Clark later recalled the period to Janet Stone: ‘I remember when I was being attacked over the “Giorgione” panels I felt quite hysterical – all kinds of people I hardly knew wrote me abusive letters. Of course they didn’t care about the “Giorgiones” – they were attacking my too-rapid rise to fame. The worst part was that I was entirely in the wrong.’17 He could console himself that his nineteenth-century predecessor Charles Eastlake had had similar problems with a non-Holbein, and Clark believed that ‘nearly all the attacks were influenced by jealousy’. He had blundered through a mixture of haste, overconfidence, and a failure to consult his staff properly. But he had acted in a similar fashion recently to secure the Gulbenkian loan, and no doubt thought he could pull off a second coup. Nicholas Penny intriguingly suggests that he may have been viewing the four panels through the slightly gauche pictorial spectacles of Bloomsbury.18 They have remained mostly in the National Gallery basement ever since, less for their downgraded state than for the memory of an ugly episode in the gallery’s history. With a show of some defiance, in 1949 Clark would use them to illustrate the Giorgionesque theme in Landscape Into Art.19
—
It is time to consider Clark’s colleagues at the National Gallery. He made two excellent curatorial appointments: Philip Pouncey and Neil MacLaren. Pouncey joined in 1934 as an assistant keeper, and was to become the most widely respected specialist in Italian paintings and drawings in Britain. He generally got on well with Clark, but had been offended at not being properly consulted over the ‘Giorgione’ panels, and later became irritated by Clark’s slighting of Ian Rawlins, the gallery’s scientist. MacLaren, who joined the gallery the year after Pouncey, was an authority on Dutch and Spanish paintings, and not unlike Clark in his refusal to suffer fools. It is not recorded what he thought of Clark, but neither he nor Pouncey shared Clark’s desire to communicate with the public, and it is unlikely that they regarded his connoisseurship very highly. One day Clark wittily told Pouncey that he felt ‘MacLaren possesses a superiority simplex’ – something many believed was truer of Clark himself.20
Among his happier achievements at the gallery, Clark helped the careers of three talented young art historians whom he made honorary attachés: Ben Nicolson, who later became editor of the Burlington Magazine; Denis Mahon, who would be largely responsible for the revival of the appreciation of seicento paintings in Britain; and John Pope-Hennessy, who was to serve as director of both the V&A and the British Museum.
Clark had been a mentor to Denis Mahon since his Ashmolean days, although when Mahon applied unsuccessfully for a curatorial post Clark told the board that ‘his temperament might be a hindrance to his fitting into institutional life’. Mahon however remained profoundly grateful to Clark, and years later wrote him a moving letter setting out his debt to him.*
In 1936 Clark urged the trustees to accept John Pope-Hennessy as an honorary attaché without salary. The only obstacle to this was Pope-Hennessy’s military father, who was opposed to the idea. Clark invited the General to meet him at the gallery, a plan almost wrecked by Clark uncharacteristically failing to make a note of the visit, so that he was out when his visitor arrived. Despite this, Pope-Hennessy did come to work at the gallery, and left an unflattering account of his senior colleagues: ‘The academic staff was small, inward-looking, and with one exception, untalented. The exception was Philip Pouncey…The Keeper was a nonentity named Isherwood Kay, who had once written a book on the watercolour painter Cotman, and the deputy keeper a prissy, thin-faced figure called Martin Davies, with whom I found it difficult at that time to keep my temper.’21 It was these last two who were to be the cause of a great deal of trouble for Kenneth Clark.
Clark’s problem with his two senior keepers, Harold Isherwood Kay and Martin Davies, was essentially a power struggle exacerbated by his style of leadership. The gallery staff regarded themselves as public servants, and thought Clark was behaving as if he was above all that. He was young, rich, a pluralist, and they were offended by his lack of interest in their activities. The curators were already conditioned to be alert to condescension from the trustees, and they merely transferred their frustrations onto the director, whose sympathies they felt were with the trustees rather than with the gallery staff.
The Giorgione scandal let the genie out of the bottle. Clark’s friend John Walker, who would become director of the National Gallery in Washington DC, looked back on how ‘His staff reacted like small children and sent him to Coventry. They would not listen to him or speak to him and kept their offices locked. Things got so bad that he called the staff together and asked what they thought the function of the director should be.’22 The brunt of this problem fell on the new chairman, Lord Balniel, who kept very careful notes of all his interviews with Isherwood Kay and Davies. Isherwood Kay initially approached Balniel to complain that ‘he had difficulties shared by the rest of the staff, in his relationship with the director: “They were not consulted by the Director, nor had his confidence…They did not know what was happening, and, instead of being treated as junior partners in a firm, were looked down upon as the porters and servants.” ’23 However, Isherwood Kay was careful to add that Clark was not in any way discourteous to them.
The first part of the problem was Clark’s policy, which Isherwood Kay told Lord Balniel ‘seemed to be to popularise the Gallery, whereas the prestige of the Gallery could only be enhanced by its becoming an institute of scholarship’. Isherwood Kay strongly believed that scholarly concern should come first, ‘and publicity and popularising of the Gallery should take second place’. He gave the example of Martin Davies being ‘forced to write a short “popular” introduction to a new Gallery handbook. Davies had done so but “without his heart being in the job”. He – and all the staff except the Director – felt that this was work he should not have been asked to undertake, that one of the lecturers or a journalist should have done it, that it was derogatory to a scholar etc.’24
The second part of the problem was the definition of the roles of director and keeper. Among the papers in the Clark archive is a six-page letter to Lord Duveen in which he explains the ambiguities of the gallery’s constitution: ‘The constitution of the National Gallery is like the British constitution: it has grown up gradually as the result of various traditions and adjustments, and on many important points it is almost impossible to find out how or where our constitution is defined.’25 Isherwood Kay and Martin Davies both believed that Clark was ‘trying to whittle down the Keeper’s office’. Astonishingly, Isherwood Kay thought the director had ‘no part in the day to day running of the Gallery, and it was not even necessary for him to attend at the Gallery’.26 When Balniel suggested to Isherwood Kay that he had formed a false impression of his duties and his constitutional relation to the director, he replied that he had been basing his position on the (long redundant) Treasury minute of 1855, which was a response to Charles Eastlake’s desire to be away searching for paintings in Italy. Davies shared Isherwood Kay’s view, and Clark wrote to Balniel: ‘I am fascinated by his account of the Director’s functions. What an ideal job! I am almost sorry that the never-to-be-forgotten Treasury minute of 1855 is not still in operation.’27
Isherwood Kay then admitted to Balniel that he was in a ‘state of great mental confusion, and unable to collect his thoughts’, and that he had begun to focus upon trivialities, ‘provoked by an irritation too small in itself to be recounted in a letter’.28 He announced his desire to leave the gallery and to apply for the vacant directorship of the Tate, which became an escape route for dissatisfied staff. Martin Davies told Balniel that if Isherwood Kay was appointed to the Tate he would like to go as well, and described the atmosphere at the National Gallery as ‘poisonous’.29 Balniel concluded that ‘Clark had completely upset the Gallery staff: but he was admittedly dealing with fools and neurotics, who were hopelessly in the wrong themselves: but Clark ought to have been able to smooth matters over…He is so nearly the perfect director that one d
eeply regrets his failings: but they are there, and apparent for all to see. Still I like him and find him an ideal companion.’30 Clark wrote to him: ‘I am terribly sorry that the Gallery is causing you so much bother and unpleasantness. I do apologise most humbly for my part in it.’31 He imparted his misery to his mother: ‘As for the Gallery, I am very disillusioned. Attacks come from all sides, within and without…My staff are more miserable than ever. However I must cling on and see if I can wipe the floor with them all.’32
Martin Davies was a far more formidable foe than Isherwood Kay. In his office he had a large filing cabinet with a drawer marked ‘Clark’, which was designed to unnerve the director. He was an unquestionably fine scholar, responsible for setting new and very high standards for the cataloguing of the National Gallery’s collection, but as a personality he was very dry bones: a colleague recalled that ‘the only strong emotion he experienced was hatred – intense and lasting hatred – of Kenneth Clark’.33 Davies was unmarried, and his entire social life was based at the Reform Club, where he lunched and dined almost every day. Christopher Brown, a colleague at the gallery, offered the following observations of Davies: ‘his catalogues were a model for many subsequently produced by the world’s greatest collections of Old Master paintings. He had a profound loathing of Kenneth Clark which was, I think, based on two points of difference. Firstly…the director should, in Martin’s view, represent the views of the staff to the trustees. He thought that Clark was too close to the trustees and, because of what Davies thought to be his foolish social climbing, disinclined to offend them by representing a contrary view. Secondly, he thought Clark a slapdash scholar, and it was just such poor scholarship that he had set his face against in his gallery catalogues…[Davies] was said by one of our NG colleagues to have come from “a long line of unmarried vicars”, and indeed it was hard to conjure up great enthusiasm from him – even about the work of Rogier van der Weyden, on whom he published his only monograph. Returning with the enthusiasm of youth to the gallery, having just seen Rogier’s Last Judgement in Beaune, I told him how exciting I had found the experience. “It is, of course, substantially damaged,” was all I got in reply. He was also forgetful, and famously took the King of Norway on an official visit around the National Gallery wearing his carpet slippers.’34 Davies could however be kind to young scholars, who recall a sardonic wit.
Clark believed that Davies was neurotic, a natural misanthrope, and wrote to his chairman: ‘The whole thing has been a great blow to me, because I know I must be in some way to blame – not in what I have done, but in a certain absence of true cordiality in my dealings with Davies.’35 He hoped that Davies ‘would be willing to try and work with me without further upsets…If things [do not improve] perhaps Davies might be reminded that I am Director, not he, and if I take special pains to placate him he must take even greater ones to please me.’36 He added, ‘Unbalanced as Davies is, I do not think he can be quite so far gone as to wish to throw up a good job in the Gallery simply out of personal dislike of me.’ Despite Davies’ lasting dislike, he and Clark were able to make an accommodation with each other during the war, and Clark went on to write about him without rancour – but not without some satire – in his memoirs. Martin Davies became director of the National Gallery in 1968.
Clark found little solace at home from his troubles at the gallery. Jane showed him no sympathy. ‘However bad the rows were,’ he told Colette, ‘nothing was so bad as having to defend myself to your mother at the time.’ Even if Jane did not actually take his opponents’ side, he still had to justify himself to her, and she was very cross and sceptical.37 But Clark did receive one consolation: in December 1937 there arrived a letter from 10 Downing Street offering him a knighthood. When his name appeared in the New Year’s honours list he received over a hundred letters of congratulation. Monty Rendall was among the first to applaud his old pupil, and most of the art world followed suit. Some (like Roger Hinks) took the opportunity to commiserate with Clark over the attacks on the National Gallery. The Duke of Buccleuch added to his note: ‘I see you have also been under heavy fire recently, and I trust you are still unscathed.’38 Clark thanked everybody for their letters: typical was his letter to the diplomat Victor Mallet: ‘A KCB seems wholly inappropriate to my age and character, but as it is given to the office and not to its holder I am not unduly disturbed.’39 Jane observed, ‘we are called Sir K and Lady for the first time and feel rather bashful’.40
Harold Isherwood Kay died in October 1938, which alleviated some of Clark’s troubles, and opened a vacancy. He wrote to Balniel: ‘I would rather be landed with the reprobate but agreeable older man than…the type of colourless pipsqueak which is already too well represented in the Gallery.’41 The successor whom he favoured was William Gibson, already on the gallery staff. Gibson was duly appointed, and this ushered in a long period of peace in director–staff relations. As Clark wrote to Ben Nicolson: ‘The Gallery is very pleasant now that we have a new keeper. Kay was an innocent creature, but steeped in the Collins Baker tradition. I wish you could have been here under the more liberal regime of Gibson. M[artin] Davies is quiet and sad, but his friends tell me that he thrives on misery and that even if I were able to alleviate his unhappiness (which I am not) it would be unkind to do so.’42 By 1939 Clark had more pressing problems on his hands, for it had fallen to him to safeguard the nation’s pictures against the approach of war.
* * *
* ‘I think this is the occasion to mention two of my debts of gratitude to you when I was just starting to take an interest in art history. First, it was from your advice to read Wölfflin that I date the origins of the entirely fresh approach so necessary in this country for anyone proposing to take the Seicento seriously. Secondly, when I did so, you were always more than tolerant of the eccentricity, and never condescended to it. That meant a great deal in those days, you know!’ (1960, Tate 8812/1/3/1801–1850.)
16
The Listener and the Artists
My ideal patron does not simply buy pictures at exhibition, he helps give the artist his direction.
KENNETH CLARK interviewed in The Listener, 22 February 19401
During the mid-1960s Clark proclaimed that art was in an infinitely better place than it had been at any time since 1936.2 He did not choose that date at random: with the death of Roger Fry two years earlier, people had started wondering where English art was heading. Some thought Fry’s Francophile hegemony had left English art in ruins, and that perhaps there might no longer be a place for a national style. Writing the Preface to Fry’s posthumous Last Lectures (1939), Clark asserted that since 1936 ‘feelings about life and art have changed’. But it was not so much that art changed in that period – Clark himself had changed. He had engaged with a new group of young artists: Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Victor Pasmore.
Clark’s interest in contemporary art had gradually increased, mostly under the influence of Roger Fry. Even at the age of twenty-six, before his Ashmolean appointment, he had been in discussion about lending support to contemporary British artists, although the idea went nowhere at the time.*1 However, he continued to buy and commission works by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, including a large set of forty-eight colourful ceramic plates of Famous Ladies. ‘As usual with commissions,’ wrote Clark, ‘it turned out differently to what we had expected’ – instead of repeated ornamental designs ‘these are in effect forty-eight unique paintings by Duncan and Vanessa’.3 In addition, both artists painted moderately successful portraits of Jane (who was photographed, with far more interesting results, by Man Ray in Paris). But from the early 1930s Clark began to look for a way out of Bloomsbury, and puzzled about the direction of contemporary painting; at that time he believed abstraction was a blind alley, a position he may have inherited from Berenson. Then in 1935 he embroiled himself in a controversy which had the opposite effect of his intentions – far from revealing him as a thoughtful examiner of contemporary art, it caused him to be seen as
a mild reactionary.
It took place in the pages of The Listener, the esteemed highbrow magazine of the BBC. Clark opened an article entitled ‘The Future of Painting’ with the provocative, if not startling, statement: ‘The art of painting has become not so much difficult as impossible,’ and then asked why this should be so. After a swipe at the Royal Academy (‘a sort of pathetic charm…a period piece’), he dismissed the latter-day Impressionists, and suggested that the ‘post-war movement in the arts, with its belief in violence and superstition, has been essentially German’. But his real quarry was what he called ‘the advanced school of painters’, as promoted by Herbert Read.4 He noted their reliance on theory, with ‘an extreme opposition to everybody who does not think as they do’, and classed them under two headings, cubists and super-realists (Surrealists). He expressed the belief that abstract art had ‘the fatal defect of purity’, and that the whole Cubist movement ‘has revealed the poverty of human invention when forced to spin a web from its own guts’. He objected to the tendency to identify new schools of art with new structures of society, and used a simile which has caused critics to snigger ever since: ‘To claim one’s style is the style of the future is like claiming to be the Duchess of Devonshire – quite useless unless one has the consent of the Duke; and whatever shape society is going to take it is not going to be ruled by people who like cubist or super-realist painting.’ He then opined that ‘Good visual art is not an invariable accompaniment of civilised life…there have been slack periods,’ and cited Italian painting at the end of the sixteenth century and long, mediocre intervals in Egyptian, Indian and Mesopotamian art. He ended by suggesting that no new style would emerge out of a preoccupation with art for its own sake: ‘it can only arise from a new interest in subject matter. We need a new myth in which the symbols are inherently pictorial.’5
Kenneth Clark Page 20