Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  His friendship with Henry Moore, however, remained as strong as ever.*4 In the summer of 1961 Clark gave an exhibition of his own, by now considerable, collection of Moore’s work at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; it included nineteen sculptures – mostly bronzes – and forty-eight drawings. As for the Pipers, although their friendship endured, Clark did not admire John’s later work: ‘I didn’t at all like the large oils. Since the Welsh things there has been a curious lack of reality about his work – which isn’t a matter of realism, but of inner knowledge and conviction.’5 He enthusiastically embraced Graham Sutherland’s artistic change of direction in painting portraits, and maintained that it was he who recommended Sutherland to paint the ill-fated Churchill portrait that was reportedly destroyed on the orders of Lady Churchill.6 However, when Sutherland painted Clark’s own portrait in 1963–64 it led to a cooling in relations. Sutherland painted Clark in profile, like a Renaissance medal, based on the Piero della Francesca Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro. Clark was a bad sitter, and was unhappy with the result, which he thought made him look like a snooty dictator. But this was not the main problem: to Jane’s annoyance Kathy Sutherland asked for Graham’s standard fee. Colin described the spat: ‘My mother had definitely attracted Graham’s eye in her youth, and she had always disliked Kathy underneath the surface. She now wrote to her in considerable rage, offering only half the sum which had been asked. Kathy, who probably did not like my mother much either, accepted, but made it clear that this would not include any of Graham’s sketches for the portrait.’7 Relations were only ever partially patched up.

  Clark’s appreciation of modern art in the 1960s was, like so much about the man, a contradictory affair. His fundamental belief that abstraction was a blind alley inhibited his proper appreciation of the art of the day. For Clark, abstract art had developed too quickly, and through a succession of only a few men of genius: Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Malevich, and then the pure abstractions of Mondrian – so it was all over by 1925. Now, to his own surprise, he became fascinated by the post-war New York School. On a visit to Venice in 1950 he saw a notice for the exhibition of an American artist of whom he had never heard: ‘I went in, and for two minutes was bewildered,’ he later wrote of this first encounter with the work of Jackson Pollock, ‘then suddenly I became aware of an energy and a vitality that had almost faded out of European art. France, to which all earnest lovers of modern art had for so long turned their eyes, was exhausted; a new school had arisen where we had not expected to find it, the USA.’8 Clark certainly thought that Pollock’s early death in a car accident in 1956 was one of the great disasters for art in his time. When he tried to decide where Pollock fitted into the pattern of twentieth-century art, he saw it like this: Mondrian had been a classic artist who closed the door to abstraction, but painters of the New York School reacted against this and produced Jackson Pollock, a great romantic spirit. Pollock intended to appeal to our feelings, and released us, so Clark thought, from the somewhat sterile classicism to which the Cubists had led us. He would refer to Pollock as a ‘Dionysiac’ painter.9

  Perhaps even more surprising than Clark’s admiration for Pollock was his reaction to Mark Rothko. He found him a charming, if rather sentimental, artist,10 but believed that his use of colour had extended the genre: ‘Only in the realm of pure sensation, that is to say in the realm of colour, have some painters, notably Rothko, made an advance on the founders of pure abstraction.’11 Clark believed that Mondrian, Pollock and Rothko had also exhausted their genre, and that a return to nature was needed, a concern for human figures and their natural setting. He was fond of quoting his friend Victor Pasmore: ‘We don’t know what we are doing or what we should be doing.’

  Clark became a friend of the New York School artist Robert Motherwell, and they would lunch together at Albany. One day Clark mentioned that he had met the American colour-field painter Barnett Newman, whom he described as ‘just like a cobbler, an old cobbler’.12 The man largely responsible for introducing the New York School to London was Clark’s friend and protégé Bryan Robertson of the Whitechapel Gallery in London’s East End. Clark hugely admired him, describing him as ‘the most gifted gallery director (next to Sir John Pope-Hennessy) who has been produced in England since the war’; the Whitechapel Gallery he described as the place where ‘everybody who cared for art had to go’,13 and whenever he was invited to explain contemporary art on television, he would always recommend Robertson instead. Michael Gill, the soon-to-be producer of Civilisation, remembers observing Clark at the Whitechapel during a Robert Rauschenberg exhibition: ‘When Clark swept through with the actress, Irene Worth, he delivered brilliant, perceptive and, I thought, ultimately condescending opinions on each complex image in turn.’14

  Clark had no such sympathy with Pop Art: ‘I think Pop Art is nonsense – a fifty year old hang-over from Duchamp and Dada, plus some contemporary hokey iconography. But I have seen pictures by Roy Lichtenstein that were powerfully designed and even imaginative.’15 Jane gives an amusing description of a visit to Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1964: ‘In the morning we went to the Jewish Museum & saw a very good exhibition of a very modern (but not pop) artist [sic] by an artist called Johns – very impressive quality of paint and drawing. But in the afternoon to a pop artist’s studio – exactly like a Pinter play. K was so upset he had a sneezing fit! Andy Warhol the name. It has no relation to art – he paints rows and rows of boxes Heinz soup boxes etc exactly like the containers and meant to be – he has an exhibition next week! We then cheered ourselves up by going to the Frick.’16 For Clark, both abstraction and Pop Art were a fall from the grace of humanism.

  In 1962 Clark wrote a lecture entitled ‘The Blot and the Diagram’, which was an attempt to come to terms with contemporary art. His aim was to understand the present by using the past as a guide, but however hard he tried he could not see anything but decline, stating, ‘the development of science…has touched that part of the human spirit from which art springs, and has drained away a great deal of what once contributed to art’.17 He additionally maintained that any attempt to view abstraction with detachment was immediately interpreted as an attack. This lecture, printed as an article in the Sunday Times, brought a strong rebuttal from Clark’s friend John Russell, the paper’s art editor, who warned him that ‘The public longs to hear from you that modern art doesn’t really count and they can safely disregard it.’18 Russell’s main attack was on Clark’s premise that we should not be asking whether new art is as good as the Parthenon, but whether it makes sense of life today. The affair attracted a great deal of attention, and Clark claimed that ‘The Blot and the Diagram’ was ‘the most quoted and translated of all my works before Civilisation’.19

  Meanwhile, Clark was still in enormous demand as a lecturer, and had lost none of his old magic. In 1962 he delivered an after-dinner speech to a short-lived ‘1958 Club’ on Platonic notions of beauty. Surprisingly, and possibly with an eye to posterity, he scribbled afterwards on his invitation: ‘This is the oddest thing I have ever done – and was really a tour de force, as I kept an audience of half-drunk business men quiet for half an hour when I talked about Plato’s Philosophy.’20 He repeated his success the following year at the annual conference of the Institute of Directors, speaking at the Albert Hall on ‘Industry and the Arts’. Bill Williams, secretary of the National Art Collections Fund, described how Clark ‘roused great fervour among them by his plea that industry and commerce should seek to become major patrons of art’.21 A group of directors clubbed together to examine what could be done for the arts, and the Institute even set up an Art Advisory Bureau – although, like many such good intentions, it was soon forgotten. One of Clark’s best published lectures was given in Oxford in 1967 – ‘A Failure of Nerve: Italian Painting 1520–1535’, describing the strange period after the death of Raphael.22

  During earlier decades Clark had been deeply concerned with the art of the present, but as this interest waned he became m
ore interested in saving the past, growing anxious about the destruction of architectural landmarks and settings. Clark had always been an architectural conservative, but he was now becoming a fervent preservationist. It is difficult now to understand the public indifference of those times towards the destruction of historic city centres and architectural masterpieces such as Bath. In 1965 Clark gave a speech at the Royal Festival Hall to members of the National Trust in which he pointed out that ‘with the help of our democratic institutions, our local authorities and planning committees have done more in a few years than time, neglect or enemy action had done in centuries to obliterate history and destroy the visible beauty of England’.23 Yet he would never support preservation for its own sake – he always sought out specific economic and social arguments as to why any particular building or landscape should be saved. Nor did he hold conventional views about the things that constituted the national heritage. He believed that there should not be any general restriction on the export of works of art, and held that museums in Britain were already too full. He wrote that ‘from the constitutional point of view, a general restriction is a most violent and inequitable attack on property, usually reducing by about half the value of a work of art…An Italian picture in an English private collection does not belong to England.’24 He disliked claims that such paintings and sculptures formed part of Britain’s national heritage – especially when the country was destroying its historic city centres and failing to restore its ancient cathedrals, which he felt were far more worthy of government preservation and support.

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  Clark played a major role in the creation of one arts institution in which past and present should in theory have found a happy union. The idea of a National Theatre had a long gestation; the 1949 National Theatre Act and the identification of the South Bank site brought it closer to reality, but all governments had accorded it low priority. In 1951 the Queen Mother – then Queen – had laid a foundation stone, but nothing further happened for a decade. One of the moving spirits of the revived enterprise was the National’s first chairman, Oliver Lyttelton, Viscount Chandos, a decorated wartime Grenadier Guardsman, sometime Tory minister and friend of the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. An ambitious man with a sense of public duty, Chandos was the epitome of the old-fashioned establishment which was being challenged by the forces of youth. However, it was his leverage with the Treasury and the Prime Minister that brought the project back to life.

  Clark’s practical involvement in the National Theatre project began in 1960, when he had just given up the Arts Council. He was made chairman of a new executive committee which included representatives from the two leading theatrical companies of the day, the Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company.25 This committee reported to the so-called Joint Council, chaired by Chandos, and was tasked with preparing building plans and cost estimates to set before the government. From the beginning Clark was a very active chairman, writing long memoranda to Chandos setting out practical recommendations for the composition of the committee. He asked for a deputy to be appointed to the artistic director, Laurence Olivier, and urged that there should be more actors on the committee in general.26 Many, including Peter Hall, the founder of the RSC and Olivier’s successor as director of the National, were against the appointment of actors, but Clark asserted that it would be they ‘who will have to work in the National Theatre, and on whom its success depends’.27

  The architect appointed to the project was Brian O’Rorke, who was required to provide one amphitheatre with 1,200 seats and one proscenium theatre with eight hundred seats – although Clark was far from certain that ‘the wretched O’Rorke’ was up to the job.28 Clark was regarded as a tactful chairman who brought practical management skills, and above all experience of the workings and preferences of the Treasury. At first he remained fairly pessimistic about the outcome, as he told Janet Stone: ‘much National Theatre business…I have an awful feeling that it will all come to nothing.’29 He invited the theatrical impresario Prince Littler, whom he had got to know through the ITA, on to his committee, at the same time warning him, ‘I have made it clear that if the Government do not take an interest in our proposals I am off.’30 Once again Clark found himself in a position – not unlike his early days at the ITA – in which he was attempting to make things happen against a background of divergent opposed interests and Treasury reluctance.

  The crisis over the creation of the National Theatre came in autumn 1960, while Laurence Olivier was away in New York, playing in a production of Jean Anouilh’s Becket. Clark wrote to him at the Algonquin Hotel reporting that things were ‘not going so well. The chief reason is that the Arts Council is against it and seems to be conspiring with the Old Vic to do it down.’31 The venerable Old Vic saw a National Theatre as a rival for funds, and wanted its own new building. The Arts Council correctly foresaw that the National would require a large annual subsidy from its own budget, which would diminish its freedom of action. Clark offered to go to the Arts Council to tease out what was going on, and told Olivier, ‘I am very much afraid that they will recommend the Treasury to make a small grant, which they will expect us to turn down, and then be able to say that we had abandoned the scheme.’ He added: ‘I have not given up hope and will continue to make a great nuisance of myself, as sometimes this does the trick, even for a hopeless case.’32

  By December things were so bad that Clark wrote a seven-page memorandum to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Selwyn Lloyd, which Chandos approved: ‘I think your draft is quite admirable – perhaps I am prejudiced in its favour because it is written with great clearness and in English.’33 This was followed by a deputation led by Clark to see the Chancellor for an hour-long meeting – ‘Which,’ as he told Laurence Olivier, ‘is a very long time for a politician to give the arts.’ As Olivier was still in New York, Clark wrote to him, ‘we were not a bashful party’, adding that he was guardedly optimistic, believing that the Chancellor was ‘favourable, but I fancy everybody else in the Government is against it’.34 Hopes however were dashed when Selwyn Lloyd told the House of Commons in March 1961 that there would be no money for the National, and that what funds there were would go to the Old Vic and the RSC – just as Clark had foreseen. The general assumption was that the RSC would become the de facto National Theatre; Clark and his committee appeared to have been stitched up.

  Pressure was brought to bear, however, by Clark and others.35 The Chancellor had a change of heart, and in July he announced the government’s support for the National in the form that had always been envisaged. It was Clark who chaired the momentous meeting at Chandos’s Grosvenor Place office on 22 July at which the ubiquitous lawyer and fixer Arnold Goodman was asked to prepare a constitution for a new National Theatre. The following year Clark was formally invited to join its board for five years. Characteristically, he wrote to Janet: ‘The first…meeting is on Thursday – my heart sinks at the thought.’36

  With the election of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1964 the impetus for an ambitious new building was enthusiastically taken up by the new minister responsible, Jennie Lee.37 The main loser was Chandos, who remained chairman but with his Tory power base gone – he turned overnight from being all-powerful into an object of derision. Moreover, he was uneasily coupled with Laurence Olivier, who wished to identify himself with the forces of change, and wrote, ‘there can hardly have been two men with less in common than Chandos and myself, save for the intensity of enthusiasm we shared for the erection of a national theatre’.38

  But there was one man who had even less in common with Chandos, seeing him as representative of all that he most hated: the influential critic Kenneth Tynan, the Lucifer of the story, appointed as the National Theatre’s literary manager, but demoted to consultant by Chandos. Olivier was the highly respected – but easily led – director alongside the flamboyant and iconoclastic enfant terrible Tynan. Clark’s role changed, and he was invited to chair the Drama Committee, which although it did not propose
new plays, was delegated by the board to approve the repertory proposed by Olivier and Tynan – a perilous commission. Clark was caught in the middle of the appalling rows between Chandos and Tynan which were a paradigm of the generational antagonisms that characterised the period. Olivier, ever keen not to appear fuddy-duddy, invariably sided with Tynan. Catherine Porteous remembers how Clark used ‘to laugh about Tynan giving speeches for Larry Olivier to read out at meetings which were full of philosophy and psychology, saying, “Poor Larry, he hasn’t the faintest idea what any of it means.” ’39 Clark respected Tynan as a critic and as a man who got things done, but Porteous believes that Clark ‘in the end thought he had developed into too much of a loose cannon, and began to resent anyone questioning his decisions and/or motives. I think Clark also raised his eyebrows at Tynan’s personal vanity.’ Jennie Lee confirmed Clark’s board position, which as he told a friend made him ‘a sort of buffer between [Chandos] and the more revolutionary elements on the staff of the Theatre’.40 Clark found himself out of sympathy with the new school of British drama, although his natural instinct for quality was sometimes intrigued. ‘I added to my depression by going to see the new Pinter play [The Homecoming],’ he told Janet in August 1965; ‘really rather good, but sordid and heartless to a degree…this is part of the price we have paid for ridding ourselves of hypocrisy.’41