OPINION:
KENNETH CLARK: LIFE, ART AND CIVILISATION
By James Stourton
Alfred A. Knopf, $35, 478 pages, illustrated
Kenneth Clark (1903-1983) thought of himself as a writer, which indeed he was, producing numerous fine works of art history ranging from Rembrandt to the Italian Renaissance to the nude and two of the best 20th-century British autobiographies, “Another Part of the Wood” and “The Other Half.” But he packed so much else into his eight decades on this earth that it is amazing that he found time to write, something he liked to do sitting in his parked automobile, where he could be undisturbed by the outside world and the storms of a complicated private life.
All these many facets, private and public, are ably chronicled by James Stourton, the former chairman of Sotheby’s U.K., whose knowledge of the art world gives him a great foundation for his informative biography. But he brings a great deal else to this project: intelligence, tact, psychological and social acuity, and a sure-footed ability to traverse the intricacies of British society. It is a quantum leap upward from that published the year after Mr. Clark’s death by Meryle Secrest, who knew her subject, but whose book looks even more trivial now in the light of this magisterial, definitive work, which draws on a treasure trove of archival material and interviews.
Fate seemed to smile on Kenneth Clark from his birth as the only child and heir to a great fortune derived from the Coats and Clark thread ubiquitous for embroidery and other sewing. But despite the family’s wealth, no child born in poverty could have had more philistine parents with no understanding of, let alone, capacity for nurturing, their son’s artistic ambitions. The education provided at the elite Winchester College, while a bruising experience for a pampered only child, did point him toward his chosen path. This process was further nourished by an early and lasting association with the art maven Bernard Berenson and Oxford University, where he was deeply influenced by the opposing figures of the aesthetic Walter Pater and the socially responsible John Ruskin. In this fusion, we see the twin poles of a life where public roles vied with vibrant intellectual and cultural passions to produce enormous achievement and success.
All this began early. Director of Britain’s National Gallery at 30, knighted a year later, soon surveyor of the king’s pictures, he became the supreme guardian of his nation’s art. Indeed, during World War II, he supervised the removal of the capital’s treasures to secure locations deep in the country away from German bombers and turned the empty gallery into a venue for lunchtime concerts to buoy the spirits of those people who had to endure their deadly visitations. No wonder the British establishment showered all its highest honors on him, culminating in a seat in the House of Lords as Baron Clark of Saltwood (the castle he bought and restored as the family home). Oxford was where he met his future wife, an intelligent, forceful woman, who was initially a great support personally and socially but whose tragic descent into alcoholism did not prevent a lifelong marriage and a dedicated husbandly devotion.
When Mr. Clark was given his peerage, the frequent remark that he should have taken the title Lord Clark of Civilisation is a tribute to the BBC television series which, in the final analysis, must be accounted his magnum opus. Modestly subtitled “A Personal View,” it certainly is that, but more importantly, it is the distillation of a lifetime immersed in and deeply appreciative of culture.
What never ceases to amaze me when I watch it — which I did when it first appeared nearly half a century ago and many times since — is, notwithstanding his patrician manner and plummy tones, Mr. Clark’s preternatural ability not to talk down to his wide audience, few if any of whom could even hope to approach his erudition. Rather, by talking to them as equals, he seeks to raise them as close to his Olympian heights as possible, with remarkable success given the huge, appreciative audience this lengthy BBC color documentary in 13 episodes running for almost 11 hours won at home and all over the world. Mr. Clark’s fusion of music and art — my own favorite is the one on Baroque music and architecture — plus samples of his vast knowledge of history and culture, additionally salted by humorous anecdotes and personal asides, is simply magical.
The only fault I can find with this exemplary biography is a certain tendency to show his subject’s feet of clay. Lord Clark was no idol, but so engaging a figure and his works speak so well for themselves that it is inevitable that seeing the nuts and bolts of how they were produced cannot help, at least momentarily, obscuring their extraordinary enduring, nay eternal, importance and value. It is not fair to criticize a biographer for a job well done, and seeing the turmoil and cost surrounding such great achievement can only enhance one’s admiration for it. Even if in the end, one wants to turn to Lord Clark’s peerless words on page and screen, again and again, for the sheer joy they engender.
• Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif.
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