The other friendship Clark gained through the exhibition was with ‘that fascinating character, Charles Ricketts’.13 Ricketts, the quintessence of the 1890s, was an apostle of beauty, an all-round artist, stage designer, illustrator and art collector. When visitors later compared the Saltwood Castle art collection to I Tatti, they might just as accurately have referred to the eclectic splendour of that assembled by Charles Ricketts and his friend Charles Shannon. It was a marriage of love and taste – Japanese prints, early antiquities, drawings and paintings. ‘Can one ever be too precious?’ Ricketts once asked Clark, whose response was, ‘Quite right.’ Clark was always to have a soft spot for art collectors, and would put up with their eccentricities and egoism if they genuinely loved art. He was to write warmly of characters such as ‘Bogey’ Harris and Herbert Horne in his memoirs.14
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The Italian exhibition was a fabulous success with the public. There were 540,000 visitors, and the press was enthusiastic. As a result Clark enjoyed his first taste of social cachet with London hostesses who were hoping for an invitation to a Sunday-morning private view. This also marked the beginning of his lecturing career – he gave his first talk, on Botticelli, at the Chelsea home of St John Hornby.15 With his childhood love of acting and his teenage habit of soliloquy, lecturing came very naturally to Clark. But he was painfully aware that it encouraged ‘all the evasions and half-truths that I had learnt to practise in my weekly essays at Oxford’. He often wondered if it would have been better had he never taken this direction – in which he would be so spectacularly successful – reflecting that ‘the practice of lecturing not only ended my ambition to be a scholar (this might never have succeeded as I am too easily bored) but prevented me from examining problems of style and history with sufficient care’.16 Paradoxically, he was soon to start work on his greatest scholarly achievement.
While organising the Italian exhibition, Clark heard a lecture in Rome that was to have a profound influence on his life and work. Given by a man he described as ‘without doubt the most original thinker on art-history of our time’, Aby Warburg,17 it was delivered in German at the Bibliotheca Hertziana. Warburg liked to address one person when lecturing, and Clark was flattered that he ‘directed the whole lecture at me’. It lasted two hours, and by the end of it Clark had glimpsed an entirely new approach to looking at works of art. In his words, ‘instead of thinking of works of art as life-enhancing representations he [Warburg] thought of them as symbols, and he believed that the art historian should concern himself with the origin, meaning and transmission of symbolic images’.18 This was very far from the formalism of Roger Fry and the connoisseurship of BB. Clark later said: ‘His whole approach was entirely new to me, my knowledge of the German language was incomplete, and at the end of three hours I felt I had been riding in an intellectual Grand National. But it changed my life and I am eternally grateful.’19
Clark was deeply impressed by the possibilities this iconographical approach offered. It was particularly relevant for the interpretation of Renaissance art, with its dual freight of Christian and Classical symbolism. He began to ask very different questions in front of works of art. Until this point he had been preoccupied with the Berensonian questions of connoisseurship: when and where was this picture painted, and by whom? He now started to think more about the function of a work of art: why was it painted, what does it represent, in what circumstances was it painted, and above all, what does it mean? He later claimed that the chapter on ‘Pathos’ in his most admired book, The Nude, is ‘entirely Warburgian’. But in the end aesthetics were too important for Clark ever to be an ardent student of iconography, and the elucidation of detailed symbolism came to bore him.
Clark’s approach to art history was a synthetic and evolutionary affair, containing many elements, beginning with the poetic and descriptive literary inheritance of Hazlitt, Pater and Ruskin. He could already see the limitations of Roger Fry’s analysis of design (or formalism), but we can still detect this influence when he came to write his book on Piero della Francesca. The residual artist in Clark was focused – in a rather French way – on the creative process, and why artists did things in a particular way. Years later he was to tell one correspondent: ‘If my work has any value this is because I write from the point of view of an artist, and not as an academic.’20 He did not give up connoisseurship, and went on playing what he called ‘the attributions game’ – this was to cause him much trouble in future at the National Gallery. He was never to spend much time in archives, and once claimed that in the field of Renaissance art ‘the study of archives has made relatively little progress since the 1870s…and if these heroes of the first age of accumulation are seldom remembered today, except by the writers of footnotes, it is because posterity draws a distinction…between architecture and a ton of bricks’.21 This attitude would raise eyebrows within the profession.
The most unexpected element of Clark’s art history came from books he read in German – what he described as the historical interpretation of form and composition by Wölfflin, and Riegl’s study of the art-will.22 They brought a rigour and an analytical approach to Clark’s work that is seen to best advantage in The Nude. German art history freed Clark from the world of Edwardian connoisseurs and Bloomsbury. Finally, there was his new-found Warburgian interest in symbols and subject-matter; but he was sometimes critical of this approach if taken to extremes, where the crudest woodcut might be as valuable to study as a Raphael painting. He distrusted philosophical and metaphysical approaches to art history, and always steered clear of dogma, quoting Giovanni Morelli, who ‘loved to tease the professors who, “preferring abstract theories to practical examination are wont to look at a picture as if it were a mirror in which they see nothing but the reflection of their own minds” ’.23 Clark told a teenagers’ radio programme that the qualities of a good art historian are ‘imagination, sympathy, responding to works of art, knowing how to use documents and telling the truth’.24
While in Rome, Clark had one other unforgettable experience: a sight of the strange, rarely seen, very late Michelangelo frescoes in the Cappella Paolina in the Vatican. These represent the Martyrdom of St Peter and the Conversion of St Paul, and reduced Clark to an uncomprehending loss of words. Jane broke the silence: ‘They are tragic.’ The sight of these frescoes haunted Clark for the rest of his life, and they became the centrepiece for his 1970 Rede Lecture, ‘The Artist Grows Old’.
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Clark was starting to spread his wings across the art world even before the Italian exhibition. When a group of art historians that included Herbert Read, W.G. Constable and Roger Hinks suggested a History of Art Society to publish original books on the subject in English, Clark was proposed as the secretary. But, as he wrote to his mother, they all had different aims: ‘Constable is for scholarship, Read for philosophy, I for history,’ adding, ‘Personally I see no public that will swallow any chaff of German scholarship…I had a taste of pure scholarship last night, when I attended a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries, and it will do me for years. I would rather go to church.’25 In fact, Clark himself was about to face the limitations of British interest in intellectual German art history when he gave two lectures at London University on his heroes, Riegl and Wölfflin. It was a chastening experience, as he told BB: ‘They cost me infinite pains & were complete failures: only twenty people in a vast hall & of the twenty 15 were elderly ladies recruited by Jane. They neither heard nor understood a word, & my chairman greeted me at the end with the words “You don’t really think Riegl a serious writer, do you.” So ended the first effort to spread the gospel in Great Britain.’26
With the Italian exhibition behind him and the abandonment of Florentine Drawings, Clark needed a new project. ‘I was prevented from dispersing my faculties,’ he wrote, ‘by [an] offer from the newly appointed librarian at Windsor Castle.’27 Owen Morshead was an unusual courtier – scholarly, funny and affectionate, he was much admired by George V because he had wo
n both a DSO and an MC in the war. He had been impressed by Clark on his visits to the library to inspect the drawings (‘he has an austere quality of mind’, he told a friend28), and took an avuncular interest in his career. He had proposed the librarianship of the House of Lords to Clark, suggesting, ‘I think your wings must have to be clipped a bit.’29 Now Morshead offered Clark the chance to catalogue the extraordinary collection of Leonardo drawings in the Royal Collection. As Clark wrote: ‘This was one of the most important assignments that could be given to a scholar, and it is almost incredible that it should be handed to an unknown amateur of 25 with no standing. Owen Morshead took a big risk.’ ‘But,’ he added, ‘I think it came off.’30
Clark published his first article on Leonardo, an essay in Life and Letters, in 1929.31 This has two characteristics of all his later writings on the subject: the importance of understanding the wider intellectual interests of the man, and the necessity to demythologise him. He started work at Windsor the following year, and his catalogue took three years to complete. The mammoth task of researching and cataloguing six hundred drawings by the most diverse of all Renaissance artists should not be underestimated. There was virtually nothing to help him except a few unfinished nineteenth-century notes. It has never been established how the Leonardo drawings came to be at Windsor, but they were in the collection of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, in the early seventeenth century, and by the end of that century are recorded in the Royal Collection.
Clark’s catalogue was eventually published in 1935 by the Cambridge University Press, in a lavish edition for which Clark was paid fifty guineas. The Leonardo catalogue has always been his most admired work amongst the scholarly community. For the Leonardo specialist Martin Kemp, it set ‘the British standard for such publications’, within an attributional framework that has ‘stood up to sustained examination incredibly well’.32 Whenever critics have wanted to question Clark’s standing as a serious art historian, his defenders have always pointed to the Windsor catalogue as evidence of his ability to produce impressive scholarship on one of the most complex and difficult assault courses the discipline can offer. Clark himself modestly called it ‘my only claim to be considered a scholar’.
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Meanwhile, the Clarks were so miserable in their Westminster house that they travelled as much as possible. They visited the hotel at Sospel, which was failing as a business but was still a source of pleasure to share with their friends Maurice Bowra and John Sparrow. They even began house-hunting around Sudbourne, but Clark’s parents made it clear that they would only buy them a house near London. A solution presented itself when the Clarks were invited for lunch by the British Museum drawings scholar A.E. Popham at Twickenham, beside the river. The house was ‘full of reflected light and children’, and its charms persuaded them to look along the Thames in West London – which was also convenient for Windsor Castle. They found a beautiful Georgian house called Old Palace Place, on the site of the Tudor palace of Sheen, on Richmond Green. Clark wrote to his father, ‘I think I might get it and all the fixtures and a few optional oddments for £12,000…I am so glad you liked the look of the house and I must tell you that I am truly grateful for your offering to give it to me. I know you say it is only reasonable to give me the money now rather than later, but not all fathers are reasonable with their son especially when their sons have done so little to deserve it. We should be very proud indeed to live in such a fine house.’33
For the first time the Clarks possessed a house where they could proudly receive visitors and entertain. They knocked through two first-floor rooms to create a long drawing room, with seven tall windows, in which they could display their growing art collection. They hung the walls with old red silk, and at one end placed the lion of their collection, ‘a large heavy portrait by Tintoretto’. With the passage of time Clark came to feel this grand purchase was a mistake, and that the picture really belonged in a gallery. In future he was always to make a distinction between a ‘gallery’ picture and a ‘private’ one, and he eventually sold his Tintoretto.34 He had already formed a group of drawings, many of them acquired from the Fairfax Murray estate in Florence, and these were placed in the downstairs sitting room, where French windows opened onto the garden. Many of these drawings were to remain with Clark all his life, and were on his walls when he died. His favourite was Samuel Palmer’s Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star, bought from the sale of the artist’s son at Christie’s in 1928, which was later credited with influencing Graham Sutherland.
The Clarks were delighted with their new house. Jane wrote to Bowra, ‘your room is ready’, and Clark told his mother, ‘Even in the foggy weather Richmond is delightful…Lam stayed with us and took Alan for long walks.’35 They started giving ambitious dinner parties. Clark described one of them to his mother: ‘Our grand party was pretty good fun – less for me than for Jane who sat next to the PM [Ramsay MacDonald36] and got a lot out of him. I think you would like him, especially if you talked to him about France…about France he rivals my Father.’37 It was not only the great that they received. The young John Pope-Hennessy, then a schoolboy at Downside, has left an account of a visit: ‘When I rang the bell at the Old Palace, the door was opened by a young man of extraordinary charm, confidence and suavity…he showed me his drawings. Would I like him to tell me who did them, he asked, or would I prefer to form my own impressions? I said I had rather be told…I felt then (and for some years afterwards) that he was everything that I aspired to be.’38
Clark was enjoying his work, and a routine soon established itself. Each day he would catch a train from Richmond station to Windsor, where he worked in the library till lunchtime. He would have a snack in a teashop and then take the train home, ‘my pockets stuffed with notes’.39 He expected this peaceful and happy existence to last for many years, until one day ‘I received a telephone call from a character named Brigadier Sir Harold Hartley asking if he could call on me. It boded no good, and sure enough he came to invite me to become Keeper of the department of Fine Art in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.’40
9
The Ashmolean
You certainly would be in clover to be in such a toy-shop for grown-ups.
BERNARD BERENSON to Kenneth Clark, 10 June 19311
The circumstances of C.F. Bell’s forced resignation from his position as Keeper of Fine Art at the Ashmolean Museum by the university authorities are unclear. Certainly he ran his department as a private fiefdom, and was frequently obstructive to both students and collectors. Lord Lee of Fareham was treated with such disdain by Bell that he switched the bequest of his art collection from Oxford to London.*1 As early as 1928, Clark had written to Berenson suggesting that Bell was ‘thinking seriously of retiring. So his great life’s work of preventing people seeing the drawings in the Ashmolean may be ruined. Much as I love him, it will be a good thing for Oxford and students generally when a more liberal spirit rules the Ashmolean.’2 It was, however, not for another three years that Clark found himself turning to BB for advice: ‘I have been offered Charlie Bell’s post at the Ashmolean. I did not stand for it, partly because a friend of mine named Ashton was standing, but apparently he and all the other candidates have been turned down and they have come to me in despair…I am very much tempted, though it means leaving our lovely house and garden, which really distresses me, as well as costing several thousand pounds. Please forgive my bothering you, and let me know what you think.’3
The Ashmolean is the oldest public museum in Britain. It was given to the university by Elias Ashmole in 1683 as a collection of curiosities, and has grown far beyond the founder’s imagining. In 1908 the museum was amalgamated with the University Gallery and went from strength to strength, augmented by gifts and bequests, many of them princely. The Ashmolean is a scholar’s museum, ‘a collection of collections’ with a complex history of amalgamations and transformations. In Clark’s time it was divided into two: an archaeological department with its own keeper, and a fine art de
partment with outstanding Western and Oriental art, and – as we have seen – a particular strength in drawings. It was this keepership that Clark was offered. His department also housed the glorious Fox-Strangways collection of early Italian pictures, including Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest.
BB answered shrewdly: ‘It is a most flattering offer. You certainly would be in clover to be in such a toy-shop for grown-ups…You would at the same time take a high rank among the dignitaries of a great university where so recently you were a mere boy…The advantages are so real, so splendid, & so alluring that you would – perhaps – do well to seize them. On the other hand the post will fix you down in the world of collectors, curators, dons…My dear Kenneth you still are so young that I venture yet once again – but positively for the last time – to ask you to reconsider what you are doing.’4 Despite BB’s plea, Clark accepted the position, explaining to him that it was ‘partly that I should have, as you say, so many lovely toys to play with, and partly that it really gets me out of the Burlington world’5 – by which he meant the London art world exemplified by the Burlington Magazine, Burlington House and the Burlington Fine Arts Club. He had seen this world at ugly close quarters during the Italian exhibition.
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Clark’s appointment to the Keepership of Fine Art at the Ashmolean was in some ways more astonishing than his National Gallery directorship, which was to come three years later. Oxford was a conservative place, where age and rank took precedence, and he was still only twenty-seven. Nothing is known about the reason for his appointment. It was welcomed by Bell – with whom Clark had not yet had his final break: ‘I don’t think I ever could have felt so happy and contented. It is far better than being followed by a son…for even in moments of the most soaring fantasy I never could imagine myself producing a son with your intellect and sympathetic temperament.’6 At this stage Bell preferred to see the appointment as the result of his own patronage, writing acidly to the University Registrar: ‘I cannot help reflecting that it is fortunate for the Museum that the new Keeper happens to be an old Friend and Pupil of my own, so that the transfer of the duties will be as smooth and the interruption of business as slight as we can possibly make them by mutual give and take. Certainly the Visitors [i.e. the museum’s trustees] have no reason to congratulate themselves for having brought about this happy coincidence.’7
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