starting point, Clark also demonstrated a deep engagement with the subject-matter, and as he told Carel Weight: ‘I think it is nice and solid, and I am prepared to throw it at the head of anyone in the Warburg Institute who says I am a dilettante.’31 The book, dedicated to Henry Moore, was well received. However, given the complexity of Piero scholarship (for example, the difficulty of interpreting the three foreground figures in Piero’s The Flagellation of Christ), it was never going to find easy agreement among scholars. The most penetrating review was in the Burlington Magazine by Ernst Gombrich, who raised questions on the grounds of iconography and chronology.32 He enjoyed the passages of beautiful writing, which he thought ‘might well find their way into anthologies of poetic prose’, and compared the endeavour to Pater’s work on Giorgione. But he took serious issue with Clark for seeing pagan as well as Christian elements in Piero, and in an intellectual somersault even provided a Jungian framework through which, by collective memory, this might be plausible – only to reject it. To those unfamiliar with such complexities, the book was much admired. Maurice Bowra told Clark: ‘I tried to delude myself by saying that it must be much easier to write about pictures than about poetry, that [it is] just because you have mastered the subject and sunk yourself in it that you produce it all easily and clearly for us.’33
Clark planned a number of books that were never written. He toyed with the idea of a study of English art, but decided that there was not enough scholarly groundwork already in place. He signed up to write The Art and Architecture of the Quattrocento for the Pelican History of Art series edited by Nikolaus Pevsner and published by Allen Lane, but after nine months’ work confessed that he was ill-suited to the task, and begged to be let off.34 Also with Allen Lane he planned an anthology of the writings of Ruskin, which he hoped would interest a new generation; but the project was postponed, and instead he wrote an Introduction to Ruskin’s autobiography, Praeterita, for Rupert Hart-Davis. Clark always maintained that for anybody embarking on reading Ruskin, Praeterita was the best place to start, and many younger people would have echoed Edith Sitwell, who wrote in thanks for her copy: ‘I, for one, owe Ruskin entirely to you.’ There is an undated letter (circa 1948) to Jock Murray in the Clark Archive with a list of four proposed books of essays, mostly worked-up lectures (a well-known form of literary suicide, as Clark well knew): ‘Studies in the Renaissance’, ‘Studies in English Art’, ‘Studies in Aesthetics’, ‘Literary Studies’ – and a postscript, ‘perhaps also a long book on the Nude’.35 This was the germ of what was to become his most important book.
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One of the constant puzzles about Clark’s life was how he accommodated the sheer number of requests for help t
hat he received. It is no wonder that he began to dread the postman, for he was besieged with letters (often at great length, with attached photographs) seeking advice on jobs, careers, selling pictures, creating art, buying art, writing novels about art, restoration, courses about art history, etc. All received courteous replies, although occasionally a note of exasperation creeps in: ‘So perhaps the only advice I can give you is to compare the work of Orpen, de Laszlo and [Frank] Salisbury with that of Titian, Velasquez and Gainsborough and if after some time you cannot see any great difference between them, there is really no more to be done.’36 Sometimes the writers are surprising: in 1952 he received an unsolicited letter from a young Henry Kissinger, then editor of the first issue of Confluence, a Harvard University magazine, inviting Clark’s views and contributions. It received this response: ‘I started to read it with considerable scepticism because it deals with the sort of abstract topics which usually promote nothing but hot air, but your writers are prepared to face the facts.’ But Clark concludes: ‘I have no ideas worth printing.’37 However, when the subject in hand appealed to him, he might write a long scholarly review for a journal such as the Burlington Magazine. Anita Brookner remembered Clark ‘with affection…because unlike many scholars he disdained adversarial positions’.38 He would shrink from writing a bad review, as he told the editor of the Burlington when declining to review a new edition of Longhi’s Piero della Francesca, because ‘I am ashamed to say I cannot be bothered in involving myself in a row.’39 When the literary editor of the Sunday Times asked him to review Arnold Hauser’s Marxist Social History of Art, Clark wrote back: ‘Reading it is like correcting a vast number of examination papers by conscientious students. You must send it to somebody with an appetite for estimable half truths; he should not be hard to find.’40
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