The pride of Saltwood was the Turner, although Clark had nearly bought the painting for someone else. On resigning from the National Gallery he had been invited to become the paintings adviser to the Felton Bequest, which provided most of the purchasing funds of the Melbourne Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria. He had accepted the post as a means of staying in touch with the art market, and enjoyed spending the £15,000 annual budget. However, it often led to conflicts and dilemmas, as he revealed to Colin Agnew: ‘I shall certainly take the Murillo, either for Melbourne or for myself: not that I have anywhere to place it, but it is too good to let go.’5 Clark recommended that Melbourne should acquire diverse works to be exhibited according to century rather than school – not unlike the Ashmolean, with paintings displayed alongside tapestries and missals of the same period.6 He advised on about twenty paintings, mostly Old Masters, of which the most significant was Poussin’s Crossing of the Red Sea,7 and the most beautiful a Bonnard nude, formerly from his own collection. Not all his acquisitions were appreciated: ‘The only purchase of mine that offended my committee was a Landseer. Landseer was then out of fashion and I was able to buy his masterpiece for a very small sum. But my friends in Melbourne were distressed – I had hurt their feelings.’8 His guiding principle was to buy a small number of masterpieces and – pace the Landseer – not be tempted by bargains.
By 1948 the director of the Melbourne Museum, Daryl Lindsay, and the Professor of Fine Arts at Melbourne University, Joseph Burke, were urging him to come out to Australia to see the collection for himself. As the latter put it: ‘I cannot emphasise too strongly the influence a visit from you would have, and particularly the encouragement it would give to the small band of really good modern artists and lovers of modern art.’9 Clark went, out of a mixture of curiosity and adventure, and no doubt welcoming a break from all his responsibilities. As it happened, Colin Anderson, by now chairman of P&O, was taking his wife Morna to Australia that December on the maiden voyage of the SS Orcades, so Clark joined them. Unfortunately Anderson fell ill early in the voyage, and he and Morna disembarked in the Mediterranean – which left Clark alone, and exposed to his own weaknesses. He had written to Jane from on board: ‘I am so proud when I can make you happy, and I hope at the beginning of every year that I will do better, and won’t have my silly fits. I really think I have learned to recognise them and contain them better, and if I come back from this expedition they will be inexcusable. So let us hope that I shall become less tiresome. I am, my darling, your adoring husband, K.’10
There can be little doubt that ‘silly fits’ refers to women rather than temper, but despite these good intentions Clark started an affair on board with Barbara Desborough, an Australian friend of Morna’s whom Anderson later described as ‘an intriguing but also rather infuriating woman with red hair and freckles’.11 Colin Clark mentions the matter in his memoirs: ‘I know that he had got seriously involved with an Australian lady and that my mother was quite frightened that she would lose him. If she welcomed him home with all his children, she reasoned, he would remember his responsibilities and stay.’12 On his return Jane would be waiting at Southampton with Alan and the twins. Barbara Desborough subsequently left her husband and children and came to London to devote herself to Clark, who had to recruit the help of the Andersons to keep her at bay. He would be named in the Desboroughs’ divorce proceedings, which found their way into the Australian press – a considerable scandal by the standards of the day.
Clark liked Australia, as he told Berenson: ‘As you will have learnt from Jane, I enjoyed Australia far more than I had expected to do. I find it hard to explain why without seeming patronizing, but the brilliant climate seems to have had a magical effect on the Anglo Saxons, removing their inhibitions and hypocrisies. Of course they are very naïve – hardly out of the pioneering stage – but they are a gifted people, only held back by laziness.’13 He found Melbourne a little staid and conventional compared to Sydney, tactfully telling the Melbourne Sun: ‘I know of no other place where one can live so completely in the 19th century…Sydney is more reckless than Melbourne…Perth was like a film by René Clair…quite isolated from the world, peaceful and lovely moving in slow, harmonious tempo.’14 He was fêted wherever he went: the press mogul Sir Keith Murdoch, chairman of the museum, gave a dinner for him on his third night in Melbourne, there were lectures, lunches at Government House, trips to ‘big timber country’, dinners, social events, and all the usual aspects of a state visit. The most important lecture he gave was ‘The Idea of a Great Gallery’, delivered in Melbourne, in which he set out his guiding principles for the museum.15 By far the most popular item housed there was the stuffed remains of the celebrated racehorse Phar Lap. Clark outlined the need for a balance between popular art (Highland cattle/Impressionists) and art that stretches us, ‘and the gradual creation of a new store of values based on the contemplation of the greatest works of the past’; he cited two works in the museum, Turner’s Red Rigi and the Poussin Crossing of the Red Sea.
Clark travelled around Australia, and was enchanted by the natural world, especially the luminosity of the landscape – everything so light, with no forest darkness.16 He was particularly pleased by a sighting, for which he had got up especially early, of a duck-billed platypus – ‘this was worth the whole trip’. Among the places he visited was Adelaide, where he became an early admirer of Aboriginal art: ‘No one had observed that these poor, harmless, stone age people had been sensitive artists.’17 While in Adelaide he rehung the gallery, and he was invited to scout pictures for it, but turned down any suggestion of a fee. The sums of money were small, and for that reason Clark was all the prouder of what he managed to acquire: a large John Piper Welsh landscape watercolour at a cost of forty guineas, Pasmore’s Flower Barrow (£350),18 William Nicholson’s House in Snow (£275), Gwen John’s Girl with a Cat (£260) and Lucian Freud’s The Boy with a White Scarf (£75), as well as works from the Barbizon school and Old Master paintings.19
The most lasting personal benefit of Clark’s visit to Australia was the lifelong friendship he forged with the artist Sidney Nolan. It was Joseph Burke who alerted Clark to Nolan’s work, taking him to an exhibition at which Clark was deeply impressed by Nolan’s Abandoned Mine, which he immediately bought: ‘a straightforward painting of the Australian countryside…without any mythical ingredients, except a disconsolate-looking sundowner’.20 The next day they drove out together to meet Nolan in a Sydney suburb;21 the encounter increased Clark’s admiration, and he wrote that he felt ‘confident that he had stumbled on a genius’.22 Nolan was initially a bit fazed by Clark, with his English talk about his paintings being ‘corking good’, but did not doubt his enthusiasm. Clark offered to arrange an exhibition in London, and wrote to Oliver Brown at the Leicester Galleries, although it was in fact the Redfern Gallery that was to take the artist up. He bought three more of Nolan’s paintings, and wondered how they would look under a northern sky. When they arrived, the answer – delighting Nolan – was ‘a bit queer, which proves how very like Australia they are’.23 This friendship would endure (despite Nolan’s wife Cynthia’s violent disapproval of Clark’s womanising), and Nolan was the last major contemporary artist that Clark was to befriend and champion. There was one other artist whose work Clark acquired in Australia: Russell Drysdale, a natural choice for Clark, as his work was influenced by Moore and Sutherland.
Clark’s visit to Australia and his purchases, although modest, had a galvanising effect on the artistic community there; as Burke wrote to him, ‘One can travel by the stars, but one also needs a compass and perhaps more than anyone you have provided that for painters.’24 Clark later described the arrival of the Australian school of contemporary painting as ‘one of those blessed events which help to free the arts from the iron grip of historical determinism’.25
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Clark always proclaimed that, apart from his family, he had no loyalties except to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This was the commi
ttee that gave him the most pleasure both in terms of what it instigated, and from its increasingly impressive results: Covent Garden turned into the home of one of the great opera and ballet companies of the world. Clark’s support had begun with Sadler’s Wells Ballet in the 1930s, and by 1940 he was guaranteeing the company to the tune of £500 a year.26 At the end of the war the question arose of the future of the Covent Garden theatre, which was being used as a dance hall. The music publishers Boosey & Hawkes had acquired a short lease, and in the absence of CEMA’s chairman Maynard Keynes, who was attending the post-war economic conference at Bretton Woods, called on Clark in his role as vice-chairman. They asked if CEMA might support a season of opera at the theatre, but, with echoes of his response to Myra Hess at the National Gallery he said, ‘No; we will take on Covent Garden altogether.’*5 Clark’s decisive action, followed by strong advocacy to the Treasury from Keynes, transformed the fortunes of Covent Garden and led to the creation of the Royal Ballet and Royal Opera Companies. A trust was established, with Keynes as chairman and Clark as a prominent member (he would later become vice-chairman).
The Royal Ballet was a relatively simple matter to bring to life: the new board persuaded Ninette de Valois and the Sadler’s Wells Company to change its name and to make Covent Garden its home. De Valois became a close friend to Clark, to whom she would always bitterly complain that the Royal Ballet was treated like a poor relation of the opera company.*6 Its opening night on 20 February 1946 was Oliver Messel’s production of Sleeping Beauty, with Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann performing in front of the King and Queen. The only thing that marred the occasion was that as the curtain rose, Keynes was taken ill – he was to die two months later.
After a faltering start, the vastly more expensive Royal Opera Company eventually took off, heralding a golden era of British opera, with important work coming from Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett and Lennox Berkeley. Clark’s personal taste in opera was catholic: he loved Mozart and Verdi – he would start his children on the former so as not to spoil their ear – and Britten. Not sharing Jane’s passion for the Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad singing Isolde, he discovered a chaise longue at the back of the royal box which he told his secretary was the ideal place to recline and listen to Wagner.27
The immediate problem was finding someone to run Covent Garden, and Clark put forward David Webster to become the general administrator. They had met in Liverpool, where Webster, who ran the city’s philharmonic orchestra, had impressed Clark with his knowledge and energy. Other names were mentioned, but it was the advocacy of Kenneth Clark that mattered, for in Leslie Boosey’s words, ‘Everyone listened to him.’28 Webster was appointed, and had a long if not always smooth run until 1970. Clark also introduced Lord Drogheda, the managing director of the Financial Times, as secretary to the board – probably at Jane’s behest. Drogheda, who was later to become chairman, described Clark as ‘that extraordinary polymath, who had first introduced me to the scene’.29 Clark resigned from the board of Covent Garden when in 1953 he was invited by the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rab Butler, to become chairman of the Arts Council, a job he was never to enjoy. He remained close to Covent Garden, not least because his daughter Colette was asked to create its reference library. The board was so impressed by her that she became one of the directors shortly afterwards.
It is not entirely clear why Clark took the Arts Council job, unless out of a weary sense of public duty – but at least it provided him with a splendid office in St James’s Square for meetings, and an excuse to come up to London during the week.*7 After his participation in CEMA’s heroic foundation years with Keynes, a return to the Arts Council was always going to be somewhat mundane. The Council’s operations had settled into a pattern of making inadequate grants and coping with disappointed supplicants. It was divided into semi-independent baronies in art, music, literature and drama; there was even a modest budget for acquiring works of art. Clark was privately ambivalent about the whole premise of the Arts Council. He believed such bodies should exist to help and give access to the public (without it there could be no Covent Garden), but that ‘what it can’t do by spending money is create artists. God does that. And I think that although schemes of the kind that set out to help the creative side are very worthy, very honourable, I think they’re trying to do something which is almost impossible.’30 In an indiscreet moment he confided to Janet Stone: ‘Behind it all one felt the corrupting effect of subsidies. There were moments when I felt that it would be quite a good thing to cut the whole grant and see what would happen.’31 He even told his successor: ‘Everybody says we should have double. If we did, it would only be wasted.’32 He knew that the government could only refrain from interference if the Council remained poor, although this gave its meetings a negative and despondent character. Despite his (generally suppressed) doubts, Clark found himself having to lobby an even less enthusiastic Conservative government for more money – the annual grant of £575,000 had remained static for five years. When he went to put the case to the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, he was reportedly kept waiting for hours before the Prime Minister greeted him with: ‘Good evening, Clark, now what’s this trouble with your Arts Society?’33
Clark had been appointed to bring his enormous prestige to the organisation, which had already settled into its own rhythm. Contrary to his expectations, he was not required to be executive. His first surprise was to discover that the role of the chairman had been severely curtailed since the days of Keynes; the Council was now run by his old friend from Penguin Books, Sir William ‘Bill’ Williams, the secretary-general, and there was nothing Clark could do about it. Williams told him, ‘I am the Captain of this ship. You are the Admiral. I pipe you aboard with full honours. But I run the ship, you see.’ Denis Forman, who was director of the British Film Institute at the time, remembered Williams as a ‘curt, big, bluff organiser, like a football manager in the field of culture, socially orientated rather than arts orientated’.34 Others called him a powerful éminence rouge. Clark might chair the meetings, but Williams controlled their agendas and minutes. Colette recalled: ‘Bill Williams was in love with my mother but they did not have an affair. Father was a bit sneery about him – he was very left-wing and idealistic. He was warm-hearted but steely. They had many gibes between them. Williams was a tough egg and used to get drunk.’*8
Clark was popular with the staff, who were all aware of his difficult position; nonetheless, although insisting ‘I like to be bothered,’ he remained aloof. He was much appreciated by the secretaries who served him at the Council, first Catherine Porteous and then Audrey Scales, who replaced Porteous when she became pregnant. Scales described Clark as ‘appreciative, courteous and kind. I enjoyed his “throw away” remarks…He had a very quick mind and I admired his honesty. He was not at all egotistical.’35 She recalled how in the late afternoon Clark would have a fire lit in his book-lined office and retire to an armchair to smoke a cheroot and read and write.36
Catherine Porteous described the Arts Council as ‘riven with feuds, arts weren’t talking to drama, etc. Everybody knew about the power struggle between K and Sir W, but K knew everybody and therefore exercised more influence. It was a deeply eccentric place, with a lady in the basement doing astrology, but there was a quiet sense of mission. It was left-ish and on a mission to bring art to the people. I found myself measuring and making costumes for Opera for All. There was a touch of inspired amateurism about the place.’37
Clark devoted most of his time to organising a series of small, low-key exhibitions for which he wrote the introductions, and which were mounted in the former dining room at St James’s Square: ‘Edward Lear’, ‘Ruskin Drawings’, ‘Turner’, ‘Charles Keene’, ‘Graham Sutherland’ and ‘Reynolds Stone’. The Arts Council’s role in showing art gradually mutated into supporting more ambitious exhibitions, such as ‘The Romantic Movement’ (1959) at the Tate; for this Clark wrote the introduction, which is a foreta
ste of two of his Civilisation episodes – The Fallacies of Hope and The Worship of Nature, with their emphasis on Turner and Constable but underplaying German Romanticism, with the exception of Goethe. The great era of Arts Council exhibitions lay in the future, after Clark had left.
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One of the compensations of Clark’s position was being able to entertain all the grandees of the art world in elegant surroundings. At the end of 1954 the Clarks’ friends the Massiglis were recalled to France, and Clark and Jane used this as an excuse to throw a grand farewell dinner for them, inviting the cream of the creative world. Harold Nicolson recorded the occasion: ‘Viti and I dine at The Arts Council where Kenneth and Jane Clark throw a huge party of 60 for the Massiglis…The heads of all the professions are there. Tom Eliot for literature, the Oliviers for the theatre, Margot Fonteyn for the ballet, William Walton for music, Graham Sutherland for art, and Lord and Lady Waverley for the Port of London Authority. It is well done and a success.’38 Raymond Mortimer went even further in his bread-and-butter letter: ‘Nobody else could have mustered such a gallery: it should be immortalised in one of those engravings the Victorians went in for…a party such as has never, I imagine, been given for any other Ambassador.’39
In 1960 Clark’s term at the Arts Council came to an end, and although there was an attempt to make him stay he was too disillusioned by the organisation. He confided to Janet Stone: ‘such a dim and stagnant affair…it is like trying to revive the use of canals’.40 Bill Williams wrote a warm farewell letter: ‘The A.C. had the luck to have you in the chair during what I am sure has been the trickiest years of its adolescence…there is a melancholy air about the Camp.’41 Clark had brought his considerable prestige to the Arts Council, but apart from a few exhibitions it is unlikely that he made much of a difference, as he knew only too well. He could not decide whether this was his fault or theirs, and told Janet: ‘I think there is a general feeling that I should have done better – and so I should. Or is it simply that I don’t like institutions and in the end institutions don’t like me? I think the latter has a lot to do with it, for I remember feeling the same when I left the NG.’42
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