The main obstacle to the plan that was being hatched between Clark and his benefactor was the problem of where and how Gulbenkian’s will could be managed to allow his entire estate to bypass both his family and taxes. As early as 1937 Clark was seeking advice from the legal adviser to the British Embassy in Paris about the difference between ‘domicile’ and ‘residence’, and the implications of making an English will.45 This last matter was central to Gulbenkian’s concerns; he did not want to pay British death duties, but was equally opposed to a French will, which would have forcibly given a third of his estate to his family, ‘a thought’ that according to Clark ‘greatly distressed him’.46 These were fairly insuperable barriers, but there was also another, less predictable, problem. As Clark explained to Lord Balniel, by now chairman of the trustees: ‘There seems to be no doubt that he [Gulbenkian] is going to go through with his benefaction in the course of the next year if we can agree to his terms. He has authorised me to spend another £2,000 on plans and models and when these are to his liking he will draw up a legal and what he insists on calling a “moral” scheme for the gift. The cost of the building has been estimated at about £150,000. I think it will be rather more but this does not seem to deter him in the least. The only thing that worries him is that we cannot offer him a big enough garden, and if the scheme does not come off it will be solely because of his horticultural obsession.’47
The letters between Clark and Gulbenkian are businesslike, mostly about specific works of art, usually paintings, and always formal in their manner of address. In a typical early example, Clark is suggesting the publication of a short catalogue of the pictures and alerting Gulbenkian to a Bellini from Charles I’s collection that was for sale on the London market. As he became more confident in the relationship, Clark would draw Gulbenkian’s attention to items on which the National Gallery had passed, such as a Rubens of the Archduke Albert and a Terborch portrait of a woman.48 Finally Clark turned to him to buy items that the gallery would like to own but could not afford, in the hope that they would one day join the rest of Gulbenkian’s ‘children’ at Trafalgar Square.
One of the collections that was always on the radar of the director of the National Gallery was the Cook collection, held at Doughty House on Richmond Hill. It was a late-nineteenth-century collection, full of masterpieces including important Renaissance paintings and Rembrandt’s beguiling Portrait of Titus. Sir Herbert Cook died in 1939, and Gulbenkian, never one to miss a chance, wrote to ask Clark whether anything would be sold. Clark had a clear conflict of interest with the National Gallery as he described the collection, and in particular the Titus portrait, to his benefactor, but he thought that nothing would happen immediately.49 Gulbenkian was unconvinced: ‘I think the matter will require your urgent attention in order that we should not miss such a fine opportunity.’50 Later in the month Clark took Gulbenkian down to Richmond, and shortly afterwards they made an offer through the Cook family’s lawyer for Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Small Boy [Titus] and Benozzo Gozzoli’s Madonna and Child with Angels. The Cook trustees prevaricated, and matters rumbled on through the war, but Gulbenkian never managed to secure them.*1 The continuing story of Gulbenkian belongs to another chapter.
The Cook executors and trustees were to prove a thorn in Clark’s flesh. Several of the Cook paintings, including a most desirable Van Eyck, a Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi team effort, and Titian’s La Schiavona, were on the gallery’s list of paramount paintings. The Cook family had always enjoyed close links with Trafalgar Square, and various promises were believed to have been made with regard to the future – to which the executors of the collection, whose priorities were different, felt under no obligation. ‘They are Shits,’ wrote Lord Crawford in a rare outburst,51 and Sir Robert Witt of the National Art Collections Fund complained that ‘the greed of a degenerate Baronet has done us down!’ Having no purchase funds available, Clark even proposed to Lord Crawford selling ‘a few of our redundant pictures? It will create a most appalling row, however as Mr Gulbenkian says – “The dogs howl, the caravan passes” – and the great thing is that we should secure the Fra Filippo and the Van Eyck.’52 He went to the Treasury to see if it would advance the money, but by then war had broken out and it was impossible to expect any government largesse – or to call upon Gulbenkian. The Van Eyck and the Lippi were eventually sold abroad;*2 however, the Titian was presented to the gallery by the family in 1942. Clark had had more luck with the Duke of Buccleuch, who in 1938 offered another irresistible painting, Rembrandt’s portrait of his wife, Saskia, which Clark was able to acquire for the gallery for £28,000.
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At the end of 1937 the question arose of Lord Duveen’s reappointment to the board for a further term. The gallery chairman at the time, Samuel Courtauld, was opposed, as was another trustee, Lord Bearsted. Clark agreed with them, believing that the reappointment would be a disaster. Furthermore, Gulbenkian had attached a condition to any gift that there should be no dealer on the trustee board. But Duveen had strong supporters in Sassoon, d’Abernon and Charteris, who told Clark, ‘Surely the policy of hitting a gift horse in the mouth with a crowbar is not only a little brutal but extremely unwise.’ As a group they had more political cunning than their opponents. What happened next is a matter of some doubt. Clark left an account in his autobiography, and also placed an account in the files of the Burlington Magazine: ‘When the vacancy occurred I asked permission to see [the Prime Minister] Mr. Chamberlain. I am not likely to forget the interview, which took place in the Cabinet room: Mr. Chamberlain on the opposite side of the green baize table looking like a starved and hungry vulture. On my stating my purpose he said, “It is too late, I have promised Sassoon and Charteris and I have already informed Duveen that he has been re-appointed.” I asked permission to state my case at greater length. At the end of ten minutes Mr. Chamberlain said, “You have convinced me; I will ring up Duveen (who was in America) and revoke the appointment”: which he very courageously did.’53 The problem with this account is that the records show that it was Lord Balniel and Courtauld who saw the Prime Minister, and not Clark.54 Whether or not his account was a second-hand one (which seems likely), Duveen’s friends assumed that his intervention had carried the day. Sassoon was furious, and wouldn’t speak to Clark for three months, while Charteris calmly told Clark, ‘You do not know what harm you have done.’55 When he came to write his autobiography Clark looked back on his own position as ‘a piece of priggish nonsense’, but his change of mind was influenced by the fact that Duveen died a year later of cancer.
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One of Clark’s responsibilities was the Tate Gallery, which at that time was still an uneasy dependency of Trafalgar Square. Paintings for the Tate were offered to the National Gallery board meetings, as the Tate had no purchase grant of its own. The main point of contention was the customary division of paintings, and at what point, and by what criteria, paintings should pass from the Tate to the National Gallery.*3 The feeling at Trafalgar Square was that the Tate was too weak to deserve to keep the finest pictures, a position that caused resentment, but Clark bent over backwards in his efforts to be fair to the Tate, for which he had great sympathy.56 Much depended on the relationship between the two directors, and fortunately Clark got on well with the painter James Bolivar Manson, who directed the Tate. Manson was a charmer with a twinkle, whose acquisitive vision Clark thought was limited to pictures ‘more or less in the style of himself and his friends’.57 He kept Picasso out of the Tate, and refused the Stoop collection58 for the same reason. Herbert Read’s Art Now, published in 1933, had offered a view of European avant-garde art which made the Tate appear hopelessly insular and behind the times.
But Manson’s most obvious disadvantage was his drinking. The chairman, Evan Charteris, had a soft spot for his errant director, and would deploy all his powers of advocacy to rescue him from scrapes. ‘Evan had decided to champion the Tate gallery,’ Clark told Jane, adding that Philip Sassoon complained: ‘My
dear, if you even hint to Evan that Manson’s ever drunk anything but milk he flies into a rage!’59 Manson finally went too far at the opening of the British exhibition at the Louvre in 1938. Clark organised this exhibition, hoping to escape the dealers’ view of British art and do justice to such artists as Samuel Palmer and William Blake. He thought it contained ‘the best collection of British painting ever assembled’, with three living artists – Walter Sickert, Augustus John and Wilson Steer. Manson’s downfall came at the opening banquet at the Hôtel George V. Clark always enjoyed the story, not least because the French press attributed Manson’s behaviour to the young director of the National Gallery: ‘Quite early in the meal ominous farmyard noises came from one of the small tables where Manson was seated…By the second course these had been succeeded by remarkably life-like and penetrating “cock-a-doodle-do’s” at which point Manson set out on his peregrinations.’60 He went off in search of more to drink, and on the way leered at the delicate wife of the British Ambassador, ‘I’ll show you something that isn’t in the Tate Gallery…’61
After Manson’s inevitable departure, John Rothenstein was appointed as his successor. He was to become one of the Tate’s most successful directors. Clark wrote to him to express ‘relief to have a reasonable being at the Tate who does not envisage the relations of the Tate and the National Gallery as a continual guerrilla warfare’.62 Rothenstein found Clark decisive and knowledgeable, and wrote that their seven years as colleagues had ‘never, so far as I recall, been flawed by the smallest disharmony’, which was quite a feat.63 Clark told Rothenstein when he was appointed, ‘You have in Evan an admirable Chairman. But when you see his face assume a dreamy, far-away look, take care.’64 Evan Charteris had by this time become thoroughly disenchanted with Clark, no doubt partly as a result of the Duveen affair, but also because Clark was turning into a controversial figure amongst his colleagues. Lord Crawford’s diary records the two prevailing views about Clark at the beginning of 1938: ‘Evan was full of complaints about Kenneth Clark, “the young dictator has faults, and doesn’t know how to behave, puts people’s backs up and makes unnecessary enemies”; but to me his virtues far outweigh his faults. His energy, drive, imagination and brilliant mental gifts are all at the service of the Gallery and he has done more there already than has been done for generations.’65 But unfortunately Clark had played directly into the hands of his detractors, as we shall see.
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*1 Clark bought the Benozzo Gozzoli for the National Gallery in 1945. The Rembrandt was the subject of a notorious auction sale in 1965, when it was bought by Norton Simon.
*2 In 1939 they were offered to the gallery for £150,000 and £60,000 respectively – prices so high that Clark believed the family were deliberately seeking a refusal by the gallery in order to sell abroad.
*3 The National Gallery contains the nation’s collection of Old Master paintings, whereas the Tate held exclusively British paintings and what were deemed as modern works of art. This was generally defined with a cut-off around 1900, but was never exact.
14
Lecturing and Leonardo
Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.
KENNETH CLARK, Leonardo da Vinci
With Clark’s arrival at the National Gallery, his ability to find the time to write scholarly books was drastically curtailed. His ambitious plans for works on Classical art, motives and symbols were all put on hold. However, lecturing was still possible and desirable for any public figure in the arts. Throughout the 1930s he gave scores of talks, some impromptu and others polished for publication. The appearance of Clark’s Windsor Leonardo drawings catalogue in 1935 established his scholarly credentials, and the book received considerable applause. The Times Literary Supplement devoted a leading article to a review praising Clark’s ‘quiet precision’.1 It admired his wide knowledge, but also his practical sense in distinguishing the master from the pupils by the simple explanation that, since Leonardo was left-handed, the diagonal strokes of his drawings always run down from left to right.2 The enthusiastic response of his young protégé John Pope-Hennessy particularly pleased Clark: ‘There is nothing nicer than to be praised by people younger than oneself. The old become slack and maudlin…but the young are always ferocious.’3
Many of the reviewers expressed the hope that Clark would use the knowledge he had gained at Windsor to write a shorter general life of the artist, a point not lost on him. When he was invited to give the prestigious Ryerson Lectures at Yale, he chose as his subject Leonardo da Vinci’s development as an artist. The lecture series had the additional benefit of taking him to America for the first time. Clark was to blow hot and cold about the USA over the next twenty years, but he was very enthusiastic about his first trip.4
The Clarks’ arrival in the United States in 1936 made headlines owing to a press interview in which he remarked that the recent Depression had hit only bad art. While fashionable portrait painters were without work, he said, the good artists went on selling; he added the doubtful proposition that ‘good paintings fetch much less money than bad paintings, you know’.5 He also expressed a strong desire to see all the great collections of nineteenth-century French paintings in America, and in that he almost succeeded. The Clarks took a suite on the twenty-eighth floor of the Waldorf Towers Hotel in New York, which to his delight appeared to be two (sic) thousand leagues under the sea – he ‘would not have been surprised if a large fish had bumped its nose against our window’.6
America in the 1930s was the place to see French Impressionist paintings, as European museums were still catching up. Clark and Jane visited the collection of the banker Chester Dale, which ‘proved, what I already knew, that the love of art was in no way related to culture or refinement of manners’.7 But the undoubted climax of their trip was a visit to the collecting maverick Dr Albert C. Barnes in Philadelphia. Barnes was a genuine doctor of medicine who had made a fortune from an antiseptic called Argyrol. On the face of it, Clark represented everything that Barnes disliked: museums, art history, and the establishment he was determined to snub. As Clark later put it, some collectors acquired art to get a foothold in society, but ‘Dr Barnes enjoyed the refined pleasure of keeping people out.’8 Clark, however, always had a soft spot for monsters, and recognised that there was an element of spoof to the collector, who appeared dressed as though for St Tropez. Whatever Barnes’s morals, and the appalling methods he had used to separate widows from their paintings, Clark felt that his passionate love and knowledge of painting made him supportable, and they got on well. Clark was particularly impressed by Barnes’s huge groups of works by Cézanne and Renoir.
Joe Duveen took care of the Clarks’ New York arrangements, and lent them a secretary – partly in order to monitor their activities, which did not bother them at all. They visited his celebrated 5th Avenue gallery, where pictures were hastily changed on each circuit of the six showrooms. In one room they saw a spirited Baroque marble Virgin and Child that Clark admired. It was of no interest to Duveen, as he could not sell it as a Bernini, so he sold it to the Clarks for a tiny sum. The sculpture still makes a splendid impression at the head of a passage at Saltwood.9 Duveen threw a dinner party for the Clarks at which men in creaking shirts and white tie accompanied ladies so weighed down with jewellery that, according to Clark, they laid pieces on the table. The evening was mentioned in the diary of the painter Adolfo Müller-Ury, who records that many of the great names in American art collecting were present – Samuel Kress, Jules Bache, Nelson Rockefeller and Robert Lehman, among others – so Clark was able at one swoop to meet almost everybody of importance in the upper echelons of New York society.10
The lectures on Leonardo at Yale were well received, and it was agreed to publish them as a book, with three additional chapters. This was to establish the pattern for most of Clark’s best-known books: lectures written up, supplemented and polished for publication. University publishing houses are notoriously slow, as Clar
k must have known, but when two years had passed he wrote a petulant letter ruling out any involvement of Yale University Press as a publisher for Leonardo, accusing it of ‘seriously injuring the success of publication by delay’, with the result that he had ‘finally decided not to publish it’.11 He was obliged to use Yale under the terms of the Ryerson Lectures contract, and the effect at the publisher was one of great surprise. The book appeared the following year, published by Cambridge University Press.
Clark’s book on Leonardo was at every level a success. It is one of a tiny handful of art history books that are read by non-specialists, and it has rarely been out of print since its publication in 1939. In searching for models for Leonardo da Vinci, Herbert Horne’s book on Botticelli is sometimes cited, and Clark regarded it as ‘undoubtedly the best book on any single painter’. Horne’s work, however, was a luxury book, and very different in intention. The art historian Hugh Honour thought that Clark’s book was ‘a model biography of an artist and humanist – he got it absolutely right – he invented the form. Horne is too precise and archaeological to be an influence.’12
The first thing that everybody noticed about Leonardo da Vinci was how beautifully it was written, with well-chosen references to Goethe, Pater, Valéry and Freud. For anybody writing about Leonardo, Walter Pater’s famous essay remained the poetic benchmark. While Clark wished his readers to be stirred by beauty, he didn’t attempt fin de siècle flights of description, but occasional Paterian touches do appear. Here is Clark describing some drawings: ‘beside prosaic horses…are wild ethereal horses, with nervous heads thrown back. They are the spies and outriders of Leonardo’s imagination entering the world of conventional Florentine art.’13 As the Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp wrote, Clark ‘believed in the interpretative power of literary description, in a manner with which we are now relatively unfamiliar’.14 Kemp believed that the main virtue of Clark’s approach was to intuit the nature of Leonardo’s vision as a whole – ‘the remaking of nature through the art of painting. Thus every picture becomes a kind of multiple “proof” that he has truly understood the relationship between the causes and effects in all visual phenomena.’15
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