Anybody who looks at Clark’s book for a description of the movement’s great buildings – Barry and Pugin’s Houses of Parliament apart – or for an account of its great architects will be disappointed. Gilbert Scott features as a rather cynical, commercial figure whose merits Clark did not at that time sufficiently recognise.*3 As for Butterfield, Waterhouse, Burges and Street, they are barely mentioned. It was only as he was completing the book that the quality of their work dawned on Clark, as he later admitted when it was republished: ‘I was not sufficiently sure of my ground. I felt fairly certain that Street was a great architect but could not say why.’15
As mentioned earlier, Clark had been much influenced by Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism, a then fashionable book which attempted to expose Victorian architectural fallacies under the headings ‘Romantic’, ‘Mechanical’, ‘Ethical’ and ‘Biological’.16 Clark applied Scott’s fallacies to the interpretation of his own subject, and posited a false antithesis between Pugin and Scott. This was pointed out in an otherwise admiring review by the architect Harry Goodhart-Rendel, the most sensitive and knowledgeable contemporary interpreter of Victorian architecture. His 1924 lecture at the RIBA had been a stepping stone towards understanding the movement, and Clark referred to him as ‘the father of us all’. He gently took Clark to task for believing that there is a rule of taste.17
Despite its limitations, The Gothic Revival was a successful, pioneering and much-admired book, not least for the elegance of its prose, and is still read with pleasure today. The brilliant young critic John Summerson described it as ‘a small, exquisite and entirely delightful book’,18 and the architect Stephen Dykes Bower called it ‘a very good book’, but regretted its failure to deal with the main architects: ‘the missing quarter is the most important. Mr Clark has gained the ramparts; and had his courage mounted with the occasion, he might have stormed the citadel’.19 The TLS was equally admiring: ‘Mr Clark’s insistence on the scenic value of the Revival is one of the acutest points in the book. It allows him to try in the court of the picturesque works that would suffer if brought before a strictly architectural tribunal.’20 What these reviews reveal is how timely the book was. Today it can be seen as part of the neo-Victorianism of the 1920s: John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, and Christopher Hussey’s important book on The Picturesque published in 1927, and perhaps even a distant relative of the whimsical Victorian revival of Harold Acton and Evelyn Waugh.
When the publisher Michael Sadleir21 proposed a new edition of The Gothic Revival in 1949, Clark reopened the book after a twenty-year interval and responded, ‘I expected to find the history inaccurate, the entertainment out of date, the criticism relatively sound. But it is the criticism which has worn least well.’22 It was republished in 1950, and the TLS ran a leader welcoming it, but pointing out its inherent contradictions. Clark did not change the text, which he felt was a period piece, but added some self-lacerating footnotes, two of which will give a flavour:
Text: King’s College Chapel is not completely successful and would be less so if it were a church and stood alone.
Clark 1949 footnote: I forget now why I thought it grand to be so critical of King’s College chapel.
Text: The result is a series of erosions and excrescences, breaking the line of our streets, wasting valuable ground space, and totally disregarding the chief problem of modern civil architecture.
Clark 1949 footnote: This is the stupidest and most pretentious sentence in the book. I knew little enough about ‘modern civil architecture’, but if I had stopped to think for a second would have realised that the beauty of all towns depends on the ‘waste of valuable ground space’; and I had not to go further than Oxford High Street to see what beauty a street can derive from its line being broken by erosions and excrescences.
Clark’s autobiography states that ‘having delivered the book to a publisher…I was free to turn back to my true centre, Italian art’, and implies that he went straight to Leonardo da Vinci.23 But in fact he contemplated and toyed with a number of very ambitious projects which reflect his continuing admiration for Austrian and German art history and his desire to emulate Riegl and Wölfflin. He described one to his mother: ‘My imagination is fired by the great subject which I have long been starting and I now definitely approach – The Classical Revival.’24 He was still nominally collecting material for Berenson, and tried out one suggestion on his mentor: ‘Of course work for the Florentine Drawings cannot consume all my time…Many plans have occurred to me, the most ambitious and the one which seems to me most worth doing is some study of the conflict between classicism & baroque which seems to have absorbed the Italian spirit during the late 16th & early 17th century. I should like to put Raphael & Michelangelo into two slots at the top and see them come out Poussin and Rubens at the bottom…Do you think it is worth attempting?’25
The project he outlined never developed, although he was later to show a parallel interest in the conflict between Neoclassicism and the Romantic Movement. However, there was another idea that was to tease Clark for the next fifty years. A notebook in his archive, dated 1928, reveals the beginning of a lifelong obsession with what he believed would be his ‘great book’, to which he frequently returned: Motives. The cryptic note reads: ‘write a Study in the History of Ornament tracing the change of character in various well known motives. By taking the history of one motive, one is able to concentrate on changes of form. The ornaments must have had at least three incarnations – Classical, Medieval & Renaissance…& Oriental, Baroque & Modern. Collect subjects beginning with: 1. Mermaids 2. Greek masters [?] 3. Horses & chariots etc.’26 The project, which owed much to Riegl, was an attempt to interpret design as a revelation of a state of mind, and changes of style, as for example that from the Classical to the early medieval, not as a decadence but as a change of will.27 By examining a recurrent theme he hoped it would be possible to express the unity of form and subject – the essence of a work of art. Clark returned to Motives at various points of his life, notably when he was Slade Professor, but confessed in his autobiography that ‘I had neither the intelligence nor the staying power to achieve such an ambition, but it has haunted me ever since, and although I have not written my “great book” I know what kind of book it ought to have been.’28 Motives was even to become one of his principal arguments against making Civilisation.29
—
In May 1929 Berenson finally decided to drop any pretence about his relations with Clark. He wrote from Baalbek in Lebanon: ‘I think I must let you know after having thought it over as well as I know how, I have decided that we had better give up our plan of collaborating on the new edition of the Florentine Drawings…I shall need not a collaborator but an assistant…It would be absurd to expect you to leave house and wife and child and friends to devil for a cantankerous old man…I want you to believe, dear Kenneth, that it is to save our friendship that I am giving up our working together.’30 Once he had recovered from the initial upset, Clark would have realised that Berenson was right. Besides, he was about to embark on a great adventure in the London art world, and one of which BB would not approve.
* * *
*1 Letter from C.F. Bell to Mary Berenson, 2 June 1927 (I Tatti). An undated letter (c.1927) to Berenson provides Bell’s view of Jane Clark: ‘I wish he had made a better marriage. I do not like his wife, she is sly and insincere.’ He did, however, like to emphasise Jane’s role in saving, typing and reading The Gothic Revival, perhaps as a way of underlining her husband’s fickleness.
*2 Letter to G.M. Young, 29 June 1949 (Tate 8812/1/2/7235). Clark erroneously believed that Pugin was entirely forgotten, and was unaware that Hermann Muthesius had written about him in Die neuere Kirchliche Baukunst in England (1900).
*3 ‘One great difference between Gilbert Scott and ourselves: he believed that he built very good Gothic, we that he built very bad.’ (Clark, The Gothic Revival, p.182.)
8
The Italian Exhibition
&nbs
p; What a horrible affair the whole thing is! I wonder if…Italian friendship is worth the risk?
LORD BALNIEL to Kenneth Clark1
On 18 December 1929 there sailed into the East India Docks in East London the greatest cargo of art ever brought to Britain’s shores. The priceless hoard of over three hundred works – paintings, sculpture and drawings – was placed in the hold of a single boat, the Leonardo da Vinci, which made its way from Genoa through winter storms off the coast of Brittany to London. With it came Kenneth Clark’s first great opportunity in the London art world: his involvement in the extraordinary exhibition of Italian art that opened at the Royal Academy on 1 January 1930.
The exhibition’s aims were shamelessly political – it was an attempt by Mussolini to promote italianita, or what Francis Haskell, in his entertaining account of the saga, described as ‘Botticelli in the service of Fascism’.2 With enthusiastic support from Il Duce, the loaned works of art were of a quality and importance inconceivable outside a fascist state. They included virtually every major painting that was judged safe to make the journey from Italy to London: Masaccio’s Crucifixion, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Giorgione’s Tempesta, Titian’s Portrait of an Englishman, and the pair of portraits that had brought Clark to his knees in the Uffizi, Piero della Francesca’s Duke and Duchess of Urbino. The irresponsibility of consigning so many of the world’s art treasures to such risks was widely condemned at the time. ‘Naturally,’ wrote Clark, ‘all right thinking lovers of art were horrified by this piece of vandalism – none more so than Mr Berenson.’3 So why did Clark become one of the principal organisers of the exhibition? It was an irresistible opportunity to catalogue some of the greatest paintings in the world that no ambitious young man could forgo.
The idea of the exhibition had in fact been born in Britain. During the previous decade a series of successful London exhibitions, each with a different national theme, had been held at the Royal Academy: Spanish paintings, Flemish art, and Dutch art. The last two were not actually organised by the Academy, which levied a rental fee for the use of its galleries. These promising precedents gave Lady Chamberlain, the formidable wife of the Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, the idea for an even more ambitious exhibition of Italian art. She and her husband were enthusiastic Italophiles, and it was her vision, energy and connections that brought the exhibition into being. It came, however, at a shocking cost in strained relationships between the two countries.
All started reasonably well. Lady Chamberlain and the collector Sir Robert Witt4 put together a committee in the second half of 1927, which elected her as chair. The historical range of the exhibition was agreed to be 1300–1900, mostly paintings, but also drawings, sculpture, manuscripts and ceramics. Loans – all chosen by a London selection committee – were sought from museums and private collections across Europe, but well over half would come from Italy. At the Italian end, Ettore Modigliani was appointed to organise the exhibition. His qualifications were excellent: director of the Brera Museum for twenty years, and Soprintendente delle Belle Arti of Lombardy – but his distinction was lost on Clark, whose aversion to bores got the better of him. He described Modigliani as ‘a ridiculous figure by any standards and must have risen to high office by sheer volubility. He never stopped talking for a second, and hard-pressed officials must have given him anything he wanted just to get rid of him.’5 Haskell, from an examination of Modigliani’s life, thought this was an unfair caricature.
The support of Mussolini was crucial to realising the high ambitions of the organisers, which, Modigliani hoped, would épater the English and show that despite recent history, Italy was still a great lady.6 Mussolini wanted to impress Austen Chamberlain, and brought enormous pressure to bear on reluctant Italian lenders, whether public or private, to accede to British requests. He personally intervened with the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan for the loan of Pollaiuolo’s Portrait of a Lady, which in the event became the exhibition poster. But the Italian leader finally lost his patience when Lady Chamberlain refused to take no for an answer over Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love in the Villa Borghese. The British Ambassador in Rome informed her: ‘It appears that Mussolini is thoroughly fed up with the question of the pictures and can’t bear any mention of them.’7 Any good the exhibition might have done for Anglo–Italian relations was soon wiped out by the Abyssinia crisis.
The main problems for Lady Chamberlain and her committee, however, were domestic: the London art world was a political minefield. Roger Fry, one of the moving spirits of the exhibition, had for years been in a feud with Berenson (mostly over the Burlington Magazine, which Fry had edited), who was against it. Key figures on the committee, Robert Witt and Lord Lee of Fareham,8 were regarded with contempt and dislike by their colleagues. Nor was Berenson alone in resisting the exhibition: Clark’s other mentor, C.F. Bell, was fiercely against it. Not only did he think it irresponsible, but he had no wish to denude his newly arranged museum. Lady Chamberlain appealed unsuccessfully over his head to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, and eventually a Tiepolo oil sketch was coaxed out of the Ashmolean. The Royal Academy, however, turned out to be by far the greatest obstacle. The organising committee was outraged when it demanded 50 per cent of all profits as well as a gallery hire fee. This turned into a long and bitter row. Then, to add to the committee’s woes, the National Gallery refused to lend any of its paintings; but at least it provided what Clark referred to – de haut en bas – as ‘an industrious official’ named W.G. Constable to arrange the exhibition. The various hostilities gathered pace, so that by the time Clark was appointed to assist with the catalogue he described the situation as ‘like a battlefield at nightfall. The principal combatants were exhausted and had retired to their own quarters, surrounded by their attendants; but their enmities continued unabated.’9
Clark’s appointment by the committee to assist Constable was a sensible choice. He had the practical experience and prestige of having worked with Berenson, he had just enough knowledge of Italian collections, and, perhaps most important of all, was ‘a new member of their circle who was not influenced by their old feuds’. The young man had a novelty value, and all the competing parties thought he was on their side. Clark had a chameleon aspect to his character which always enabled him to play with opposing factions, and this becomes very evident later in his career with his dealings with politicians from all sides. In practical terms his appointment to the Italian exhibition meant three things: he would sit on the selection committee, he would catalogue the pictures that came from outside Italy,10 and finally he would be allowed to hang the exhibition. Very little is known about which members of the committee selected the paintings, or indeed what the exhibition looked like. Constable, with whom Clark got on well, gave him a free hand. Clark wrote to Umberto Morra: ‘As you may have heard I was inveigled onto the Italian Exhibition committee and I bitterly regret it. Besides annoying BB and causing some resentment among those of my elders and betters who are not on, it has meant a lot of co-operative work. It has however had an excellent result. It has pleased my parents who find it a recognizable form of success, and will acquiesce more quietly in my future inactivity.’11
Contrary to the impression he gave Morra, Clark was enjoying himself very much. Hanging paintings was his favourite activity, and to be given the opportunity to hang six hundred of the finest Italian pictures in the world was all he could ever hope for. He deliberately left Botticelli’s Birth of Venus until last, and – having gathered everybody to watch – had the painting hauled up from the basement, enjoying the coup de théâtre as she slowly rose into the gallery. His main responsibility, the catalogue, he described as ‘by a long chalk, the worst catalogue of a great exhibition ever printed’.12 He blamed himself: ‘I simply did not know enough.’ He was momentarily overlooking the fact that at least five people had a hand in the catalogue entries. Haskell thought that retrospective guilt at his involvement in a piece of fascist propaganda so coloured Clark’s judgement that he w
as misleadingly dismissive about his own capabilities, as well as those of his colleagues. Two of these colleagues were to become friends, one of them lifelong.
Clark always maintained that for him the best thing to come out of the Italian exhibition was his friendship with David, then Lord Balniel, later the Earl of Crawford. Balniel came from an ancient Scots family that had produced generations of cultivated art collectors and bibliophiles. The family art collection contained Renaissance paintings and works of art assembled by Ruskin’s mentor, Lord Lindsay. Clark shared with his father a slight horror of aristocracy, but made an exception for David Balniel, who devoted much of his life to pro bono public service in the arts. Their paths were to remain entwined. At the time of the Italian exhibition, Clark thought that Balniel knew far more about the subject than he did.
Kenneth Clark Page 10