Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  Clark may have felt frustrated by almost every aspect of the Arts Council, but it had provided him with the means of escape from Jane at Saltwood. Mary Glasgow was right in her analysis that he meandered between the desire to retreat with relief to his Montaigne’s tower at Saltwood, only to obey with alacrity the next summons to London. As he once admitted: ‘there is evidently a low side to my nature which loves action and big decisions’.43 Of all his major positions, however, the Arts Council was the one from which he came away with least to show. Part of the trouble was that, while Williams shut him out, Clark himself was also distracted by his chairmanship of the Independent Television Authority (see Chapter 27) and by the writing of The Nude, both of which required all his intellectual powers.

  The exhibitionist side of Clark was always there, but concealed under shyness. He maintained that he was the least clubbable of men, yet he belonged at different times to at least seven clubs: the Travellers’, the Beefsteak, the Athenaeum, St James’s, Brooks’s, the Dilettanti, and the bibliophile Roxburghe Club. Like most Englishmen of his class and time he used clubs as a convenient place to meet friends for lunch in the West End of London, but he had a horror of being at the bar and ‘joining in’. He belonged to distinguished academic bodies such as the British Academy (of which he was vice-president in 1958–59), but took no part in their proceedings. Denis Forman, on the other hand, observing Clark in the showbiz world, rated him as ‘a good conversationalist with a knack of bringing conversation around to his subjects – he wanted to be the star – he absolutely loved clubs’.44 Clark was to use all his clubbable skills over the next three years to establish Independent Television and somehow find time to write his best book, The Nude.

  * * *

  *1 Letter to Berenson, 5 November 1951 (Cumming (ed.), My Dear BB, p.354). Clark found the Royal Fine Art Commission, which scrutinised new buildings, to be a confused body, uncertain ‘whether it ought to be maintaining high standards of taste or making the best of the inevitable bad job’. See letter to Betjeman, 20 December 1951 (Tate 8812/1/3/328).

  *2 The earliest correspondence is on 13 April 1948, with the estate agents Knight, Frank & Rutley writing that Lady Conway was prepared to sell Saltwood with less land and with or without the furnishings.

  *3 Letter from Penelope Betjeman to Clark, undated, ‘Feast of Ss Perpetua and Felicity’ (Tate 8812/1/3/310–350). The couplet comes from the Persian poet Amir Khusrau, and graces several buildings in India.

  *4 Clark’s secretary, Audrey Scales, told the author: ‘Berger sent a copy of his book to Clark, who wrote a letter to Berger (dictated to me) thanking him for sending it: “Naturally I did not enjoy the chapter about me.” KC did not ignore Berger’s gratuitous rudeness, but he did not retaliate or noticeably take offence, at least not at the time. However, it must have been hurtful.’

  *5 Clark, The Other Half (p.131). Boosey & Hawkes received a promise of financial backing from the Treasury and took a short lease on the building. Behind the scenes, negotiations were going on which resulted in the government acquiring a fifty-year lease of the property and renting it to a newly created Covent Garden Opera Trust. (See Lord Drogheda, Double Harness: Memoirs.)

  *6 At her eightieth birthday party in 1978 Clark proposed her health; he told Colette his speech was a pensée d’escalier in which he described how she turned ugly ducklings into swans.

  *7 The Arts Council provided Clark with a car (a black Rover) and driver, and a beautiful office in the former library on the ground floor of the headquarters at No. 4 St James’s Square. Clark could thank himself for that, as he had been instrumental in the choice of the building in 1947, and persuaded its former owners, the Astor family, to lend fittings: ‘I do think that it is very important that our nearest equivalent to a Ministry of Fine Arts should be housed in a beautiful building.’ Letter to Lady Astor, 8 December 1947 (Tate 8812/1/2/351–400).

  *8 (Interview with the author.) Curiously, the year before Clark went to the Arts Council he had proposed Williams for the Travellers’ Club, and when it was evident that he would be blackballed, Clark resigned: ‘If he is an unsuitable member…I am most certainly an unsuitable member myself.’ Letter to R.P. McDougall, 29 February 1952 (Tate 8812/1/2/6544).

  26

  The Naked and the Nude

  He has written much that is elegant and attractive; this I must pass over, but one thing it would be improper to omit – a difficult and tricky task, which he has successfully accomplished: his persuasive reasoning has taught us how to distinguish the naked from the nude.

  THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY ORATOR, on the occasion of the presentation to Clark of an honorary Doctor of Letters degree, 9 June 1966

  Of all his books, Clark was proudest of The Nude, describing it as ‘without question my best book, full of ideas and information, simplifying its complex subject without deformation, and in places almost eloquent’.1 It was his most original work, developing the synthesis that he had pioneered in Landscape Into Art but bringing it to bear on a far more ambitious subject. Clark believed that The Nude stretched him to the very limits of his abilities; however, he felt inspired, and if there is one book that epitomises his approach to art history, it is this. Civilisation was to reach a much larger audience and make a greater impact, but Clark’s reputation as an art historian largely rests here. He wrote The Nude in the two places that – Saltwood apart – he loved most, I Tatti and Aldeburgh, and he dedicated it to Bernard Berenson, whose intellectual range informs its background. However, from a practical perspective The Nude was the result of Clark’s tentative but growing love affair with America (to which he referred as that ‘kind, crude, competitive continent’2), and from now on all his major projects were to have an American component.

  Clark went to America almost every year during the 1950s, to lecture in either Philadelphia, Washington or New York (where he spoke at MoMA and the Frick).*1 Most of these talks were reruns of old favourites, and he was reluctant to go ‘off piste’, as he told the Washington National Gallery’s director David Finley when he visited Philadelphia: ‘I have no message for the world, and if I had, I certainly could not spout it from the platform in ten minutes. It would be much better if they had engaged Danny Kaye.’3 Clark always enjoyed New York: he found it exhilarating, and compared it to being in the Alps. His friendships there, however, were still at an early stage, and it was not until the 1960s that he settled into his routine of staying with Ronnie and Marietta Tree at 123 East 79th Street, lunching with the hostess Nin Ryan and being fêted by the collectors Charles and Jayne Wrightsman.4 Washington he knew better, because it was smaller – although this had its disadvantages, as he told Berenson: ‘In spite of many kind friends there, I must confess that I am dreading it. I can’t face the mixture of heartiness and competition. One has the feeling that culture is a sinking ship in which everyone is trying to get a seat in the last boat; and quite prepared to stab their neighbour in the back in order to get there. However, this may be bracing after the quiet apathy of our home town.’5 Despite his doubts, Clark came to adore Washington, whose social life he eventually found the most rewarding in America. He and Jane (who usually went with him) were drawn into the Georgetown circle of Democratic politicians, lawyers and journalists, ‘who were in the thick of affairs at a vital moment in the world’s history’. Cultivated, intelligent men like Dean Acheson, Joe Alsop, Walter Lippmann and Felix Frankfurter all lived within a stone’s throw of each other, and would see the Clarks most evenings at dinner.6

  The art world in Washington was dominated by the collectors Mrs Robert Woods-Bliss and Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, with whom the Clarks often stayed. The Phillipses had acquired Clark’s great Matisse Studio, Quai St Michel, and had amassed an astonishing collection of mostly nineteenth-century French paintings, including Renoir’s masterpiece The Boating Party. It was John Walker, Clark’s erstwhile replacement as assistant to BB and now chief curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, who suggested that Clark shoul
d give the prestigious Mellon Lectures there in 1953. Clark’s first choice of subject was a reworking of his Oxford lectures on Humanism, but Berenson persuaded him to write something fresh. When Clark proposed his new subject to Walker in October 1950 as ‘The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art’, he realised that it might arouse facetious comment, and in those still prudish days thought it would be advisable to withhold the title of the lectures.7 But Walker responded: ‘We all like your proposed subject for the Mellon lectures. In fact I doubt whether we will ever have a more appealing one!’8 It was a well-paid assignment, offering Clark $7,500 plus $2,500 expenses, but this included publication rights. He insisted on retaining the UK rights (which turned out to be a canny move), for the honourable reason that he had originally conceived the subject as a book for Jock Murray.9 After the difficulties he had encountered with Landscape Into Art, he preferred in any case to write The Nude as a book and then condense it into the six lectures required for Washington.10 An interesting light is shed on his experience of writing the book by a letter he wrote to Mary Potter while working on it: ‘It is a great burden to be on one’s own, as you are. It deprives one of all the compromises, which are really props. One has to go for perfection. I should probably never write a word, if I hadn’t to do it under difficulties. As it is, I am keeping up my 1,000 per day.’11

  Clark’s choice of subject was inspired. Given the importance of the nude in Western art, the literature on it was surprisingly small; the only general studies were both in German, and one of them was Marxist. As Clark explained: ‘Since Jacob Burckhardt no responsible art historian would have attempted to cover both antique and post-medieval art…The dwindling appreciation of antique art during the last 50 years has greatly impoverished our understanding of art in general; and professional writers on Classical archaeology, microscopically re-examining the scanty evidence, have not helped us to understand why it was that for 400 years artists and amateurs shed tears of admiration for works which arouse no tremor of emotion in us.’12

  Clark’s decision to tackle a subject so rooted in antiquity seems reasonable enough today, but at a time when (thanks in part to Roger Fry) Greek and Roman art were at the nadir of fashion and had become the preserve of specialists and archaeologists, such an undertaking was brave, and perhaps almost foolhardy for a non-specialist. As he admitted to Jock Murray: ‘To tell the truth, I think the subject is a little beyond me, but I am committed now and I must do my best.’13 Clark had conceived the idea at I Tatti, and returned there to make use of its library.*2 He described his visit to Mary Potter: ‘I am now in the stage when work is going well and I dread leaving. For a few days I couldn’t settle down, and got rather nervous. Then I had an idea of how to treat my vast subject, and I haven’t looked back. It has given me a wonderful…feeling like a religious conversion, which would be dangerous and a bore if it were to last – but it won’t…You ask me about my life here. I usually write till 10.30. Then I go into Florence and take notes in the galleries or churches, lunch, visit more galleries and return at 4.0 – sleep till 5.0 and then work till dinner at 8.0. I lunch and dine alone, but as I lunch in Florence it isn’t as dull as it sounds.’14

  This ‘religious’ feeling was to follow him to Aldeburgh, where he went to finish the book, staying at the Wentworth Hotel overlooking the sea. The hotel is architecturally commonplace but loveable – like the town – and Clark often took the family there as an alternative to Portmeirion. In fact he reached such a pitch of confidence that he wrote the hotel manager a remarkably detailed letter suggesting a long list of good everyday wines to be put on the carte du vin – even supplying the vintage, price and the shipper.15 Clark loved Aldeburgh, ‘which ever since my childhood has had the effect of sharpening my mind…I remember that after writing the passage on Rubens I began to tremble, and had to leave my hotel bedroom and walk along the seafront. I make no claim to be an inspired writer but I know what inspiration feels like.’*3 He specially revisited the Athens museum, but then in 1953 had to put his manuscript aside to deliver the Washington lectures, confessing to John Walker: ‘My chief feeling about the lectures is one of curiosity; I have been thinking about the subject so long that I have no idea what they will seem like to other people.’16

  Clark had been right about the title; in prudish 1950s America the lectures were announced without a subject, relying on the prestige of the lecturer and the series to draw its audience. He wrote cautiously to BB: ‘If it turns out to be any good I should dearly love to dedicate it to you, for nothing else I am likely to write will contain more that I have learnt from you. But I mustn’t land you with a failure – so let me see how it goes in Washington, and if it is well received (by me!).’17 The lectures were in fact very well received in Washington – Walter Lippmann attended, and told Clark, ‘I have a growing impression that this book is going to land you ultimately among the philosophers.’18 Clark later said, ‘I have never spoken to a more intelligent audience, and I should like to have given every member of the audience a copy of [the] book as a token of gratitude as soon as the course was over.’19 They would have to wait three years for the book, with its many additions and notes, to appear. When it did come out in 1956 it became, by the standards of art history, a bestseller. Gertrud Bing, the director of the Warburg Institute, wrote Clark an admiring letter: ‘I felt as if I were being taken on a long walk through the galleries of Europe, engaged in an unhurried conversation, arguing, questioning, testing my own impressions against yours.’20

  By far the most important aspect of The Nude was its reassessment of Greek and Roman art for an audience increasingly attuned to anti-Classical modern art and African masks. It opens with the memorable, if somewhat misleading, sentence: ‘The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude.’ The book identifies the naked as the Gothic nude of the north, which Clark calls ‘the alternative convention’, for although it includes major artists such as Rembrandt, this is not the main subject of the book. Instead The Nude sets out to explore the survival of ideal and heroic forms, and gives names to these – ‘Apollo’, ‘Venus’, ‘Energy’, ‘Pathos’ and ‘Ecstasy’; and along the way it takes in all that is most expressive in Western art, from the kouroi of ancient Greece to the work of Matisse and Henry Moore. Clark explains the idea of the nude as a Greek invention – which, when he later visited the Cairo museum, he realised had been an oversimplified notion;21 he admitted that he had viewed the ancient world from the point of view of a student of Italian Renaissance art: ‘I saw Graeco-Roman art through the eyes of Raphael and Michelangelo.’22 This continuity, however, was also the strength of the book, a successful attempt to reinterpret the art of the Classical world to a general audience, providing illuminating reassessments of those masterpieces of antiquity, the Apollo Belvedere, the Venus de Milo and the Laocoön, by bringing the reader to see their ancient power sometimes through the Renaissance works of art they had inspired. Thus the book explains Classical art’s various reinventions into medieval, Renaissance and Baroque forms, and achieves a fine balance between exploring individual works of art and engaging with their broader cultural context.

  For many it was the passages on Michelangelo that electrified the whole book. His is the dominant personality that fills the chapters on ‘Energy’ and ‘Pathos’, and Clark tells us that ‘Before the Crucifixion of Michelangelo we remember the nude is, after all, the most serious of all subjects in art.’ Clark was never a conventional believer in the Christian faith, but when he contemplates these Michelangelo drawings he tells us, ‘we reach a realm of the spirit where analysis is inappropriate and critical language inadequate. We can only be grateful for a second to catch a glimpse of the nobilissima visione. For a second those great mysteries of our faith, the Incarnation and the Redemption, are made clear to us by an image of the naked human body.’23 This essentially emotional response was not confined to Michelangelo. The artist whose reputation was probably most enhanced by The Nude was Rubens, about wh
om Clark writes with freshness and love. He describes the artist’s depictions of ‘golden hair and swelling bosoms’ as ‘hymns of thanksgiving for abundance’, and claimed that ‘Rubens did for the female nude what Michelangelo had done for the male.’

  The Nude was the most successful of Clark’s syntheses. Some considered that his account of the alternative convention – the nude of the Gothic north – represented an uneasy grouping of disparate parts, with Cranach’s saucy nudes placed alongside Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, but most of Clark’s readers found his imaginative connection of the ancient with the modern both exhilarating and revelatory. As Ben Nicolson wrote in his review: ‘This most un-German of writers, has absorbed German scholarship, and enriched his perceptions in the process.’24 The book is unthinkable without its debt to the historical interpretation of form and composition by Clark’s German hero Wölfflin, and the influence of Aby Warburg. Gertrud Bing, who worked closely with Warburg, told Clark, ‘he saw like you images as the embodiments of impulses, coined in the workshop of Classical antiquity and capable of being discovered in such apparently divergent products as the Nereids and Michelangelo’s Risen Christ’.25 To Bing, the seemingly opposite approaches of Warburg and Walter Pater had found their natural meeting point in The Nude.

  The immediate response to the book was almost universally positive, although some readers took issue with the weakness of the oversimplified medieval sections, and debated whether nudes should or should not be received as erotic (Clark had been of the opinion that they should, however remote the feeling). The praise that mattered most to him came from Berenson: ‘Let me congratulate you on surpassing even yourself in “the Nude”. Much as I always have expected from you, this achievement goes beyond expectation. You unfurl the subject to its vastest horizons and fill it with details so perfectly communicated, such precise epithets, such illuminating evocative phrases, such rhythmic sentences, that it is a delight to read and read and read. I admire your scholarship and the way you have assimilated it. Wonderful your analysis of the Apollonian nude. You end by constructing a schema of common characteristics regarding the figure work. No province or representation that you fail to illumine.’26 Maurice Bowra wrote with his usual enthusiasm: ‘the writing, as always with you, gave me unending pleasure – the right words, the varied movements of the sentences, the quiet surprises, the imaginative outbursts – I like them all very much. Of course you will be accused of being lush.’27 Robert Graves even penned a witty poem, ‘The Naked and the Nude’, which appeared in the New Yorker.