Also by James Stourton
The Dictionary of Art (contributor)
Great Smaller Museums of Europe
Great Collectors of Our Time: Art Collecting Since 1945
The British as Art Collectors: From the Tudors to the Present (with Charles Sebag-Montefiore)
Great Houses of London
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2016 by James Stourton
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by William Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, London, in 2016.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016940293
ISBN 978-0-385-35117-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-385-35116-4 (ebook)
Ebook ISBN 9780385351164
Front-of-cover photograph by Irving Penn, England, 1958 © The Irving Penn Foundation
Cover design by Oliver Munday
v4.1_r1
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To Colette, Jane and Fram
Contents
Cover
Also by James Stourton
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Illustrations
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’
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Illustrations
Illustrations
Unless otherwise stated, images are from the Clark family archives.
1Sudbourne Hall, Suffolk.
2Kenneth Mackenzie Clark the elder.
3Clark as a child in Suffolk.
4Miss Lamont (‘Lam’), Clark’s childhood governess.
6Maurice Bowra, 1958. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
7William Strang, Portrait of Charles Francis Bell, 1913. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
8Clark in the Gryphon Club, Oxford, 1925.
9Bernard Berenson and Nicky Mariano.
10Clark circa 1941.
11Jane Clark, photographed by Man Ray. © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016.
12Clark, King George V and Queen Mary leaving the National Gallery, 25 March 1934.
13Bellevue, on Philip Sassoon’s Port Lympne estate.
14Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Henry Moore and Clark. Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation.
15John Piper at Fawley Bottom. © Bill Brandt Archive.
16Clark enjoys a bibulous train journey to Leeds with Henry Moore, Myfanwy Piper and Colin Anderson.
17Alan and Colette, with Tor. Photograph by Douglas Glass.
18Upton House in Tetbury Upton, Gloucestershire.
19Van Dyck stuck under a bridge, heading for the Manod Caves. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
20Queues for a wartime concert at the National Gallery. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
21Clark conducting Leopold Mozart’s Toy Symphony at a National Gallery concert on New Year’s Day 1940.
22Clark and Jane at home at Upper Terrace House, Hampstead.
23Seurat, Cézanne and Renoir in the sitting room at Upper Terrace.
24Colin Anderson and Henry Moore with Clark, Jane and Colin.
25Clark’s muse and confidante, Janet Stone.
26Clark speaking at the inaugural banquet for independent television at the Guildhall, 22 September 1955. © TopFoto.
27Clark at Saltwood. Photo by Terence Spencer/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images.
28Clark in the study at Saltwood. Photo by Terence Spencer/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images.
29Filming the opening scene of Civilisation. © BBC Photo Library.
30Clark in the great hall at Saltwood. Photo by Terence Spencer/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images.
31Clark with Nolwen at the Garden House, Saltwood.
32Nolwen’s château, Parfondeval, Normandy. © Guillaume de Rougemont.
33Clark filming In the Beginning in Egypt, November 1974.
The drawing by John Betjeman on this page is from John Betjeman: Letters, Vol I: 1926–1951, edited by Candida Lycett Green. Reproduced by permission of Methuen Publishing Limited.
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.
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, Aesthe
te’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 on this page). 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 Wood1
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.
Kenneth Clark Page 1