Kenneth Clark

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Baron Clark, Baron Clark, (13 July 1903 to May 1983) was a British art historian, museum curator, and broadcaster.

He came to television in the 1950s and 1960s, presenting a series of art shows during the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the Civilisation series in 1969. Clark, the son of wealthy parents, was introduced to the arts at an early age.

The writings of John Ruskin, which inspired him to believe that everyone should have access to great art, was one of his early influences.

Clark was elected director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford aged twenty-seven, and three years later he was in charge of Britain's National Gallery after falling under the influence of connoisseur and dealer Bernard Berenson.

The gallery was redesigned to make it more available and inviting to a larger audience during his twelve years there.

Clark donated the building to a series of daily concerts during the Second World War, when the collection was transferred from London for safe keeping. Clark shocked many by accepting the chairmanship of the UK's first commercial television network after the war and three years as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford.

He promised to produce and present programs on the arts after the service had been launched.

These made him a household name in the United Kingdom, and he was asked to produce the first color series on the arts, Civilisation, which premiered in 1969 in Britain and then in many countries shortly after. Clark was knighted at the age of thirty-five, and three decades later, he was named a life peer shortly before the first transmission of Civilisation.

Clark was honored in an exhibition at Tate Britain in London, three decades after his death, triggering a reappraisal of his career by a new generation of critics and historians.

His aesthetic preferences, particularly those attributioning paintings to old masters, were mixed, but his success as a writer and his enthusiasm for popularizing the arts were widely recognized.

In retrospect, both the BBC and Tate characterized him as one of Britain's twentieth century's most influential figures.

Family and personal life

Elizabeth Winifred Martin, nicknamed "Jane" (1902–1976), married Robert Macgregor Martin, a Dublin businessman, and his wife, Emily Winifred Dickson, in 1927. Alan and Colin were married in 1928, 1928; Colette (pronounced "Kelly") and Colin in 1932.

Clark spent time away from his official duties in the 1930s, enjoying what he described as "the Great Clark Boom" in the 1930s. In a large house in Portland Place, he and his wife lived and dined in a very sophisticated way. "The Clarks in joint alliance became stars of London high society, intelligence, and fashion, from Mayfair to Windsor," Piper said.

The Clarksons' marriage was devoted but stormy. Clark was a womaniser, and although Jane had love affairs, particularly with composer William Walton, she was concerned about some of her husband's extramarital affairs. She suffered with a severe mood swings, then alcoholism, and a stroke. Throughout his wife's death, Clark was largely supportive of his wife. The Clarks' ties with their three children were often difficult, especially with their elder son Alan. He was deemed a fascist by conviction by his father but also as the ablest member of the Clark family "parents included"; he became a Conservative member of parliament and junior minister; and a respected diarist. Colin, Colin's younger brother, went on to become a film director, who had previously worked with his father in a television series in the 1970s. Colette's twin daughters, a Royal Opera House trustee and board member, lived out her parents and brothers, and she was the main source for James Stourton's accepted biography of her father, which was published in 2016.

The Clarks lived in Capo Di Monte, a cottage in Hampstead, until they migrated to the much larger Upper Terrace House nearby. Clark and his family lived in Saltwood, Kent, when Clark bought the Norman castle of Saltwood, which became the family's home in 1953. In his later years, he dedicated the castle to his older son and moved to a purpose-built house on the grounds.

Jane Clark died in 1976. Clark's death was expected, but she left Clark devastated. Several of his female friends wished that he would marry them. Janet Stone, the wife of engraver Reynolds Stone, was dismayed when he announced his decision to marry Nolwen de Janzé (1924–1989), the daughter of Frederic and Alice de Janzé. Clark seemed to be causing a great deal in marrying someone he didn't know well for very long, but the family believed he was delaying it for a long time. Clark and his second wife stayed together until his death.

Clark's parents were Liberal in outlook, and Ruskin's social and political convictions inspired the young Clark. Clark, according to Mary Beard, a lifelong Labour voter. His religious convictions were unusual, but he believed in the divine, condemned atheism, and found the Church of England's view too secular in its outlook. He was admitted into the Roman Catholic Church a few months before his death.

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Life and career

Clark was born in 32 Grosvenor Square, London, and was the only child of Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (1868-1932) and his mother, (Margaret) Alice, daughter of James McArthur of Manchester. The Clarks were a wealthy Scottish family who had risen to prominence in the textile industry. The cotton spool was invented by Clark's great-grandfather, and Paisley's Clark Thread Company had developed to a large industry. Kenneth Clark senior served briefly as a director of the company and resigned in his mid-twenties as a member of the "idle wealthy," Clark junior said, "many people were wealthyer, but there were others who were idler." At Sudbourne Hall, Suffolk, and Ardnamurchan, Argyll, the Clarks wintered on the French Riviera. Kenneth senior was a sportsman, a gambler, an eccentric, and a heavy drinker. Clark had little in common with his dad, although he was still fond of him. Alice Clark was shy and distant, but her son's affections were shown by a devoted nanny. The young Clark, who was not closely related to his parents, had a boyhood that was often solitary, but he was generally content. He later recalled that he used to take long walks and talking to himself, a habit that he believed held him in good shape as a broadcaster. Clark senior snapped pictures on a small budget, and the young Kenneth was allowed to rearrange the collection. He had a natural gift for drawing, for which he later received several awards as a schoolboy. He was seven years old when he saw an exhibition of Japanese art in London, which had a definite influence on his artistic tastes; he said, "dumb with delight, I felt that I had entered a new world."

Clark was educated at Wixenford School and Winchester College from 1917 to 1922. The former was known for its intellectual rigour and – to Clark's dismay – enthusiasm for sports, but it also encouraged its students to pursue their interest in the arts. Montague Rendall, the headmaster, was a devotee of Italian painting and sculpture, and influenced Clark, among other things, to appreciate the works of Giotto, Botticelli, Bellini, and their compatriots. The school library held John Ruskin's collected writings, which Clark enjoyed avidly and influenced him for the remainder of his life, not just in their artistic decisions but also in their political and social convictions.

Clark, a historian from Winchester, gained a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, where he researched modern history. He received his Bachelor's degree in 1925 with a second-class honours degree. Clark was supposed to obtain a first-class degree, but he did not dedicate himself to his historical research, according to Sir David Piper's Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: "History has already converged clearly to art study."

Clark was captivated by Roger Fry's lectures at Oxford, the influential art critic who staged the first Post-Impressionism exhibitions in the United Kingdom. He gained an appreciation of modern French painting, particularly Cézanne's work under Fry's influence. Clark Attracted the attention of Charles F. Bell (1871–1966), Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum's Fine Art Department. Bell became a mentor to him and suggested that Clark write about the Gothic revival in architecture for his B Litt thesis. At that time, it was a deeply unpopular subject; no comprehensive analysis had been published since the nineteenth century; Despite the fact that Clark's main area of study, his admiration for Ruskin, the most prominent defender of the neo-Gothic style, led him to the subject, but Ruskin, the most prominent defender of the neo-Gothic style, attracted him to the subject. He did not finish the thesis, but later turned his findings into his first full-length book, The Gothic Revival (1928). Clark was introduced to Bernard Berenson, an influential scholar of the Italian Renaissance and advisor to major museums and collectors in 1925. Berenson was preparing a new copy of his book Drawings of the Florentine Painters and wanted Clark to assist. The project took two years, corolling with Clark's Oxford studies.

Clark was asked to catalog the extensive collection of Leonardo da Vinci drawings at Windsor Castle in 1929, as a result of his apprenticeship with Berenson. He was the joint curator of an exhibition of Italian painting that opened at the Royal Academy in January 1930. Lord Balniel and his co-organiser obtained masterpieces that never saw outside of Italy, many of which were purchased from private collections. The exhibition featured Italian art "from Cimabue to Segantini" – from the mid-thirteenth to the late-nineteenth century. Clark's name was raised, and public and critical acclaim were lauded, but it was later revealed that the public and critical value of the exhibition was lost, but it was also sad that so many sought-after paintings were not available. Several leading figures in the British art world disapproved of the exhibition; Bell was one of them; but Clark retained him as his preferred replacement at the Ashmolean.

Clark was not sure that his future lay in government; he loved writing, and would have preferred to be a scholar rather than a museum director. Nonetheless, Clark agreed to replace him at the Ashmolean when Bell retired in 1931. Clark oversaw the construction of a new extension to the museum in order to ensure a more efficient space for his department over the next two years. An unidentified benefactor, who later revealed himself as Clark himself, made the development possible. Clark would be remembered for his time in the museum, according to a later curator, "when, with his characteristic combination of arrogance and dynamism, he transformed both the collections and its display."

Sir Augustus Daniel, the director of the National Gallery in London in 1933, was sixty-seven, and he was scheduled to retire at the end of the year. W. G. Constable, his assistant, who had been on time to replace him, had taken over as the head of the new Courtauld Institute of Art in 1932. Behind the scenes, historian Peter Stansky writes that the National Gallery was "in a lot of turmoil"; the employees and the trustees were "in a state of constant conflict with each other." Lord Lee, the trustee chairman, convinced Ramsay MacDonald that Clark will be the right appointment, both for the administrative and trustees, and in a position to restore harmony. Clark was not ecstatic when he heard MacDonald's call for the job. He felt he was too young, aged 30, and he and his mother had been torn between a scholarly and an administrative career once more. He accepted the directorship, but "in between being the boss of a large department store and being a professional entertainer to the landed and official classes," he wrote to Berenson.

Clark had declined one from King George V's officials to replace C. H. Collins Baker as the King's Pictures Surveyor at the same time as accepting MacDonald's offer as directorship. He felt that he could not do justice to the post in tandem with his new duties at the gallery. The king, determined to succeed where his employees had failed, went with Queen Mary to the National Gallery and begged Clark to change his mind. Clark was first named in The London Gazette in July 1934; he stayed with the position for the next ten years.

Clark believed in making fine art available to everybody, and though he was conceived with this intention in mind at the National Gallery, he created several projects with this intention in mind. "Clark put all his knowledge and imagination into making the National Gallery a more welcoming environment in which the visitor can enjoy a superb collection of European paintings," the Burlington Magazine said in an editorial. He had rooms re-hung and frames enhanced by 1935; by 1935, he had installed a laboratory and introduced electric lighting, making evening openings possible for the first time. Despite periodic sniping from those opposed to fundamentally saning old photographs, a program of sanitizing was initiated; experimentally, the glass was removed from some photographs. In several years, the gallery opened two hours earlier than normal on the day of the FA Cup Final to the benefit of those attending the match in London.

Clark wrote and lectured during the decade. The annotated catalogue of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, on which he had started work in 1929, received acclaim; eighty years later Oxford Art Online called it "a work of firm scholarship, the results of which have stood the test of time." Clark's 1935 book offended some in the avant-garde: an essay published in The Listener's "The Future of Painting" in which he chastised surrealists on the one hand and abstract artists on the other for claiming to represent the future of art. Both men were deemed excessive and too specific, and "the conclusion of a period of self-consciousness, inbreeding, and exhaustion" was considered by the author. He said that good art must be available to everybody and must be embedded in the observable world. Clark was in demand as a lecturer during the 1930s and he often used his findings for his talks as the basis of his books. He delivered the Ryerson Lectures at Yale University in 1936, and afterward his study of Leonardo, published three years later, attracted much attention; both then and later.

The Burlington Gazette, an annual publication, profiles Clark's time as gallery curator, one of the seven panels forming Sassetta's San Sepolcro Altarpiece from the twentieth century, four works by Giovanni di Paolo from the same period, and Ingres' Madame Moitessier from the nineteenth century. Rubens' Watering Place, Constable's Hadleigh Castle, Rembrandt's Saskia as Flora, and Poussin's The Adoration of the Golden Calf were among the notable acquisitions, according to Piper.

Scenes from Tebaldeo's Eclogues was one of Clark's least popular performances as director. He saw them in 1937 in Vienna's possession of a dealer, but against his colleagues' joint instruction, he persuaded them not to buy them. They were supposed to be by Giorgione, who's work was inadequately represented in the gallery at the time. The trustees approved the expenditure of £14,000 of public funds, and the paintings were on display in the gallery with a great deal of enthusiasm. His employees did not accept Giorgione's name, but academic study revealed the paintings as the work of Andrea Previtali, one of Giorgione's minor contemporaries. The British press reacted angrily to taxpayers' money, Clark's image suffered a severe blow, and his professional team, which had already been strained, were still uneasy.

Clark and his coworkers were encouraged to consider how to shield the National Gallery's collection from bombing raids as a result of war with Germany in 1939. All of the works of art must be relocated out of central London, where they were acutely fragile. One suggestion was to ship them to Canada for safekeeping, but Clark was worried about the possibility of submarine attacks on the ships during the collection around the Atlantic, and he was not dissatisfied when prime minister Winston Churchill vetoed it: "Hide them in caves and cellars, but not one photograph will leave this island." As the store, a disused slate mine near Blaenau Ffestiniog in north Wales was chosen. Special storage compartments were constructed to shield the paintings, as well as careful monitoring of the collection's findings, which aided in its care and display when it returned to London after the war.

Clark considered volunteering for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve but was later promoted by Lord Lee's instigation to the newly-established Ministry of Information, where he was initially appointed to head the film division and later promoted to be the head of home publicity. He established the War Artists' Advisory Committee and advised the government not to deploy official war artists in large numbers. Under Clark's initiative, up to two hundred people were involved. Edward Ardizzone, Paul and John Nash, Mervyn Peake, John Piper, and Graham Sutherland were among the few named "official war artists" by the Federation. Jacob Epstein, Laura Knight, L. S. Lowry, Henry Moore, and Stanley Spencer were among artists on short-term contracts.

Clark, despite the fact that the photographs were in storage, kept the National Gallery open to the public during the war, staging a popular series of lunchtime and early evening concerts. They were the inspiration of pianist Myra Hess, whose proposal Clark accepted with a sigh of surprise as a good way for the building to be "used again for its true purposes, the enjoyment of beauty." There was no advance reservation, and audience members were allowed to eat their sandwiches and walk in or out during breaks in the performance. The concerts were an immediate and huge success. "Countless Londoners and visitors to London, civilian and service alike, came to view the performances as a haven of sanity in a turbulent world," the Musical Times said. The concert was attended by over 750,000 people in total. Clark introduced a monthly featured picture taken from storage and on display alongside explanatory information. After the war, the institution of a "picture of the month" was retained, and the operation continues to the present day.

Clark resigned as director in 1945, after directing the return of the collections to the National Gallery, intending to devote himself to writing. He had little success in the war years. He created a limited volume about Constable's The Hay Wain (1944), and from a lecture he gave in 1944, he published a short article on Leon Battista Alberti's On Painting (1944). In a series of art books published by Faber and Faber, the following year he contributed an introduction and notes to a volume on Florentine paintings. There were fewer than eighty pages between the three magazines in total.

Clark was named Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in July 1946. Each year, the author was required to give eight public lectures on the "History, Analysis, and Practice of the Fine Arts." Ruskin was the first holder of the professorship; Clark was his first subject during Ruskin's tenure as the first author. The appointment is judged by James Stourton, Clark's authorised biographer, as he explains how Clark established himself as Britain's most sought-after lecturer and wrote two of his finest books, Landscape into Art (1947) and Piero della Francesca (1951). Clark was no longer hankered after a career in pure scholarship, but he saw his job as a conduit for sharing his knowledge and experience with the general public by this time.

Clark served on various government commissions during this period and helped stage a ground-breaking exhibition in Paris of works by his friend and protégé Henry Moore. He was more in tune with modern painting and sculpture than with a lot of modern architecture. He adored Giles Gilbert Scott, Maxwell Fry, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, and others, but found many modern buildings mediocre. Clark was one of the first to announce that private patronage would no longer fund the arts; during the war, he had been a leading member of the state-funded Council for Music and the Arts. He was invited to serve as both chairman and chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1945 when it was reconstituted as the Arts Council of Great Britain.

Clark was appointed chairman of the Arts Council in 1953. He held the position until 1960, but it was a trying experience for him; he discovered himself chiefly a figurehead. In addition, he was concerned that the way the council approached funding the arts was in jeopardy of jeopardizing the artist's individualism, which the council had hoped for.

Clark stunned many and stunned others by announcing the chairmanship of the new Independent Television Authority this year (ITA). The Conservative government had planned to introduce ITV, commercial television, funded by advertisements as a rival to the British Broadcasting Corporation. Many of those opposed to the new broadcaster feared vulgarization on American television, and though Clark's appointment reassured some, others considered his acceptance of the position to be a betrayal of artistic and intellectual integrity.

Clark was no stranger to broadcasting. He had appeared on television regularly since 1936, during a radio talk at Burlington House about a Chinese Art exhibit; the following year, he made his television debut, displaying Florentine works from the National Gallery. He appeared on BBC radio's The Brains Trust extensively during the war. Although presiding over the new italicious early years, he largely kept off the air and concentrated on keeping the new network running. Clark's three-year tenure as chairman was lauded as a success, but privately, he felt that there were still too few high-quality programs on the network. Clark should develop arts programs of his own, according to Lew Grade, chairman of Associated Television (ATV) and one of the ITV brands, and as soon as Clark stepped down as chairman in 1957, he accepted Grade's invitation. "This was clearly the start of his most fruitful career as a television presenter of the arts."

The British Film Institute observes:

Clark had sharpened his presentational skills by the time he presented a program about Picasso in 1960, and came across as relaxed as well as authoritative. Two series of architecture followed, culminating in a programme called The Royal Palaces of Britain in 1966, which ITV and the BBC jointly produced as "by far the most important heritage program shown on British television to date." Clark was described by the Guardian as "the ideal man for the job" – scholarly, argumentative, and mildly ironic. The Royal Palaces were shot on 35mm film, but the broadcasting was still in black and white, which Clark chafed. By this time, the BBC was hoping to broadcast in color, and his renewed contact with the corporation for this film paved the way for his eventual return to its schedules. In the interim, he appeared on television for a 1966 film, Three Faces of France, starring Courbet, Manet, and Degas.

David Attenborough, the source of BBC's new second television station, BBC's newest television broadcaster, was in charge of bringing colour television to the UK. Clark had conceived the idea of a series of great paintings as the industry's best-bearer for color television, and had no doubt that Clark would be the best presenter for it. Clark was attracted by the suggestion, but he had to decline at first. He later recalled that Attenborough's use of the term "civilization" was what convinced him that he should enroll, not knowing what the series was about.

Clark's book consists of thirteen programs, each half-length, spanning western European civilization from the end of the Dark Ages to the early twentieth century. As the civilisation was excluded from Graeco-Roman, Asian, and other historically important traditions, a title was chosen that disclaimed universality: Civilization, Kenneth Clark. Despite the fact that the main emphasis was on the visual arts and architecture, there were also sections on drama, literature, philosophy, and socio-political movements. Clark wanted to hear more about law and philosophy, but "I could not think of any way of making them visually appealing."

Clark and his principal director, Michael Gill, formed a congenial working relationship after first mutual admiration. They and their production team spent three years together in a hundred and seventeen locations in thirteen countries, from 1966 to 2001. The filming was to the highest technical standards of the day, and it quickly went over budget; by the time it was finished, it cost £500,000. Attenborough rejigged his radio budgeting schedules to spread the burden.

Clark had ignored women and dismissed their subjects by focusing on a standardized list of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, many men, and then some women. His modus operandi was dubbed "the great man approach," and he portrayed himself on film as a hero and a stick-in-the-mud. His outlook was "nothing striking, nothing original, nothing that could not have been written by an ordinary harmless bourgeois of the late nineteenth century": "It's not surprising":

Civilisation was "a truly great series, a major project, and it was not realized in terms of television," Huw Wheldon said. Critics generally agreed that the filming set new standards, with some that were deemed "uncomprehensi to Clark's picks. An unprecedented viewing audience for a high-end art collection — 2.5 million viewers in the United Kingdom and 5 million in the United States — attracted unprecedented viewing figures for a high-end art series. Clark's accompanying book has never been out of print, and the BBC continues to sell thousands of copies of Civilisation's DVD set every year. Clark was referred to as "the man with the best telly you've ever seen" in 2016, according to The New Yorker.

From Alastair Cooke's America (1972) and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man (1973) to the present day, the British Film Institute reveals how civilisation changed cultural television, setting the tone for a later documentary film.

Clark produced a series of six programs for ITV. They were collectively referred to as Pioneers of Modern Painting, directed by Colin Powell's son. They were screened in November and December 1971, with a DVD devoted to Manet, Cezanne, Monet, Seurat, Rousseau, and Munch. Despite being shown on commercial television, there were no commercial breaks during any program. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, obtained copies of the series and sold them to colleges and universities around the country with the support of a National Endowment for Humanities grant.

Clark returned to the BBC five years ago, hosting five programmes on Rembrandt. The series, directed by Colin Clark, explored various aspects of the artist's career, from his self-portraits to biblical scenes. "These art history lectures are an authoritative study of Rembrandt and feature examples of his work from more than fifty museums," the National Gallery notes.

Clark served as chancellor of the University of York from 1967 to 1978, as well as a trustee of the British Museum. He wrote thirteen books in ten years. There were two volumes of memoirs, Another Part of the Wood (1974) and The Other Half (1977), as well as some drawn from his studies for his lectures and television series. Piper's life and personality were reflected in two autobiographical books: "elegantly and subtly polished, at times very touching, often distant, as if about someone else."

Clark suffered from arteriosclerosis for the last three years in his lifetime. He died in a nursing home in Hythe, Kent, at the age of seventy-nine after a fall.

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