Kenneth Clark
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The backlash would come in the 1960s, when critics such as John Berger examined how the concept of the nude in European art masked the true nature of women as individual human beings, transforming them into ideal types and sexual stereotypes. This cry has been echoed by feminist art historians, many of whom view Clark as the embodiment of a patriarchal establishment.28 Notwithstanding such dissenters, the work remains Clark’s most impressive art historical achievement.29
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The success of The Nude was followed by the failure of Motives, the unfinished ‘great book’ to which Clark kept returning. This was a development of the project he had attempted with Roger Hinks in Ashmolean days, the successor to Riegl’s Spät-Römische Kunst-Industrie, intended to interpret design as a revelation of a state of mind. The origin of Motives was Walter Pater’s fusion of form with subject, and those recurrent themes which, when the cultural impulse was with them, produced great works of art.30 When Oxford reappointed Clark as Slade Professor in 1961, he tried to articulate his ideas to a sympathetic audience: ‘A motive may lie about for centuries in the scrapheap of ordinary perception…It is picked up when some artist perceives that it can be used to embody a necessary idea, i.e., the Virgin and child.’ The lectures dealt with ‘Encounters’ (visitations and annunciations), ‘The Pillar and the Trunk’ (standing man, medieval art, Piero della Francesca), ‘Recumbent Man’, ‘The Ecstatic Spiral and Struggle’ (Hercules and the lion, Rubens and Stubbs), and ‘Private Motives’ (Leonardo and Turner). The Oxford audience was baffled, and Clark realised that the subject – which never quite got going – was a mistake: ‘I am not quite up to the intellectual effort needed. It is like something that I can see but can’t quite touch.’31 He was never happy dealing with abstractions, and the lectures lacked both the unifying conception of The Nude and its brilliant engagement with the works of art. Clark was tenaciously to cling on to this mirage, almost vetoing Civilisation because of it (as was Jane’s wish); as late as 1974, he still clung to the belief that ‘it will be my best book’.32
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While Clark had some powerful admirers, like Gombrich, his relationship with his fellow art historians was often prickly.*4 Part of this was a hangover from the National Gallery years. When he went to a party at the British Museum in 1967 he found ‘all my former colleagues, many of whom I hadn’t seen for fifteen years, looking extremely old, and discontented. They loathed the sight of me – I felt myself plunged into a pool of malicious animal magnetism.’33 But he himself was often derogatory about the profession. In the course of preparing Motives, he described to Janet Stone a visit to the Warburg Institute, ‘to do a little research. But, alas, it depresses me beyond words – all those dim wraith-like figures in corners of the book stores silently turning the pages of books on iconography seem like ghosts in a Hades of futility. I can see no life-principle in their labours, and I cannot even use their conclusions, because if they ever do publish anything they have forgotten what they are looking for.’34 The Courtauld Institute, the leading powerhouse of British art history, provided an impressively wide range of scholarship, from medievalists to modernists as well as architectural historians. Its staff was increasingly divided about Clark. The pupils of Johannes Wilde were taught to revere him, but the modernists did not regard him as a professional art historian – especially after he started making television programmes.*5 Anthony Blunt, the Courtauld’s director from 1947 to 1974, would invite him to lecture – mostly on extracurricular subjects such as Aubrey Beardsley – and while personally scrupulously polite to Clark, he quite enjoyed his pupils’ irreverence about him.*6 Numerous anecdotes arose, tinged with malice, typically of Clark arriving to give lectures, parking his Bentley outside, and grandly announcing that he would leave at 12.30 to have lunch with Lady Aberconway, whether or not he had finished. It is certainly true that he would never take questions after a lecture.
Clark’s subjective brand of art history was increasingly out of step with more sociological approaches to the subject, but there was a younger generation of scholars who admired him, as he found when he went to a party at Murray’s: ‘I enjoyed myself and was cheered up to find that scholars of the Haskell/Jaffé age were sympathetic, and seemed anxious for me to publish my lectures.’35
If the profession was divided between the admiring and the faintly sneering, to outsiders Kenneth Clark represented art history. It was to him that educators and publishers turned, proffering manuscripts and soliciting opinions on fellowships. Clark greatly admired Erwin Panofsky, the German émigré Princeton art historian of symbols and iconography, of whom he wrote that he was ‘undoubtedly a very remarkable writer on art. He represents the reaction against the points of view of Berenson and Fry, that is to say, he does not want to know who painted a picture and does not ask whether it is beautiful or why…he brings amazing learning and ingenuity. He is often obscure with the Talmudic obscurity now fashionable with Jewish American scholars but one always learns from him.’36 Edgar Wind, famous since writing the art book Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance (1958), which became something of a cult in the 1960s, was the subject of frequent enquiries to Clark from academics at Oxford and Cambridge, who were uncertain whether he was a genius or a charlatan. To Noel Annan, Clark wrote: ‘he is perhaps the most brilliant lecturer on art alive and, while he is talking one is persuaded of the most fantastic hypotheses…the kind of scholar to whom the term “brilliant” rather than “sound” is usually applied’.37
Clark showed some admiration (although little sympathy) for Marxist art history, as he warned one practitioner, Frederick Antal: ‘I think there is a great danger in your method, especially for young people who apply it without learning. Ultimately it tends to a denial of values and to an exaltation of mediocre artists, simply because they always provide more convenient illustrations…however this does not prevent me from recognising the marvellous learning of your book [Florentine Painting and its Social Background (1948)] and the clarity with which you approach social problems.’38 More problematic was the ‘determinist’ view of history that Marx had propagated, and many non-Marxists had embraced as a prevailing orthodoxy. Clark addressed this in his lecture ‘Apologia of an Art Historian’: ‘In the last forty years our outlook on art history, as on all history, has swung round from free will to determinism.’ He offered the example of Rembrandt, observing, ‘that he should have appeared when he did was an accident; that he should have appeared at all was a necessity. That is the nearest I can go to solving the problem of free will and determinism, as it is presented in the history of art.’39 In fact determinism went against one of Clark’s strongest beliefs, that of the God-given genius of great artists. In another lecture, ‘Is the Artist Ever Free?’, he was more explicit: ‘The history of art is not at all like a stream. If any natural analogy is to be used (and none will be exact) it is more like a series of harvests some of which are self-sown, so that the crop gets progressively poorer; and some of which are sown afresh, and the seed is individual genius.’40 This was the view he promulgated when he came to make Civilisation.
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‘In 1958 when I was still threshing around among my Motives, I was invited by The Sunday Times to do a series of articles on single pictures.’41 These were to be the origin of Clark’s book Looking at Pictures (1960), in which he played to his strengths by describing paintings with love, insight and astute observation. He had once said that the intuitive impact of a picture lasts as long as you can smell an orange; he wished to take the reader beyond that first sensation. ‘Art is not a lollipop or even a glass of Kümmel. The meaning of a great work of art, or the little of it that we can understand, must be related to our own life in such a way as to increase our energy of spirit. Looking at pictures requires active participation, and, in the early stages, a certain amount of discipline.’ His choice of painters was instructive, including Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Vermeer, Watteau, Delacroix, Goya, Turner, Constable and Seurat. Here we are reminded o
f the child Clark, admiring the highlights of the Louvre. His aim was simple, as he once wrote in another connection: ‘It seems to me that the chief aim of the art historian is to give the reader some idea of why great artists are great.’42 Looking at Pictures included two works in the V&A (Constable’s sketch for The Leaping Horse and Raphael’s cartoon of The Miraculous Draught of Fish), and one bright morning while working with his secretary at Albany Clark looked outside and announced to her that he had to go immediately to the V&A to look at the Raphael cartoons – ‘The light will be just right.’43
Of all his books, Clark had the softest spot for his anthology of Ruskin’s writings, Ruskin Today, published by Murray in 1964. He had been planning such a work for over thirty years as an act of pietas, but also out of a desire to rekindle interest in Ruskin at a time when his unwanted works filled the top shelves of second-hand bookshops. Clark found the task of rereading all of Ruskin daunting, as he told Janet Stone: ‘Dear me, what a lot of rubbish he wrote – in his youth false logic, in middle age ranting sermons, and in old age distracted grumbling. Yet every now and then insight, courage, and marvellous power of language.’44 The resulting anthology was much admired, and Clark successfully brought Ruskin to a new generation who otherwise had no idea how to approach the vast corpus of this strange Victorian prophet, moralist and art critic.45 His Introduction is masterly – perhaps the best short essay ever written about Ruskin. Clark said to Colette, ‘You don’t have to read Ruskin now, I have done it for you.’46
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It was Clark’s relationship with Jayne Wrightsman that led to the invitation to New York to deliver the first series of Wrightsman Lectures at the Met under the auspices of New York University. He chose as his subject ‘Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance’, combining two of his main interests. The resulting book was published in 1966, and has usually been respectfully passed over. The Dutch specialists felt Clark was poaching on their territory, and noted his reliance on the great Rembrandt scholar Frits Lugt,47 while the general public found the book a little ponderous, with too much hunting for sources. Clark was aware of this, and told Janet Stone: ‘It’s all right – not like the Nude or Piero, alas. Too much art-history, and I suppose my wits aren’t as bright.’48 It was probably Clark’s least successful major work. As Professor Christopher Brown points out, Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance is in the end a profoundly misleading title: Rembrandt never went to Italy, and was in certain ways anti-Italian.49 While the connections Clark made were ingenious and often original, for a book that he himself described as attempting to study the creative process, its reception fell slightly flat.50 He received the usual praise from laymen; the professionals were less kind, but Clark (who was inordinately proud of the book) brushed off their criticisms as being ‘more attacks on the image of me’.51
In the same letter to Janet Stone he set out his quandary over what to do next, and his belief that his powers were diminishing: ‘I am haunted by the number of books I still have to write, and only six years to go.*7 And the favourable reception of Rembrandt by everyone except the critics has naturally encouraged me to go on with Motives and with the collected papers. I really don’t know what to think.’ Fortunately the BBC would solve the problem by inviting him to write a thirteen-episode television series on Western civilisation.
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*1 He arranged these trips through the travel department of Fortnum & Mason, usually flying with BOAC, booking sleepers, but occasionally travelling first class on the Queen Mary.
*2 Letter to Edith Sitwell, 10 November 1950 (Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Sitwell Collection): ‘I was a month alone in Florence, and was rewarded for my solitude by an idea for a book which is exactly what I have been waiting for. It is about the use in art of the human body as a symbol of various states – embodiments and the like, Apollo, Venus, Hercules…if I think of it now it puts me out of patience with all the hack jobs I have to do for my American visit.’
*3 He once told the biologist Julian Huxley: ‘I cannot begin to explain the history of art without accepting the concept of inspiration, and this is even more troublesome for the rational art historian than mutation is for the biologist.’ Letter to Huxley, 19 March 1959 (Fondren Library, Rice University).
*4 ‘Over the years, Clark has engendered a certain, often latent, hostility in art historical circles’ (Burlington Magazine leader, June 1969). Of Gombrich, Clark always said: ‘I am nothing compared to Gombrich. He is everything, I am very little.’ See Paul Johnson, Brief Lives (p.68).
*5 This view is confirmed by Alan Bowness and the late Brian Sewell. According to Neil MacGregor, the Courtauld evidently took the same view of Michael Levey when he started making television programmes. Jennifer Fletcher, on the other hand, as a pupil of Wilde remembers that Clark’s name was always mentioned with respect.
*6 For his part, Clark liked Blunt and hugely admired his work on Poussin. He was shattered by the exposure in 1979 of Blunt’s treachery.
*7 Clark had persuaded himself that his working life would be over at the age of seventy.
27
Inventing Independent Television: ‘A Vital Vulgarity’
I am like an architect who has built a fine town, and now sees it inhabited by Yahoos.
KENNETH CLARK to Bernard Berenson, 3 September 19551
In a career full of the unexpected, perhaps the most improbable of all the job offers that Kenneth Clark received was that of the chairmanship of the Independent Television Authority in 1954. He was being asked to set up ‘the people’s television channel’ when he did not even own a television. True, he had taken a close interest in the development of the medium, but on the face of it he was a most unlikely person to run the commercial television authority: a grand mandarin in charge of what many perceived as a vulgar American import. Why did he accept it? He had more than enough to occupy himself, even though he was bored at the Arts Council. Besides, the job was extraordinarily risky. There were strong elements in both of the main political parties against commercial television, and initially the contracting companies struggled to make profits. But lurking below the polished surface, there was enough of Clark’s father in his make-up for Clark to take the chance – it was almost an anti-establishment gesture. His appointment took everybody by surprise. John Russell of the Sunday Times later likened him to an Afghan hound that had been harnessed to a brewer’s dray and would do himself an injury.2
Although the notion of commercial television was rejected by many in both the Labour Party and the ruling Conservative Party, it was also supported in equal measure by both. Most intellectuals despised television because they thought it caused people to read less; however, everybody agreed that the BBC monopoly had served Britain well. The BBC had gained extraordinary prestige as a broadcaster of high principle, whereas American television was thought to exemplify all the vulgarities of commercial dumbing down. It was the Conservative Party’s natural dislike of monopolies that gradually won backbench support for the idea of Independent Television, although the fear remained among the Labour opposition that it would become the voice of commercial interests and big business.3 MPs on both sides wanted reassurance that any advertising would conform to British rather than American standards.*1 But it was the programme content that worried critics most. When the Television Bill was published in March 1954 it outlined, in order to appease them, that the new authority would not only receive a government loan of up to £1 million to cover initial capital costs, but that, at the suggestion of the Archbishop of Canterbury, a further £750,000 from public funds would also be available as an annual grant for ten years, in order that more serious programmes should be made. It was this as much as anything else that persuaded Clark to accept the role of chairman. Although no Tory, he too disliked monopolies: ‘I am opposed to any kind of monopoly. I believe that it leads to self-satisfaction and even to a certain amount of injustice.’*2 Above all, his characteristic sense of mission led him to seize the new medium and i
ts opportunities. As Fram Dinshaw observed, ‘he very quickly realised that television was going to change unimaginably the kind and quality of information that was available to ordinary people’.4 Clark himself later said in an interview: ‘Television gives people what they want. It is not keeping people from reading, they are not reading anyway. It gives us a sense of one world, news and nature, it has enlarged our range.’5
The chairmanship was in the gift of the Postmaster General Lord De La Warr – an anomalous figure: a socialist hereditary peer serving in a Tory government. He appointed Clark in order to assuage the critics; he knew that he would appear acceptable to the Tories – he was a friend of Anthony Eden and Rab Butler – but was politically left-leaning, and would not allow the newly formed authority to be taken over by Tory interests. This was particularly important because De La Warr had appointed a Tory businessman, Sir Charles Colston, as vice-chairman.*3 Equally important, Clark’s appointment would calm what Clark referred to as Athenaeum Club circles, who hoped that he might keep the barbarians at bay. He did not entirely succeed in this, as he told the Townswomen’s Guild at the Albert Hall in 1970: ‘When I became chairman of the Independent Television Authority, I was booed in the Athenaeum – very quietly, but unmistakably booed. There was a good reason for this demonstration. On a given evening fifty thousand people can read fifty thousand different books. But they can look at only one or two television programmes.’6 Clark’s name was a badge of respectability which ensured a quality threshold.