Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Copyright © James Stourton 2016

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover photograph of Sir Kenneth Clark, England, 1958 © The Irving Penn Foundation

Unless otherwise stated, images are from the Clark family archives

While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material, the author and publisher would be grateful to be notified of any errors or omissions in the above list that can be rectified in future editions of this book.

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Source ISBN: 9780007493449

Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780007493432

Version: 2017-08-02

Dedication

To Colette, Jane and Fram

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

1 ‘K’

AESTHETE’S PROGRESS

2 Edwardian Childhood

3 Winchester

4 Oxford

5 Florence, and Love

6 BB

7 The Gothic Revival

8 The Italian Exhibition

9 The Ashmolean

THE NATIONAL GALLERY

10 Appointment and Trustees

11 By Royal Command

12 The Great Clark Boom

13 Running the Gallery

14 Lecturing and Leonardo

15 Director versus Staff

16 The Listener and the Artists

WORLD WAR II

17 Packing Up: ‘Bury Them in the Bowels of the Earth’

18 The National Gallery at War

19 The Ministry of Information

20 Artists at War

21 The Home Front

22 The Best for the Most

ARTS PANJANDRUM

23 Writing and Lecturing

24 Upper Terrace

25 Town and Country

26 The Naked and the Nude

TELEVISION

27 Inventing Independent Television: ‘A Vital Vulgarity’

28 The Early Television Programmes

SALTWOOD 1953–68

29 Saltwood: The Private Man

30 Public Man: The 1960s

CIVILISATION

31 Civilisation: The Background

32 The Making of Civilisation

33 Civilisation and its Discontents

34 Apotheosis: Lord Clark of Civilisation

LORD CLARK OF CIVILISATION

35 Lord Clark of Suburbia

36 Another Part of the Wood

37 Last Years and Nolwen

Epilogue

Appendix I: The Clark Papers

Appendix II: ‘Suddenly People are Curious About Clark Again’1

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Also by James Stourton

About the Publisher

Foreword

In his memoirs Kenneth Clark complained that Harold Nicolson ‘could not resist shampooing’ his account of a dinner party, and added the warning that ‘the historian who uses “original documents” must have a built in lie-detector’.1 This is equally true of published material. Clark’s own two volumes of memoirs are exceptionally entertaining, and are both friend and foe to the biographer. Friend, because they cover most of Clark’s life and tell his story more beautifully than any biographer ever could; foe, because Clark wrote them mainly from memory, which was not always reliable – and sometimes verged on the mytho-poetic. Every event needs to be checked against alternative sources; the chronology is loose, and Clark occasionally puts himself at events at which he was demonstrably not present. This was not deliberate on his part, but simply due to the passage of time. The memoirs tell many good stories, although I have reproduced only a tiny handful of them, as they are usually about other people. Since Clark’s own voice is always eloquent I quote him whenever possible; where he has written an alternative and usually earlier account of an event, I have used this for a fresh perspective. An example is the manuscript containing fragments of an art-historical autobiography that he wrote at the end of his life, Aesthete’s Progress, now in his publisher John Murray’s London archive.

Clark did have an eye to history; he kept all his letters to his parents, and rarely threw anything out, even occasionally annotating documents in his own archives. The Clark Archive held at Tate Britain is of a daunting scale, with thousands of letters and documents full of biographical treasures. Clark, however, offered a second warning to a would-be biographer: ‘One realises how little the historian, who must rely on letters and similar documents, can convey a personality. So much depends on the accident of whether or not a character can get himself into his letters.’2 Clark had a famous dislike of both receiving and writing letters, and whenever he could he would dictate them to an assistant. He was too busy to put art into them, but even the briefest will contain a striking phrase; he was incapable of writing a dull sentence. The majority of the letters quoted here are from carbon copies retained by Clark’s various assistants for reference. I have altered Clark’s pervasive use of ampersand to ‘and’, for reasons of flow. Quotations from the Berenson–Clark letters are taken from the excellent Yale edition edited by Robert Cumming.

For the second half of Kenneth Clark’s life we have the astonishing series of letters that he wrote to Janet Stone, which provide a vivid self-portrait, and offer a depth and nuance hitherto unavailable. In these letters his true unbuttoned character is displayed – they were a safety valve, just as a diary was to Pepys or a wartime journal to Lord Alanbrooke. It is tempting to compare these letters to his son Alan’s diaries, but their motivation – beyond the love of writing – was different. The letters to Janet Stone are held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford under a thirty-year moratorium (for reasons explained here). Fortunately, when Dr Fram Dinshaw of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, was appointed to be the original authorised biographer of Kenneth Clark in the 1980s, he was given permission by Janet Stone to read them. All the Stone letters I quote are from Dr Dinshaw’s selected transcriptions.

The biographer of Kenneth Clark is fortunate that both his sons, Alan and Colin, left behind such compelling accounts of their parents. I was equally fortunate in having his daughter Colette, and daughter-in-law Jane, ready to answer questions, and I put it on record that neither of them has at any time attempted to alter anything I have written apart from correcting factual errors. I am lucky to have known some of the main players in the story, John and Myfanwy Piper and Reynolds and Janet Stone, which makes it easier to understand why Clark found them so attractive, and their houses such blessed plots. Virtually all the crew of Civilisation are alive and were able to give me interviews except for Michael Gill, who I met before his death, but alas before I knew I would be so concerned with his story. Perhaps the greatest surprise of all was to find Clark’s favourite television producer from his ATV days in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Michael Redington, not only alive and well but living just three streets away from me in Westminster.

A word on nomenclature: Clark was always known as ‘K’ by family and friends. In 1938 he became Sir Kenneth Clark, and in 1969 he was given a peerage and became Lord Clark of Saltwood – but I refer to him throughout as ‘Clark’.

Clark studies will continue to produce new interpretations and information. This work must be seen as ‘notes towards a definition’ – space restricted me on nearly every subject covered – and it should be taken as an encouragement to other scholars to investigate his life and achievements further.

JAMES STOURTON

London, 2016

1

‘K’

Everything about Lord Clark is unexpected.

ANTHONY POWELL, reviewing Another Part of the Wood 1

At 12 noon on Sunday, 25 March 1934, King George V and Queen Mary climbed the steps of the National Gallery in London. It was the first time a reigning monarch had visited the gallery. The ostensible reason for the visit was to see the gallery’s collection of paintings, but the real purpose was to meet the new thirty-year-old director, Kenneth Clark. The trustees had been told not to disturb their weekend – a gentle instruction that their presence was not required – the King wished to see the director. Clark had only been at the gallery for three months, and his appointment had been greeted with universal approval – except at Windsor Castle. The King and Queen had been advised two years earlier by Owen Morshead, the Royal Librarian, that Clark would be the perfect candidate for the anticipated vacancy of Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. But Clark neither wanted the job nor felt that he could possibly combine it with his heavy duties as director of the National Gallery. The sixty-nine-year-old King Emperor, in an extraordinary move, decided that he would directly intervene and go down to Trafalgar Square to invite the young man to work for him. He had resolved that Clark was the man he wanted, and where his courtiers had failed, he would persuade him personally. The visit was a success, and the two men – as different as can be – found much to enjoy together. Clark later described how just after proclaiming that Turner was mad, the King ‘stopped his routine progress, faced me and said’:

‘Why won’t you come and work for me?’

‘Because I wouldn’t have time to do the job properly.’

The King snorted with benevolent rage: ‘What is there to do?’

‘Well, sir, the pictures need looking after.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with them.’

‘And people write letters asking for information about them.’

‘Don’t answer them. I want you to take the job.’2

There is no other recorded occasion of George V making such an effort – for instance, he never visited Downing Street – let alone for a thirty-year-old aesthete whose interests were as far as can be imagined from those of a gruff, pheasant-shooting, philistine sailor King. What was it about Kenneth Clark that made him so ardent? Clark had already had a similar effect on a series of distinguished elders, who all seem to have believed that they had discovered him: Monty Rendall, his headmaster at Winchester; Charles Bell, the keeper at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford; Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham College; Bernard Berenson, the most famous connoisseur in the world; and Sir Philip Sassoon, the chairman of the National Gallery. He was a Wunderkind from a brilliant generation of Oxford undergraduates; everybody recognised from the beginning that he would achieve great things (so often a recipe for lassitude in later life). Intelligence, charm and charisma played an important part in his story, but he was not alone in possessing these. What set him apart was his focus and complete absorption in art at a time when – artists aside – this was a singular quality. And he brought to this absorption an unusually synthetic power of analysis, expressed in a supple prose style that was able to fuse thought and feeling.

Early in life Clark discovered a sensibility to works of beauty: ‘Ever since I can remember, that is to say from about the age of seven, the combination of certain words, or sounds or forms has given me a peculiar pleasure, unlike anything else in my experience.’3 He called it ‘a freak aptitude’, and told a friend, ‘What is certain is that without it I would have been no more than an obscure and timid playboy.’4 This love of art in all its forms sustained him, and in one of the characteristically teasing yet self-revealing passages of his autobiography he remarked: ‘A strong, catholic approach to works of art is like a comfortable Swiss Bank … I never doubted the infallibility of my judgements … This almost insane self-confidence lasted until a few years ago, and the odd thing is how many people have accepted my judgements. My whole life has been a harmless confidence trick.’5 The confidence of youth was followed by the doubt of age.

Self-doubt is the last quality that anybody meeting Clark for the first time would have suspected. Most people were terrified of him and feared being snubbed, an attitude that baffled Clark himself, who was always expected to be one thing but was invariably something else. A folklore grew up around him – ‘impossibly, implausibly, supernaturally debonair’; ‘delicately poised between diffidence and disdain’; ‘a tranquil ruthlessness’; ‘he measured people and turned on an appropriate amount of charm’ – were all opinions offered about Clark. Most descriptions refer back to his solitary and protected childhood. His introversion suggested to many that he possessed no ‘radar’, or much perception of other people’s feelings; he could appear self-absorbed, and often cut people without even realising it. Yet those who worked for him – cooks and secretaries adored him – found him easy, and even cosy. There was a private Clark and a public Clark, one funny and warm, the other formal.

As Anthony Powell suggested, everything about Clark was surprising – he might have added contradictory and paradoxical: the writer who loved action, the scholar who became a populariser, the socialist who lived in a castle, the committee man who despised the establishment, the indefatigable self-deprecator whom many found arrogant, the shy man who loved monsters, the ‘ruthless’ man who hated confrontation, the brilliantly successful man who considered himself as a failure, the mandarin who had a passion for lemonade and ice cream. The impenetrably smooth performer had a highly emotional side, weeping in front of works of art and subject to spiritual and religious experiences. Graham Sutherland, who knew him as well as anybody, and lived in his house during the war, said: ‘of course K is a divided man … & of all my friends the most complex’. Behind all this was a mania for independence – never wishing to be caught or identified with any group except artists. As one confidante put it, ‘He was nervous of contamination.’6

There are many Kenneth Clarks to describe: the museum director, the courtier, the darling of society, the Leonardo expert, the man of action, the wartime publicist, the would-be contemplative scholar, the lecturer and journalist, the administrator and the professor, the television mogul and performer, the public intellectual, the non-academic art historian, the collector, the patron, the committee man, the conservationist, the family man and the lover – the sum of the man is equal to the parts. Describing Clark’s apparently detached progress through life, his younger son Colin thought that parents, schooling, wife, child and art all just flowed by like interesting scenery, and his father was scarcely aware that ‘there were other human beings on the planet until he was about twenty-eight years old’.7 Worldly or unworldly, Clark expected to go onto boards and for women to fall in love with him. It did not seem odd to him that he was offered the chairmanship of the Independent Television board without ever having owned a television.

An appetite for public service, born out of the ethos of Winchester, informed Clark’s life; a belief that the elite justified their position through pro bono public works. What was unique about him was his position, through which the creative and academic worlds met those of power and influence. As early as 1959 the Sunday Times thought that ‘It will be difficult to write the definitive history of England in the twentieth century without some reference, somewhere, to Sir Kenneth McKenzie Clark.’8 His role in public life, broadcasting apart, is less obvious to us today; the evidence lies in the minutes of meetings preserved in archives such as Bournemouth (the Independent Broadcasting Authority) and Kew (the Ministry of Information). There are, however, the astonishing outcomes: his hand helped build and guide arts institutions that we all take for granted today: the Arts Council, the Royal Opera House, Independent Television, the National Theatre and countless others. Everybody agreed that his writ ran everywhere: ‘K Clark doesn’t think much of it’ was a knockout blow in debate.9 His success on committees was based on an exceptionally careful reading of the papers, an acute analysis of the options, and a well-thought-out response. He would rarely be the first to speak, and waited to be asked his opinion, which was usually the one that counted. Everybody wanted to know what Clark thought. This was rarely predictable, and in writing this biography I have found that it was impossible to be sure what Clark would think on any subject. Anita Brookner wrote of the ‘unshakeable fairness of outlook [which] may have been his most extraordinary achievement’.10 Clark, however, rarely looked back with satisfaction, and even had a sense of disappointment with his contribution to most of the institutions and boards he joined – except for Covent Garden and the Scottish National Gallery.

What is certain is that Clark never wasted a minute more than he wanted to with people, subjects or institutions. He was extraordinarily disciplined with his time. Everything was timetabled – even friendship and love affairs. He was a master of disengagement. His only relaxation was to write, and what a master of prose he was. If his books are still read today, it is as much as anything because of the pleasure of reading about art described in such beautiful language. Books, lectures, essays and letters poured from his pen in those snatched moments when he was not engaged in public life. The constant question I asked myself while writing this book was, how on earth did he manage to do it all?

Clark always portrayed himself as something of a loner; he honed his lecturing skills as a child, soliloquising on country walks. But he needed an audience; he was a natural teacher who could make any subject interesting. When he was not lecturing to the public, his audience was invariably female – Clark was always most at ease with women. His greatest pleasure in life was to share his interests with a woman. The first of these was his wife Jane. What an extraordinary figure she was: moody, mercurial, expansive, generous, clever, rash, destructive, fascinating, pathetic and magnificent. No single description could ever remotely describe Jane, who Clark needed as ivy needs oak. Her unusual powers of sympathy were exercised on everyone from Margot Fonteyn to the station porters at Sandling, and were matched at home by a shrew-like anger of astonishing force. She is the key to understanding Clark – she was to support him and persecute him, and this cycle was the pattern of their life together. Clark and women are inseparable – they fascinated him, and he made the second half of his life unusually complicated by a series of amitiés amoureuses. But Jane was the greatest love affair of his life, however strange this may appear as the story unfolds.

Clark’s sharpest critics were drawn from his own profession. As the Burlington Magazine pointed out: ‘It has become almost a habit, among a very small minority, to sneer at Clark’s lifestyle.’11 The fact that he lived in a castle made him an irresistible target, and so did his inability to fit into the world of professional art history. With notable exceptions such as Ernst Gombrich and John Pope-Hennessy, his professional peers increasingly viewed him from the 1960s onwards as a non-academic television presenter and literary figure. He did himself no favours by once comparing their scholarly minutiae to knitting. But to the world beyond the Courtauld Institute of Art, whether highbrow or middlebrow, Clark came to represent the popular idea of an art historian. He became an emblem of art and culture to the public. Clark’s own hero in this endeavour was the great nineteenth-century writer and thinker John Ruskin. His debt to Ruskin can never be sufficiently emphasised, and it informed many of his interests: the Gothic Revival, J.M.W. Turner, socialism, and the belief that art criticism can be a branch of literature. But above all, Ruskin taught Clark that art and beauty are everyone’s birthright – and he took that message into the twentieth century. This is the central point of Kenneth Clark’s achievement.

2

Edwardian Childhood

I have been reading … your memoirs. What a strange and lonely childhood – a psychologist’s dream.

DAVID KNOWLES to Kenneth Clark, 27 August 19731

Kenneth Clark’s autobiography has one of the most memorable openings in the language: ‘My parents belonged to a section of society known as “the idle rich”, and although, in that golden age, many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler.’ His account of his belle époque childhood is a minor masterpiece, both subtle and comprehensive. There are virtually no other sources to challenge its veracity, nor is there any reason to doubt its essential truth; despite lapses, Clark had extraordinary recall, not only for events, but also of his feelings and awakenings. Perhaps in this, as in so much of his life, he was following John Ruskin, whose own autobiography Praeterita told the story of the making of an aesthete. Like Ruskin, Clark was an only child, one who was exceptionally sensitive to the visual world and for whom the act of recollection was a reconstruction of his inner life. He was to paint an elegiac picture of his childhood, and even the parts he found distasteful (such as the pheasant shoots) are described with a poetic eye.

When Clark described his childhood he frequently changed his point of view. His children believed that he was unhappy, the victim of dysfunctional parents. His younger son, Colin, summed it up: ‘My father felt very strongly that his parents had neglected him. He thought of his father as a greedy, reckless drunk and always described his mother as selfish and lazy.’2 Yet to others, Clark painted a sunny picture of solitary bliss.3 Both positions can be demonstrated to be true; there were moments of great happiness, and periods of melancholy solitude. It was by any standards a peculiar upbringing. What is perhaps most striking is that young Kenneth had no friends of his own age to play with, and in consequence never learned to relate to other children. Even in infancy he started to build around himself the carapace that Henry Moore later called his ‘glass wall’.