Not Your Typical Courtier

In 1974, following the publication that year of his ‘self-portrait’, Another Part of the Wood, I did a feature on Kenneth Clark for the BBC World Service. This involved interviewing him at his ‘set’ in Albany, off Piccadilly, the austerity of which was mitigated by what I took to be a small fortune in paintings and miniatures on the walls. In the book Lord Clark, as he became, described his life (1903–83) as ‘one long, harmless confidence trick’, a reference to what he called his freak aptitude, apparent from the age of 9 or 10, for responding authoritatively to works of art.

He profited from this, he told me, because most English people didn’t ‘give a blow about art’ and considered it sissy. So when they met someone who could speak with confidence and enthusiasm about paintings and sculpture, they were prepared to listen – ‘to save themselves trouble’. There speaks a highbrow, I remember thinking. And with his domed forehead Clark, known as ‘K’ to his friends, certainly looked the part. But as I subsequently learnt from James Stourton’s superb biography, Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation (2016), no one since Ruskin had tried harder to forge a bond between the artist and the man in the street. In Clark’s own words, ‘art is not the prerogative of nobs and snobs, but the right of every man’. Before he became a household name with his BBC series Civilisation, he had already made, or contributed to, more than sixty television programmes. One of Clark’s Scottish ancestors invented the cotton spinney, a revolutionary device that ensured that his descendants need never lift a finger. Hence this urbane reflection: ‘My parents belonged to a section of society known as “the idle rich”, and although, in that golden age, many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler’ – or, as a couple, so different in temperament. His father was a raffish Edwardian playboy with a luxuriant walrus moustache, who drank gallons of champagne and whisky and broke the bank at Monte Carlo. Clark lets him off pretty lightly, though it’s clear that in his cups he could be a dreadful embarrassment. His mother, from a modest Quaker background, was prim and undemonstrative. Only on her deathbed did she reveal how much she loved her son. Neither parent seems to have experienced what Clark calls ‘our poor old friend, “pure aesthetic sensation”’, though he shared his father’s devotion to billiards: ‘Nothing else absorbs and concentrates my faculties to the same extent.’ Clark’s Oxford mentor, the charismatic don Maurice Bowra, said he was brought up ‘with a callousness which only the rich dare to show their children’. An only child, he was not exactly ill-treated, except perhaps at Winchester during the Great War, but at an early age he developed what Henry Moore called a ‘glass screen’ that people found daunting. Clark said this sprang from his chilly boyhood, and the fear and inexperience that resulted, which was why he acknowledged such a debt to Bowra, who he said had the strongest influence on his life. Bowra, wrote Clark, ‘said all the dreadful things one was longing to hear, and said them as if they were obvious to any decent man . . . My priggish fears and inhibitions were blown to smithereens.’ That Bowra should have taken him up was especially noteworthy because Clark, unlike most of the don’s other protégés, ‘never felt the slightest inclination to homosexuality’, which Bowra regarded as the natural condition of an intelligent man. Women would always mean more to Clark than men. He had numerous affairs – ‘silly fits’ he called them – and for many years kept a flat in Mayfair for trysts. Clark acknowledged two other mentors, Charles Bell and Bernard Berenson. Bell, the Keeper of Fine Art at the Ashmolean, made him study the museum’s trove of drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael, the beginning of his education in art, ‘as opposed to looking at pictures in a dilettanteish way’. His debt to Berenson, the sage of I Tatti, under whom he worked for two years in Italy, he summed up as ‘difficult to describe and impossible to repay’. Recognizing a kindred spirit, Berenson invited Clark to serve a sort of apprenticeship in ‘conoscing’, his term for connoisseurship, thus establishing a bond that would last for almost forty years. Berenson was an autocrat, but Clark, by now a very rich young man, was not your typical courtier. He would defer to Berenson on Art, but not on Life. In 1927 he annoyed his patron by getting married instead of having lots of affairs (sexual gossip rivalled art as a staple of conversation at I Tatti). And by the time he left he was aware that Berenson ‘was perched on the pinnacle of a mountain of corruption’, a reference to the profitable collusion between dealers like Duveen and experts like Berenson during the heyday of American collecting. Clark’s narrative, which closes in 1939 (he later wrote a sequel, The Other Half, published in 1977), is punctuated by a series of disarmingly frank asides. ‘I am by nature exceptionally mean,’ he says at one point. He also reveals that Berenson’s mistress, Nicky Mariano, found him ‘rather standoffish and cutting in his remarks, also not free from conceit in one so young’. She was not alone in thinking this, admits Clark. Her other great complaint was that he lacked a sense of humour, a proposition which, he says, the reader must judge for himself. I couldn’t agree less. Clark had a sly, dry wit to match his love of irony and keen eye for detail. His book is full of comic interludes. Nearly fifty years later I can still recall creasing up over his description of Berenson’s reaction to some gaudy murals that his wife had unwisely commissioned for his Holy of Holies, the library at I Tatti. Mr Berenson returned from his journey slightly fatigued, entered his beloved library and immediately fainted. He is said to have fallen flat on the floor, rigid with horror. He was carried to bed, where he remained for a week. A little later Clark describes how puzzled an Edwardian dowager was by a depiction of the Last Supper, in which the Apostles were sitting round a table with square plates in front of them. ‘“Look at all those old tramps,” she said, in royal accents, “I vonder vot they are playing.”’ Clark’s precocious aesthetic credentials were established with The Gothic Revival, his ‘Essay in the History of Taste’, which appeared in 1928. But instead of devoting himself to writing, which he described to me as ‘the one wholly satisfying activity I have ever undertaken’, he bounded up the ladder of preferment as an administrator, replacing Bell at the Ashmolean in 1930 and then three years later becoming Director of the National Gallery at the tender age of 30. So began, in his own words, the ‘Great Clark Boom’, during which he and his chic wife Jane became the hottest tickets in town, asked everywhere, and entertaining everyone, including the King and Queen, at their grand house in Portland Place. ‘Jane and the K in all around I see,’ quipped Bowra. What would he have said about Jane’s modish pièce de résistance, ‘a pair of trousers of emerald green velveteen with a row of large scarlet fly buttons, not up the front, but creeping up behind, along the division between her buttocks’. Inevitably the Clarks made enemies, including Chips Channon, the socialite and self-styled ‘Lord of Hosts’, who thought they were bogus. When he asked Jane why they never invited him to dinner, she replied, ‘But Chips, we don’t know anyone grand enough to invite with you.’ It would have been interesting to know what Clark made of Channon, because he relished ‘characters’, and Chips certainly qualified on that score. Apart from Bowra and Berenson, Another Part of the Wood includes lively pen portraits of Joe Duveen, Calouste Gulbenkian, Roger Fry, Philip Sassoon, Sybil Colefax and Edith Wharton, with all of whom he could converse on equal terms. None of the above considered art sissy, but then they were not the ‘supposedly ordinary people’ whom the art historian Michael Levey said Clark dedicated himself to winning over. One earnest of this was his sponsorship of contemporary English artists such as Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, David Piper and Victor Pasmore, none of whom were either well-connected or fashionable (for which read Cubists or Surrealists). All were indebted to his support, which was vindicated in the 1940s when representational and narrative art – the authentic voice of England, so Clark thought – enjoyed a revival. Strange to relate, Clark thought of himself as a socialist, which may explain the somewhat subversive epiphany he describes on the last page of the book. War has been declared that very morning, and like everyone else he expects there will soon be an air raid. Gazing up towards Piccadilly Circus from Waterloo Place he concludes that it might not be such a bad thing if the ‘featureless blocks’ he saw were bombed, because ‘the social system of which [they] were an emanation was a worn-out monster founded on exploitation. It would be better to start afresh.’ In fact, as he then admits, none of those buildings was bombed. But the war quickened Clark’s appetite for public service. On his watch, and despite being emptied of its treasures, the National Gallery, thanks to innovations like the Picture of the Month and Dame Myra Hess’s lunchtime concerts, became what Herbert Read called ‘a defiant outpost of culture right in the middle of a bombed and shattered metropolis’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 77 © Michael Barber 2023