Cultural colossus... and a cruel cad: A new book reveals
revered Civilisation presenter Kenneth Clark was also a bed-hopping,
wife-stealing rogue
Kenneth Clark was known for 1969 television documentaries
Civilisation
But the 'happily' married man was a serial adulterer and
seeker of affairs
The trait is revealed in a new book by official biographer,
James Stourton.
By TONY RENNELL FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 00:52 BST, 3 September 2016 | UPDATED: 02:38 BST,
3 September 2016
Full-bosomed, voluptuous and with long golden hair, she
gazes wistfully into the middle distance. And the grand cultural connoisseur
(some might say, commissar) Kenneth Clark adored this vision of pure womanhood
so much that he made her the showpiece of his many grand houses.
The nude Baigneuse Blonde by the French impressionist Renoir
was ‘my blonde bombshell’, as he liked to call her, and she took pride of place
on his art-filled walls.
And who could fault his judgment? Here was a man with
impeccable taste, a giant of the artistic world who swept all before him in
20th century Britain, laying down markers of what was good art and what was
not, expanding awareness of beauty, bringing culture to the masses, all
culminating in his ground-breaking series of television documentaries in 1969,
the brilliant and unrivalled Civilisation.
Together with his actual peerage, it earned him the accolade
by which he will always be known — Lord Clark of Civilisation. For decades he
was the haughty panjandrum of the arts, admired and feared in equal measure.
Kings and prime ministers sought his advice, the great and the good flocked to
his salon parties, artists sat at his feet and courted his patronage.
Jobs cascaded into his lap like manna, from Oxford
professorships to running the National Gallery at the age of 30 and presiding
over the likes of the Arts Council and Covent Garden Opera House. He was even
invited to be a founding father of ITV, despite at the time not even owning a
television set.
There were few figures quite so respected in public life,
and seemingly respectable to a fault.
But behind all this grandness and glamour, Clark had a
secret — to which his adoration of the ‘blonde bombshell’ was a clue. Though
ostensibly a happily married man with a dutiful and caring wife by his side in
all his high endeavours, he couldn’t keep his manicured hands or his swooning
heart away from other women. He was a serial adulterer, a constant seeker of affairs,
even with the wives of his close friends.
This upright pillar of the Establishment was in fact, as one
of his detractors put it most succinctly, ‘a frightful s**t’.
This side of Clark’s character is revealed in a new book by
his official biographer, James Stourton. An art historian and until recently UK
chairman of Sotheby’s, he hails Clark’s great achievement as a populiser of the
arts and a disseminator of culture and taste.
But he does not shy away from the murky private life that
lay behind it.
Clark’s behaviour was unseemly and sordid. He drove his wife
to drink, dumped at least one mistress in circumstances that were downright
shameful and passed his penchant for bed-hopping onto his son and heir, the
outrageous Conservative politician Alan Clark. It is not a pretty picture.
Kenneth Clark was born into family money, lots of it, a
fortune equivalent to more than £500 million by today’s standards, made from
cotton. His father was a drunken extrovert, his mother shy and retiring, and
the boy grew up rattling around virtually alone in a large country mansion on a
vast sporting estate in Suffolk. Much to his bluff father’s disgust he opted
for the books in the library rather than taking a gun to the pheasants.
At prep school, he already had the solemn and self-assured
air of an archbishop about him, but it was tempered, even then, by a delight in
the company of girls. He met some for the first time at a school dance and ‘I
was enchanted beyond words by the aura of femininity,’ he recalled. That
enchantment, for good and ill, lasted the rest of his life.
From Winchester, where he frequently had to ‘sport an a**e’
(ie, bend over to be caned) for precocity and speaking his mind, he progressed
to Oxford, in whose quads he quickly made his name as an aesthete and an
intellectual.
H is chums were the brightest dons of the Twenties’
generation, clever, witty, well-read, aloof. He fitted the pattern perfectly. A
summer vacation in Italy introduced him to the artistic and intellectual
delights of Florence, and his future course in life was set.
Oxford also provided him with a wife. He’d flirted around
until then — there was an Eileen and a Sybil — but with Jane Martin it was the
real thing. She was Irish with large blue eyes and dark hair, middle-class,
elegant, high-spirited, a history graduate and . . . engaged to one of Clark’s
best friends.
When the friend had to go overseas for a while, Clark
offered to keep an eye on her. When the friend got back, there was a letter
from Clark saying he was about to marry Jane himself. He told the abruptly
jilted lover that, ‘in the end you will find this is better for everybody’.
It was typical Clark arrogance. He always assumed that,
however caddish his behaviour, what was good for him would be fine for
everybody else.
It was the same with their wedding.
Jane wanted romance, bridesmaids, the full works, but Clark
was having nothing so commonplace. He insisted on a quick hitch in a church —
just 14 minutes from start to finish, he recorded proudly — followed by a stiff
lunch with his parents.
However, they proved to be good for each other at many
levels, and things were going well. With his family wealth and his work as an
art historian blossoming, money was no problem. They set up a home with staff,
son Alan was born, they travelled and entertained lavishly, throwing dinners
and parties for the high-society set where the fashionably dressed Jane was as
much of a magnet as he was.
She was a bewitching hostess, open and affable where he
could be more diffident and reserved. The combination worked.
Increasingly, the Clarks were on the radar of those who
mattered, a power couple much in demand for their conversation, company and
connections.
The cracks were covered up. Behind her party face, Jane was
moody and mercurial, with a fierce and frequent temper and a drink problem.
She carried what she called ‘cough medicine’ in her handbag
and a nasal spray containing morphine and cocaine to calm herself down in times
of stress. She was always prone to drama and quarrels, dividing the world into
allies and friends. The placid and appeasing Clark usually bent with the wind
when she was in one of her strops, but there were still too many nights at home
when he stomped out because she was being ‘so bloody’ and walked the streets
wondering if he’d made a terrible mistake in marrying her.
He was, of course, partly to blame. His wandering eye cannot
have helped her state of mind, though which came first — her tantrums or his
infidelities — is an unresolved chicken-and-egg argument.
For a long time, Jane suspected he was being unfaithful. His
high-powered jobs gave him access to lots of women and he lunched a deux with
the likes of actress Vivien Leigh. There were also secretaries he dallied with,
and once Jane caught him cuddling one of the maids at home.
But in the late-Thirties, things escalated when he began
seeing Edith, the married sister of ballet choreographer Frederick Ashton, and
fell in love. They would meet at her house when her naval officer husband was
away, and we can only speculate at what happened there. On this occasion, Clark
confessed his indiscretion to his wife and was forgiven.
S tourton argues that the upper-class Clarks were not
unusual among their kind in having affairs, and that Jane was not short of her
own admirers anyway. These included the composer William Walton, with whom she
had a prolonged romance when living away from London during World War II.
A particular French ambassador took to calling on her and
was seen in a passionate embrace, while the sculptor Henry Moore, one of her
husband’s proteges, was a long-time admirer.
But the bonds between husband and wife ran really deep, and
neither Clark nor Jane ever seriously contemplated divorce, which anyway would
have been social death in those days.
Nonetheless, they tested each other’s devotion on a regular
basis. Feeling hard done by, he felt justified in seeking solace for his wife’s
bad behaviour, pouring out his troubles to this fancy woman and that. His
cheating did nothing to cool Jane’s temper or her need for escape via alcohol.
They were trapped in a vicious matrimonial circle, which he showed no wish to
break out of.
As his eminence increased, so, too, did his tally of lady
friends and lovers. He became sly, urging them to write to him at his club in
Pall Mall, a safe place because letters arriving at home were intercepted.
It is impossible to say how much physical sex was actually
involved in these liaisons. Undoubtedly there was some but, tellingly, he
dismissed one woman he was close to as ‘too lecherous, don’t like her’.
What mainly captivated him and sent him weak at the knees
was that ‘aura of femininity’ he had first noticed as a boy, typically over an
illicit, intimate lunch or dinner at the Etoile or Wheeler’s fish restaurant.
He found women generally ‘more receptive, more appreciative
and more stimulating’ and basked in their adoration. It’s hard to avoid the
conclusion that it was all very much about him. His own daughter, Colette,
nailed the truth when she said: ‘He was a compulsive charmer and very put out
if women did not fall in love with him.’
Occasionally love knocked him for six. Mary Kessell was a
young artist who wore exotic clothes and ribbons in her hair and lived in a
little house he bought for her close to his grand Georgian semi-mansion in
Hampstead.
He visited when he could and she wrote to him about ‘a most
perfect unforgettable evening. There is no one else in the world for me. When I
put my arms around you, I feel whole. God means us for one another’.
She begged for more of his time — raising a crucial question
about Clark and his lovers. With all the committees he was now sitting on, all
the different jobs he held down, all the receptions, dinners and parties he
attended, not to mention a wife and three children, how did he ever find time
for such a promiscuous love life as well?
The answer was that everything was rigorously
compartmentalised and timetabled, including the mistresses. Nothing overlapped,
so poor Mary was dumped. Jane had got wind of her, saw the danger and this time
threatened to leave Clark unless he stopped seeing her.
He complied, leaving Mary bereft. ‘I shall always love you,’
she wrote to him but never to see him again was ‘a bitter blow’.
Broken-hearted, she died an alcoholic. And still he philandered.
There was another Mary, surname Potter, to whom he declared,
‘you are, without exception, the most lovable human being I have ever met’. And
Morna Anderson, wife of an old Oxford friend, to whom he wrote: ‘I love you,
and have for years, and always shall.’
And Myfanwy, wife of Welsh artist John Piper. And university
lecturer Maria Shirley. And librarian Margaret Slyth. And glamorous
multi-millionaire New Yorker Jayne Wrightsman.
To Jane, he dismissed all his flings and fancies, whether
sexual or just platonic, as ‘my silly fits’. He hoped to ‘contain them better
and become less tiresome’, he wrote to her, before instantly falling into the
arms of red-haired Barbara Desborough from Australia, who left her husband and
children for him.
The indiscretions piled up, the pledges of undying love, the
false promises, but through all the mess he created in his and other people’s
lives, Clark clung onto Jane, now getting older and sicker, ‘tumbling’ more and
more (the family’s word for falling over when drunk), lonely at their new home,
Saltwood Castle in Kent while he was a star in London.
A stroke knocked her flat and with all the love and care he
could muster he nursed her until her death in 1976. He was bereft. All the
sparkle went out of him. For all his dalliances, she had been the love of his
life.
As Stourton puts it: ‘Jane was ultimately the ringmaster in
the curious performance of Clark and his girlfriends. She had been his excuse
to disengage.’ He missed her terribly.
At which point came perhaps Clark’s greatest betrayal of
all.
Photographer Janet Stone, a bishop’s daughter and married to
a master wood engraver, had been his most devoted mistress for the past 15
years. He unburdened all his problems on her, particularly about Jane, in a
mass of letters and at their clandestine meetings once a month. He led her to
believe he was madly in love with her and would one day leave his wife for her.
She — perhaps not grasping the truth about all the other
ladies in his life — believed him. With Jane now gone, Janet was, as she saw
it, on a promise. In a letter six months later, he declared his love for her .
. . followed by the bombshell news that, despite this, he was marrying someone
else! He was lonely, needed a wife and a reason to live, and had settled on a
rich widower he’d briefly met in France, Nolwen Rice.
Janet was understandably devastated. So, too, were his
family, convinced their illustrious father had been picked off by a predator.
N olwen turned out to be a toughie. She was not going to put
up with all the nonsense Jane had. Clark’s roving days were over. When Janet
tried to renew her relationship with him — encouraged, surprise, surprise, by
Clark himself, a little spirit still left in the old dog — she was told firmly
by Nolwen to ‘go get a life’ and leave her husband alone.
He was now firmly on a marital leash for the first time in
his life and remained there until his death in 1983.
It was the end of a great and grand life, which enriched the
world in many ways. Sometimes this paragon seemed too aloof and remote to be
real. Many people felt put down and put off by him. His feet of clay, exposed
in this biography, bring Lord Clark of Civilisation down to earth. It’s no bad
thing.
Adapted from Kenneth
Clark: The Authorised Biography by James Stourton, published by William Collins
on September 22, at £30. © James Stourton 2016. To buy a copy for £22.50,
P&P free, call 0844 571 0640 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk. Offer valid until
September 9.
Kenneth Clark by James Stourton review – Mary Beard on
Civilisation without women
Clark’s patrician manner, and the ‘great man’ approach of
his famous TV series, now seem outdated. This biography retrieves his
influence, but has worrying sexual politics
Mary Beard
In February 1969, I watched the first episode of Kenneth
Clark’s famous TV series, Civilisation. I can still picture him, standing on
barbaric northern headlands, explaining that “our” civilisation had barely
survived the collapse of the Roman empire. We had come through only “by the
skin of our teeth”. It was an incongruous scene: Clark – Winchester and Oxford
educated, connoisseur and collector, former director of the National Gallery –
looked every inch the toff as he walked in his brogues and Burberry over the
battered countryside, where wellington boots and a woolly would have been more
appropriate. But I tingled slightly as he repeated that phrase, “by the skin of
our teeth”. I was just 14, and it had never struck me that “civilisation” might
be such a fragile thing, still less that it might be possible to trace a
history of European culture, as Clark was to do, in 13 parts, from the early
middle ages to the 20th century.
Civilisation had
shown us that there was something in art and architecture that was worth
talking, and arguing, about
A few years later, now more a devotee of John Berger’s Ways
of Seeing (a TV series and book devised in hostile reaction to Civilisation), I
began to feel decidedly uncomfortable with Clark’s patrician self-confidence
and the “great man” approach to art history – one damn genius after the next –
that ran through the series. I was very doubtful, too, about the image of wild
barbarians at the gates that Clark conjured up in that first episode: it was as
crude an oversimplification of barbarism as his dreamy notion of ideal perfection
was an oversimplification of classicism. Nonetheless, Civilisation had opened
my eyes, and those of many others; not only visually stunning, it had shown us
that there was something in art and architecture that was worth talking, and
arguing, about.
Some of the best chapters in James Stourton’s careful
biography discuss the making of this series. Clark was then in his early 60s
and a considerable catch for its commissioner David Attenborough, who was
trying to give the first wave of colour TV on BBC2 a more highbrow image than
it had acquired in the US. What better than a series that would feature “all
the most beautiful pictures and buildings” of the last 2,000 years of western
European history?
Despite the commonly held belief that Clark was an
upper-crust scholar plucked from some dusty museum basement who luckily proved
to be a “natural” on screen, he had already made dozens of programmes for ITV,
including one featuring an argument with Berger over Picasso’s Guernica (the two
men were ideological enemies but personal friends). He was the obvious man for
the job. Less obvious was the director assigned to the series: Michael Gill,
father of the critic AA Gill, who did not share Clark’s aesthetic viewpoint
(“Michael would probably have wanted to be the barbarian at the gate,” his wife
observed). To begin with, getting the pair to collaborate was, according to one
BBC source, rather like “mating pandas”.
For some viewers, Civilisation was life-changing. In the
letters Clark received after the broadcasts, no fewer than nine correspondents
claimed they had been dissuaded from suicide simply by watching (modestly,
Clark wasn’t sure whether to believe them). Even the Sun hyped Clark as “the
Gibbon of the McLuhan age”, and he was promptly given a peerage. The rumour was
that Mary Wilson said to Harold, after one of their regular Sunday evening
viewings in 10 Downing Street: “That man must go to the House of Lords.” And so
he did.
But Civilisation was not an instant ratings success. At its
first showing, it captured less than 2% of the available audience (compared
with 35% for The Forsyte Saga). And Berger was not the only critic of Clark’s
“top-down” approach to cultural politics; others complained that they were
watching the elitist musings of an Edwardian critic. Clark’s silly jibes at
“pseudo-Marxists” (for some reason, a notch below “real” ones), and his boasts
of being a “stick-in-the-mud” laid him open to this.
On one of his ITV
programmes on 'good taste' he seems to have taken a line closer to Grayson
Perry than to Brian Sewell
As Stourton shows, some of the criticisms do not stick.
Although the programmes concentrated on western Europe, Clark was not blind (as
he was charged) to other artistic traditions: he had been devoted to Japanese
art since childhood. And however patrician his manner, he was a lifelong Labour
voter. In fact, in one of his ITV programmes on “good taste” he seems to have
taken a line closer to Grayson Perry than to Brian Sewell.
But Stourton frankly concedes one glaring omission in
Civilisation. This was a “great man” approach in the most literal sense. Hardly
any women got a look-in, and when very occasionally they did, it was not as
creative artists or even patrons, but as hostesses, temptresses, Virgin Marys,
or something woolly called the “female principle”. Almost the only woman
credited, briefly, with an independent role was Elizabeth Fry, the prison
reformer – and, it so happens, the ancestor of one of Clark’s long-standing
mistresses.
Contested though they still are, it is far easier to
evaluate Clark’s TV programmes than the rest of his life. On the surface, his
was a golden career. Born in 1903 into a family of the idle rich (“many richer
… few idler”, as he put it), he made his way through school and university
against the usual background of loyal nannies, vicious schoolmasters and cranky
dons, before managing to get himself apprenticed briefly to the art historian
Bernard Berenson in Florence. A glittering CV followed: keeper of fine art at
the Ashmolean, director of the National Gallery, keeper of the king’s pictures,
chairman of the Independent Television Authority, and so on, ending up a member
of the Order of Merit, an august body that he found, predictably enough, full
of his old pals.
Reading between the lines of Stourton’s account, it seems
clear that he was good at big ideas, not so good at attention to detail (always
a peril for men, like Clark, who don’t actually need a salary to survive). His
tenure at the National Gallery is a case in point. Appointed when he was just
30 in 1933, he scored some great successes: he installed electric light; he
opened up early on FA Cup final day to encourage fans to visit; he masterminded
the evacuation of the major paintings to the Welsh mines during the second
world war; and he reinvented the gallery as a cultural centre for wartime
London (with hugely popular concerts organised by Myra Hess). Yet the staff
were almost entirely against him, and it was partly their opposition that led
to his resignation as soon as the war ended.
Clark’s supporters tend to paint his subordinates as
small-minded bureaucrats, narrow scholars or, occasionally, psychopaths; and so
they may have been. But one of Stourton’s anecdotes hints at a different story.
Clark was going home one evening when he was surprised to see a newspaper
hoarding: “National Gallery. Grave Scandal.” It turned out that one of the
gallery’s accountants had had his fingers in the till for years, and all had
been made public. Although director, Clark knew absolutely nothing about it.
It is dangerous to
investigate marital wars from beyond the grave, and even more presumptuous to
try to apportion blame
But it is women, again, who are the most uncomfortable part
of Clark’s story. His wife, Jane, had read history at Oxford; they married in
1927 and soon had three children (including Alan Clark MP, of Diaries and other
fame). By the end of the 30s, Clark “started being unfaithful to his wife” and
had multiple dalliances – “a vigorous private life” in Stourton’s euphemism –
until her death in 1976. Jane, meanwhile, is said to have become increasingly
difficult and dependent on alcohol and prescription drugs. It is always
dangerous to investigate marital wars from beyond the grave, and even more
presumptuous to try to apportion blame. But biographers should watch their
rhetoric and at least let the different parties keep their dignity. Stourton
tries, but does not always succeed.
There is little room for independent women in Stourton’s
version of Clark’s life. Jane wins his praise early on for her elegance and her
dress sense; she was “a natural and beautiful hostess”. When she doesn’t fit
that type, she gets written up as the monstrous, unstable spouse of a
long-suffering husband: “The more she tormented him, the more he sought solace
elsewhere.” Stourton occasionally recognises that this logic could be reversed:
“The more he screwed around, the more screwed up she got.” There are simply
different ground rules for men and women. When Clark breaks down and cries in a
gents’ lavatory in Washington DC in response to a rapturous reaction to
Civilisation, that is a sign of his sensitive ambivalence to fame. When the
women cry, they are being hysterical.
The mistresses generally fare no better than the wife.
Stourton only mentions in passing that Janet Stone, the descendant of Elizabeth
Fry and mistress of Clark for almost 30 years, was an important photographer in
her own right. But he does clearly see the poignant side of a discovery made
after Clark’s death: a box of letters from her that he had never bothered, or
brought himself, to open.
Clark’s television presentation of women as objects of
desire or inspiration was not all that far from the way women in his own life
continue to be portrayed: “a muse without a role”, as he once dubbed Jane.
• Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation is published by
HarperCollins.
Kenneth Clark: arrogant snob or saviour of art?
Famed for the TV series Civilisation, Clark has long been
accused of patrician arrogance. But he was also a brilliant wordsmith whose
books changed the game, argues James Hall
James Hall
Fri 16 May 2014 14.00 BST First published on Fri 16 May 2014
14.00 BST
Italians call the great 14th‑century authors Dante, Petrarch
and Boccaccio i tre coronati – the three crowned laureates. In Britain, during
the middle third of the 20th century, art history had its own tre coronati in
the formidable shapes of Nikolaus Pevsner, Ernst Gombrich and Kenneth Clark.
What made them stand out from their contemporaries both here and abroad was not
just their extraordinary erudition and prolific output, but an eloquence and
popularising skill that made them public figures. They became the subjects of
biographies, and many of their books remain in print. Pevsner, as the author of
the landmark Buildings of Britain series, could be found in countless car glove
compartments; Gombrich wrote the bestselling art book of all time, The Story of
Art; and Clark was the maker of a number of pioneering TV series that were broadcast
internationally, the most famous being Civilisation (1969).
Of the three, Clark's reputation is most in need of rescue.
Two people bear most responsibility for his eclipse: John Berger and Clark's
son Alan. Berger's brilliant TV series and book Ways of Seeing (1972) threw
down a lethal Marxist-feminist gauntlet to Clark's Olympian worldview. Clark is
the only art historian to be named, and he is cited and ticked-off twice over.
His description of Gainsborough's portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews on their
country estate in Landscape into Art (1949) as "enchanting" and
"Rousseauist" is denounced: "They are not a couple in Nature as
Rousseau imagined nature. They are landowners and their proprietary attitude
towards what surrounds them is visible in their stance and their
expressions." Berger well knew that Clark, thanks to substantial inherited
wealth (the family fortune came from Paisley cotton), had lived since 1955 in
Saltwood Castle in Kent surrounded by a moat and a large art collection that
included old masters and impressionists.
Berger also took to task The Nude: a study of ideal art
(1956), Clark's longest and most intellectually ambitious book: "Kenneth
Clark maintains that to be naked is simply to be without clothes, whereas the nude
is a form of art." While Berger concedes that the nude "is always
conventionalised", he insists it "also relates to lived
sexuality". The female nude is subservient to the male
"spectator-owner … men act and women appear". Civilisation ended with
Clark in his study at Saltwood fondling a Henry Moore reclining nude (he also
owned Renoir's Blond Bather).
If it has become hard not to consider Clark through
Berger-tinted spectacles, it is even harder not to blot out the "lived
sexuality" of his son – the Thatcher-adoring, boozy sexual predator Alan
Clark MP, whose sybaritic diaries outsold his father's art books, and who was
proud to be Lord Clark of Civilisation's barbaric antithesis (this roguish
persona was also a rebellion against Clark senior's diffidence and emotional
aloofness). When, in 1997, Alan Clark offloaded to the National Gallery his
father's serenely austere Zurbaran still-life, A Cup of Water and a Rose
(c1630), my admiration for Clark senior's discernment (and envy of his deep
pockets) was disturbed by a stray thought – did Clark junior get rid of it
because its sobriety irked him?
In many ways, Kenneth Clark became a victim of his meteoric
success, though what shouldn't be discounted was his patrician arrogance, which
many found infuriating. Having gone to Oxford to read history in 1922, he
entered the artistic circles around Charlie Bell, keeper of the Ashmolean, and
immersed himself in the museum's superb collection of old master drawings. Bell
was a pioneering aficionado of Victorian architecture, and he proposed the
subject of Clark's first book, The Gothic Revival (1928), published when he was
only 25. Despite lambasting "these monsters, these unsightly wrecks
stranded upon the mud flat of Victorian taste", Clark also admired certain
neogothic buildings and thus became a catalyst for the re‑evaluation
of Victorian architecture. He succeeded Bell at the Ashmolean in 1931, and,
having been groomed by the connoisseur Bernard Berenson and Bloomsbury art
critic Roger Fry, became, at 29, the youngest ever director of the National
Gallery two years later. During the war, he was a heroic figure because of his
patronage of British artists and especially the displays and concerts at the
National Gallery; after the war he became chair of the Arts Council and the
Independent Television Authority (a commercial regulator) – as well as a
prolific author, globe-trotting lecturer and consummate TV presenter. Of his
museum director successors, only Neil MacGregor – the second youngest director
of the National Gallery and now in charge at the British Museum – has the same
proselytising zeal and public profile.
Books such as Landscape into Art and The Nude are now
gleefully derided, but in their day they were ground-breaking surveys that
mapped and synthesised vast fields for the first time. The Nude singlehandedly
revived interest in antique sculpture and its influence on western art and
culture after a century of Ruskin-induced neglect. The subsequent vogue for
Grand Tour studies, and Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny's standard survey
Taste and the Antique (1981), are inconceivable without it (in an otherwise
positive review, Gombrich criticised Haskell and Penny for failing to mention
The Nude). Now there are shelfloads of books about nudity in art, all using The
Nude as springboard and whipping boy, and nudity has been a key component of
recent art.
Civilisation, a product of his seventh decade, hasn't worn
so well, despite its director Michael Gill's high production values. It is
marred by slack windbaggery and loose connections, but Clark's keen awareness
of the fragility of cultures – whether of the Vikings, Franks or Nazis –
commands respect: "At some time in the ninth century one could have looked
down the Seine and seen the prow of a Viking ship coming up the river. Looked
at today in the British Museum it is a powerful work of art; but to the mother
of a family trying to settle down in her little hut, it would have seemed less
agreeable – as menacing to her civilisation as the periscope of a nuclear
submarine." He wouldn't have approved of the British Museum's current
exhibition, Viking, in which the mass-murdering slave-traders are reinvented as
entrepreneurial free-traders. His views on housing seem positively prescient:
"If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a
minister of housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should
believe the buildings." Despite his hostility to Marxism – especially when
applied to art – the sections on the slave trade, the industrial revolution and
poverty remain powerful and moving indictments. Perhaps the most shocking thing
about Civilisation is the state of Clark's teeth.
Clark's critics have lamented his Eurocentrism; his patronage
of neo-romantic Nash, Piper, Sutherland and Moore (but not Bacon); and his
dislike of purist abstraction (Ben Nicholson's reliefs, which he nonetheless
collected, were less "cosmic symbols" than "tasteful pieces of
decoration"). But the condescension of posterity is disproportionate, and
not just because "it is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially
admire all schools of art" (Oscar Wilde). In retrospect, Clark was right
about purism: it was a cul-de‑sac, however magnificent at times.
Mondrian's road to abstraction is thrilling; once he gets there, his art
becomes drily academic and repetitious. In 1935, Clark published a pessimistic
essay in the Listener entitled "The Future of Painting", in which he
argued that a viable new style "can only arise out of a new interest in
subject matter … We need a new myth in which the symbols are inherently
pictorial." Jackson Pollock is a case in point – he yearned to infuse
abstract art with profound content and, by the time of his premature death, had
returned to semi-figuration. In post-1960s art and theory, impurism – conscious
and unconscious subject matter – is all the rage.
One of Clark's most radical and least remarked innovations
was his obsession with details. While director of the National Gallery, he
produced the first ever "details" book, which is still in print: One
Hundred Details from Pictures in the National Gallery (1938). Although it looks
like an amusing potboiler, it is his most influential book. Clark wanted to
encourage viewers to look more attentively at artworks, and to see images in a
fresh way. He juxtaposed details from pictures by different artists, often from
different periods, inviting his readers to compare and contrast. His interest
in details was fostered by his knowledge of the sleuthing techniques of
psychoanalysis.
The impact of Clark's book was immediate. In December 1938,
WH Auden wrote his celebrated poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" while
staying in Brussels. He must surely have had One Hundred Details on his desk or
in his mind's eye. The poem is a perfect amplification of Clark's thesis: it
explores the important entities sometimes located in the margins or background
of artworks, and human obliviousness to great events. One can go through
Auden's poem footnoting the relevant details in Clark's book:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the
torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
Auden's poem concludes with a meditation on Bruegel's
idyllic landscape in which a tiny Icarus crash-lands into the sea: "how
everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster".
Clark ends with a detail of the tiny crucifix that is hidden
in the midst of a charming animal-filled landscape in Pisanello's Vision of
Saint Eustace (c1438-42). There is no commentary: he lets the tragic,
easy-to-overlook image speak for itself.
Paradoxically, Berger exploited details in Ways of Seeing
and today's art historians are intoxicated by them – none more so than social
art historian TJ Clark (no relation), whose short book The Sight of Death
(2006) features 70 delirious details of two paintings by Poussin. The
fascinating exhibition currently at the National Gallery, Building the Picture,
could almost be dedicated to the former director, for it focuses on the
architecture in the background of Renaissance paintings. The curator, Amanda
Lillie, explains how the spotlight is on what is usually considered a minor detail:
"Buildings in paintings have too often been viewed as background or as
space fillers that play a passive or at best supporting role, propping up the
figures that carry the main message of the picture. By looking afresh at
buildings within paintings, treating them as active protagonists, it becomes
clear that they performed a series of crucial roles." She exhibits a
Beccafumi whose fantastic architecture was zoomed in on by Clark.
Above all, perhaps, Clark was a brilliant wordsmith, the
most seductive writer on art since Ruskin and Pater, whom he greatly admired.
Today, when most art historians write as joylessly as lawyers and accountants,
such verve is sorely needed. His writing is seen at its probing and evocative
best in his classic 1939 book on Leonardo, which remains the best introduction
to his art (the reprint has an excellent preface by Martin Kemp). Clark had
established himself as the world's leading Leonardo scholar in 1935, when his
great three-volume catalogue of the Leonardo drawings in the Royal Collection
was published.
His influential interpretation of Leonardo's grotesque heads
is a tour de force: rather than a frivolous hobby, as was often assumed, they
were made central by Clark to Leonardo's art and life. Clark was always
fascinated by polarities, especially between the ugly and the ideal, and this
underpinned his notorious distinction between the naked and the nude. He
inherited this preoccupation from late 19th-century decadent writers, and from
Freud. In Oxford in the 1920s, he alternated between studying the
"unsightly wrecks" of neogothic architecture, and the Ashmolean's
sumptuous sketches by Raphael and Michelangelo. See-sawing from the monstrous
to the supremely beautiful was the art historical equivalent of Wilde's The
Picture of Dorian Gray, where's Dorian's ageless beauty contrasts with his
disintegrating portrait.
But Leonardo was the greatest single embodiment of these
polarities. Having noted that he loved drawing freaks, Clark observed:
"Mixed with his motive of curiosity lay others, more profound: the motives
that led men to carve gargoyles on the gothic cathedrals. Gargoyles were the
complement to saints; Leonardo's caricatures were complementary to his untiring
search for ideal beauty. And gargoyles were the expression of all the passions,
the animal forces, the Caliban gruntings and groanings that are left in human
nature when the divine has been poured away." Clark's son Alan would take
it on himself to embody the "Caliban gruntings and groanings", leaving
the divine roles to his father.
Clark further believed that Leonardo's grotesque man with
"nut‑cracker nose and chin" was the counterpart to
"the epicene youth", and these types can be found scarcely modified
at all stages of Leonardo's career: "These are, in fact, the two
hieroglyphs of Leonardo's unconscious mind, the two images his hand created
when his attention was wandering, and as such they have an importance for us
which the frequent poverty of their execution should not disguise. Virile and
effeminate, they symbolise the two sides of Leonardo's nature … Even in his
most conscious creations, even in the Last Supper, they remain, as it were, the
armature round which his types are created".
Perhaps it's now time for the Caliban critical gruntings to
give way to a fairer assessment.
• James Hall is the
author of The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History (Thames & Hudson)
.
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