Despite the relatively low viewing figures for the first broadcasts (if indeed they can be believed), the public response overwhelmed Clark. As he told Huw Wheldon: ‘letters of gratitude continue to pour in at the rate of about sixty to seventy a day and are a considerable embarrassment to me…the programmes seem to have had a peculiar interest for the religious. Nuns by the dozen…many bishops, two cardinals and Father D’Arcy (twice). It is all very peculiar…’24 To Janet Stone he wrote: ‘The public response is incredible – the highest appreciation figures ever. The highbrow figures are furious and foam at the mouth in all the highbrow or “with it” papers.’25 The letters from the public took many forms. There were some clever-dick letters hoping to catch Clark out; some long-winded letters from pompous bores; some indignant letters taking issue, saying Civilisation was far too Christian, or was rude to the Vikings; some letters outraged by Clark’s apparent admiration for the power and wealth of the Catholic Church. But overwhelmingly there were grateful letters from people whose horizons had been expanded. People sent him their poems, asked him about painting courses. The most affecting letters were those that said the series had saved them from committing suicide. John Betjeman simply wrote, ‘Civilisation is the best telly I have ever seen.’26
The television producer and later Controller of BBC Radio 3, John Drummond, would recall the public impact of the series: ‘I was fairly critical of Civilisation at the time, finding Clark’s manner unengaging, until while the series was first being shown on television I sat next to a clever young woman from The Economist at a dinner. I was droning on about whether Clark was as reliable on political history as he was on art history when she interrupted me and said coolly, “My father is seventy-four years of age and lives in Stoke-on-Trent. He has never been interested in art. Last week he came to London to see me, and his first question was ‘Where is the National Gallery?’ ” That is what Civilisation achieved, and I felt properly reproved.’27
Apart from the lunatics, Clark answered every letter, often at length – Colette spent three months at Albany typing the replies. There were a number of mostly minor mistakes in every episode that were picked up by the public – typically ‘William’ for Henry Purcell, and Mozart’s G minor ‘quartet’ for ‘quintet’.*5 The philosopher Bryan Magee wrote to Clark with five pages of corrections when the book came out,28 but Clark dismissed them to Janet: ‘Did I tell you that a man wrote to say that he enclosed 50 errors – but they turned out not to be mistakes of fact, only questions of opinion.’29 In the end Clark adopted a standard letter which expressed gratitude and acknowledged ‘at least two mistakes in each programme’, since so many people took pleasure in pointing them out. Mistakes apart, there was one opinion in particular that brought him a storm of protest: his view that Shakespeare was without religious belief. As his friend David Knowles told him: ‘I won’t have Shakespeare among the pessimists or the agnostics.’30 Clark wrote rather testily to one protester that ‘Dante was…the greatest Christian poet, and Shakespeare the greatest non-Christian poet. You, as a Christian, may be loath to admit it, but there is room for non-Christians in the world, and there seem to be a lot of them about.’31
Looking at Civilisation today, one becomes aware of how sensitive the series is to the rude disorder of its times. The period was troubled: it was the height of the Cold War, of Biafran genocide, of the Vietnam War that was provoking mass protests in the United States and Britain. There were race riots in America, student riots across the whole free world. Elsewhere, there were murderous dictators: Mao Zedong, ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier and the emerging Pol Pot. Above all, in the West it was a time of student dissent, when young people were no longer prepared to accept the institutions that their parents had held sacred. The popular youth culture in 1969, the year Civilisation appeared, was that of the Woodstock festival, the birth of Monty Python and Led Zeppelin. Kenneth Clark, with his tweed suits and upper-class air, was not unusual at that time on television,*6 but his view of European culture seemed too venerable not to be lampooned – and it certainly was: a 1973 Monty Python sketch featured a boxing match between Clark and the heavyweight boxer Jack Bodell; as Clark extols, ‘This is the height of the English Renaissance…’ he receives a knock-out punch – and Bodell wins the title of Oxford Professor of Fine Art. However, to most of the public, as Humphrey Burton points out, ‘Civilisation was a beacon of hope and positive thinking, a sense of how useful our medium could be. And I think that there was no great undertow of hostility, so far as I can recall…Although the young were in revolt there were many, many more middle-aged and old people for whom it was the wildest thing to behold week after week. They thought after Paris and the sit-ins they could have a bit of K. Clark.’32 There was a part of Civilisation that responded to this climate of upheaval. In the penultimate episode, The Fallacies of Hope, there is a montage of uprisings: France 1830; France, Spain and Germany 1848; France 1871; Russia 1917; Spain 1936; Hungary 1956; France and Czechoslovakia 1968; and a reference to oppression in ‘Spain or Greece today’. Cecil Beaton observed the contradiction in his diary: ‘When he is on tricky ground, e.g. a rich man welcoming the revolutions of the underprivileged, one is alert to criticise, but the guarded phrases in which he cloaks his opinions are so exact and clever that one cannot worst him.’33
Clark’s omissions made him an easy target for criticism. The most obvious problem was the series’ title, with its implication of the superiority of European civilisation over all others, which not even the subtitle could assuage. It tells us much about the fragmentation of the world in the late 1960s that the title did not give more offence, and was indeed passed over in most reviews. Clark himself gave differing opinions on the worst omission from the series: Byzantine art, the development of law from the Vikings, Racine, Poussin, German Romanticism and philosophy were the ones he most frequently offered. Some thought he should have brought in Picasso and Modernism. But towering above them all was the prickly question of Spain, the omission of which caused so much offence. Clark was taken to task by Catholic historians such as David Knowles, who thought he was simply wrong. Many assumed that his was a Protestant view, which was demonstrably untrue, given his praise for Counter-Reformation Rome. However, his baleful view of King Philip II of Spain had certainly discouraged him from making the Escorial Palace the centrepiece of a Spanish inclusion which he had briefly considered.34 It was not just the Spanish who were offended, but the entire Hispanic world. From Venezuela the British Ambassador, Sir Donald Hopson, wrote to inform Clark that the showing of the series in Caracas had caused a lot of wilful misrepresentation and anti-Anglo-Saxon feeling.35 Lengthy newspaper pieces appeared on the glories of Hispanic culture that Clark had ignored. He wrote a long letter to justify his position, pointing out that he was not anti-Catholic or anti-Baroque, as the series makes clear, and that he had included Velázquez, Goya and El Greco in his book Looking at Pictures (1960).36
To a present-day audience, another obvious omission is the lack of women in the series. Clark speaks eloquently in episode 3 about chivalry and the cult of the Virgin, but it is not until the salon ladies of eighteenth-century France, Madame du Deffand and Madame Geoffrin, that women play a central role in his story. He gives space to Dorothy Wordsworth, but largely as the inspiration to her brother William, and Elizabeth Fry is mentioned, but only in passing. Clark emphasised the feminine with his contention (despite the ridicule of John Sparrow and Maurice Bowra) that ‘the great religious art of the world is deeply involved with the female principle’, and stated his belief in the balancing power of feminine faculties with the male.
Neil MacGregor, generally an ardent admirer of the series, was particularly struck by Clark’s extraordinary difficulty in dealing with Germany and the art of the north: ‘The thing that most encapsulates that for me is when he compares a Raphael portrait with a Dürer portrait and he insists in seeing in the Raphael portrait qualities of balance, harmony, serenity, and he insists in seeing in the Dürer portrait nervousness
and ill-suppressed hysteria.37 It is a view of Germany largely shaped by the anti-German propaganda of the First World War. That seems to me to leave the vision of Civilisation hopelessly flawed.’38 Clark’s view of Germany was certainly coloured by two world wars, but he is unlikely to have allowed that to influence his view of its art. He would have pointed to episode 9, The Pursuit of Happiness, which gives a positive view of German architecture and music, both of which he worshipped.
Clark was unprepared for the appreciation felt for the series by so many people. He was especially pleased when young people wrote, and it appears today that there were far more young viewers than was realised at the time. As the historian David Cannadine has written: ‘I was myself one of them: in what would now be called my gap year between school and university, and I have never forgotten the impact those programmes made – opening the eyes, uncorking the ears, stimulating the sensibilities. Indeed there must have been hundreds of thousands whose lives these programmes changed for the better.’39
One group was conspicuously silent – Clark’s fellow art historians. There were admiring pieces by his friends Ben Nicolson in the Burlington Magazine and Denys Sutton in Apollo, but only one letter from the Courtauld – from Michael Kitson (who was in fact writing to thank him for the loan of a Claude drawing). Clark wrote back: ‘I am immensely pleased to have had a letter of support for one of my programmes from someone in the Courtauld Institute.’40 He continued to believe that there was academic hostility against him, as he had told an audience in October 1967: ‘In the last ten years I have changed my mind that the English do like art. I doubt if a single Oxford don has watched any of my programmes but ordinary people do – they feel something is being given to them.’*7 John Russell summed up what many felt when he spoke, on Clark’s seventieth birthday ‘for the thousands of people who have held themselves just a fraction straighter since they learned from Civilisation that they were the kinsmen of Dante and Isaac Newton, Michelangelo and J.S. Bach’.41 More recently, the late novelist and art historian Anita Brookner described the series as ‘one of the most influential undertakings in popular education that has been seen in this country in the last fifty years’.42
Ever since Civilisation was first broadcast, people have pondered the dichotomy between Clark’s patrician image – the effortless superiority of the man in tweed suits – and what Neil MacGregor calls ‘the most brilliant cultural populist of the twentieth century’.43 The television mogul Michael Grade was in no doubt that ‘It was successful because it told great stories. The best television is always about stories. The programmes were pioneering, with all that cutting and changing of location. His delivery was faultless. You knew you were in the presence of a great expert.’44 There was a side of Kenneth Clark that believed nothing first-rate could ever be popular, but as David Attenborough recalled, ‘I was with K walking down Piccadilly when people came up and complimented him on it, and he was as pleased as punch.’45 But now Clark would have to face the altogether more daunting adulation of America.
* * *
*1 BBC2, which started transmission in April 1964, used a more advanced 625-line system than the existing BBC and ITV, so viewers with older sets were unable to watch the new channel.
*2 ‘I had a lovely day in the peaceful, solid Bavarian countryside, and saw eight Baroque churches – half monasteries, half farms, white and clean outside, gold and silver inside.’ Clark to Mary Potter, undated, c.1950 (Potter Archive).
*3 One day in 1968 Raymond Mortimer said to Clark at Albany: ‘K, one thing I want to ask you: “God-given genius” – do you mean God? There was a hesitation and he replied, ‘ “As a matter of fact, I do!’ ”
*4 Colette recalls that the secretary of the Institute of Planners wrote a sad letter saying that they were really not as bad as tanks and tear gas.
*5 More worryingly, in what Clark called ‘my true centre’, the Florentine episode, Brunelleschi did not design the cloister at Santa Croce, and current consensus is against Clark with the Louvre Concert Party as a Giorgione and also the Ideal City as a Piero della Francesca.
*6 ‘The presentation was of its age. Clark was very patrician. The class barrier is people looking backwards. It was not a problem at the time’ (Michael Grade to the author). Clark’s suits were often described as ‘impeccable’, but in fact they were not always well-fitting. Anthony Powell in his Journals (entry for 16 September 1984) quotes Lord David Cecil as saying that he had never regarded Clark as well-dressed. Powell adds: ‘Clark was always very neat, but I agree something also looked radically wrong for some reason.’
*7 Bow Dialogue with Rev Joseph McCulloch, 10 October 1967. See also an interview with Willa Petschek in the New York Times (3 May 1976): ‘As for the carpings of academics who thought the programmes a mass of superfluities and not scholarly, Clark gave a wintry smile and said, “They may have some validity.’ ” To James Lees-Milne, Clark wrote on 21 May 1969: ‘I have long accepted my position as apostle to the low brows’ (Beinecke Library, Yale).
34
Apotheosis: Lord Clark of Civilisation
I’ve felt a terrible fraud. It’s really quite an uncomfortable feeling.
KENNETH CLARK, The Other Half 1
The year after Civilisation was first broadcast turned into an annus mirabilis for Clark. The success of the series in Britain was followed by its apotheosis in America, where Clark found himself receiving the kind of adulation normally reserved for pop stars and heads of state. At the hundredth-anniversary celebrations of the Metropolitan Museum in New York he was the principal guest, and at the National Gallery in Washington he was mobbed. Civilisation went viral. In his history of the BBC, Asa Briggs would write: ‘Clark’s own series stands out in retrospect more than it did when it was first introduced, for the initial reaction was slow and somewhat reserved, yet soon there were scores of letters of appreciation, and by 1971 Civilisation had won four awards and been sold to the United States and many other countries.’2 As a direct result Clark was showered with international honours, made Chancellor of York University and given a peerage. His daughter Colette wrote: ‘Like Byron, Papa woke up and found himself famous.’ Fame, however, has its own subtle corruption, and his family noted that it had a bad effect on his character, making him more self-centred and less tolerant.3
Initially, the American networks were not interested in Civilisation, and turned it down. To David Attenborough, this was because the United States had no history of documentaries, and whereas the BBC had developed out of radio and the broadcast voice, American television grew from feature films and Hollywood.4 Paradoxically, Clark came to think that this was the very reason for the eventual success of the series in America: having been brought up with the movies, Americans were comfortable with heroes.5
Either way, it was Clark’s friends the Wrightsmans who took the lead in promoting the series in the USA. Charles Wrightsman was given a preview in London around June 1969, and whatever he might have felt about Clark’s friendship with his wife Jayne he set aside. He took the scripts with him on his annual cruise around the Greek islands on his yacht, during which he showed them to the retired director of the National Gallery in Washington, John Walker, who agreed that they were superb. Encouraged, on his return to New York Wrightsman arranged a dinner and a showing of one or two programmes for William Paley, the chairman of CBS. Paley announced that he was bored, and that CBS would never put on Civilisation, as it would not interest enough people6 (he would later admit that this was the first time he had made a commercial mistake by underestimating public taste). The Wrightsmans, convinced that Paley was wrong, agreed to sponsor a preview of the series at New York’s City Hall.7
At the same time, the National Gallery in Washington was negotiating with the BBC for the right to give the first showing, so it was in the nation’s capital that Civilisation received its first full public airing, between October and November 1969.8 It was an immediate hit. Charles Wrightsman told Clark: ‘An amusing episode took
place yesterday in Washington. The National Gallery auditorium seats only 350 people and Johnny Walker telephoned yesterday that there were 10,000 on the sidewalks waiting to get in when the doors were opened for the first series.’9 There had been nothing like it in Washington since the visit of the Mona Lisa in 1963, and the gallery was almost overwhelmed, with the auditorium close to ‘panic level’. What had been planned as ‘Sundays only’ became a daily showing for thirteen weeks. In all, 250,000 visitors viewed Civilisation in the first year at the gallery, and museum attendance rose by more than 50 per cent to almost two million in that year.10
Within a year PBS bought the series, with sponsorship from the Xerox Corporation (which spent $750,000 on its purchase and promotion). Estimates vary, but between five and ten million viewers watched the series in the USA, making Clark, his features, voice and personality familiar to millions who had never seen him in the flesh. The series’ popularity may have had something to do with America’s view of itself as the saviour of Western civilisation through two world wars and the Cold War.11 The series told Americans that they were the heirs of the Enlightenment, and helped them understand what they had been defending. Porters vied to carry Clark’s bags, customs officials wanted to shake his hand, and everywhere he was stopped and congratulated. Universities were particularly enthusiastic, and the president of New York University wrote that many of his faculty members believed ‘the Clark films are the most effective use of motion pictures for educational purposes they have ever seen’.12
Kenneth Clark Page 47
