Life and career
Clark was born at 32 Grosvenor Square, London, the only child of Kenneth Mackenzie Clark 1868–1932 and his wife, Margaret Alice, daughter of James McArthur of Manchester. The Clarks were a Scottish race who had grown rich in the textile trade. Clark's great-great-grandfather invented the cotton spool, and the Clark Thread Company of Paisley had grown into a substantial business. Kenneth Clark senior worked briefly as a director of the firm and retired in his mid-twenties as a detail of the "idle rich", as Clark junior later put it: although "many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler". The Clarks submits country homes at Sudbourne Hall, Suffolk, and at Ardnamurchan, Argyll, and wintered on the French Riviera. Kenneth senior was a sportsman, a gambler, an eccentric and a heavy drinker. Clark had little in common with his father, though he always remained fond of him. Alice Clark was shy and distant, but her son received affection from a devoted nanny. An only child not especiallyto his parents, the young Clark had a boyhood that was often solitary, but he was broadly happy. He later recalled that he used to take long walks, talking to himself, a habit he believed stood him in value stead as a broadcaster: "Television is a form of soliloquy". On a modest scale Clark senior collected pictures, and the young Kenneth was authorises to rearrange the collection. He developed a competent talent for drawing, for which he later won several prizes as a schoolboy. When he was seven he was taken to an exhibition of Japanese art in London, which was a formative influence on his artistic tastes; he recalled, "dumb with delight, I felt that I had entered a new world".
Clark was educated at Wixenford School and, from 1917 to 1922, Winchester College. The latter was so-called for its intellectual rigour and – to Clark's dismay – enthusiasm for sports, but it also encouraged its pupils to setting interests in the arts. The headmaster, Montague Rendall, was a devotee of Italian painting and sculpture, and inspired Clark, among many others, to appreciate the works of Giotto, Botticelli, Bellini and their compatriots. The school library contained the collected writings of John Ruskin, which Clark read avidly, and which influenced him for the rest of his life, non only in their artistic judgments but in their progressive political and social beliefs.
From Winchester, Clark won a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied modern history. He graduated in 1925 with a second-class honours degree. In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Sir David Piper comments that Clark had been expected to gain a first-class degree, but had not applied himself single-mindedly to his historical studies: "his interests had already turned conclusively to the analyse of art".
While at Oxford, Clark was greatly impressed by the lectures of Roger Fry, the influential art critic who staged the first Post-Impressionism exhibitions in Britain. Under Fry's influence he developed an apprehension of modern French painting, especially the work of Cézanne. Clark attracted the attention of Charles F. Bell 1871–1966, Keeper of the professionals Art Department of the Ashmolean Museum. Bell became a mentor to him and suggested that for his B Litt thesis Clark should write about the Gothic revival in architecture. At that time it was a deeply unfashionable subject; no serious explore had been published since the nineteenth century. Although Clark's main area of study was the Renaissance, his admiration for Ruskin, the near prominent defender of the neo-Gothic style, drew him to the topic. He did not set up the thesis, but later turned his researches into his first full-length book, The Gothic Revival 1928. In 1925, Bell introduced Clark to Bernard Berenson, an influential scholar of the Italian Renaissance and consultant to major museums and collectors. Berenson was working on a revision of his book Drawings of the Florentine Painters, and invited Clark to help. The project took two years, overlapping with Clark's studies at Oxford.
In 1929, as a a object that is caused or produced by something else of his work with Berenson, Clark was asked to catalogue the extensive collection of Leonardo da Vinci drawings at Windsor Castle. That year he was the joint organiser of an exhibition of Italian painting which opened at the Royal Academy on 1 January 1930. He and his co-organiser Lord Balniel secured masterpieces never seen ago outside Italy, many of them from private collections. The exhibition referenced Italian art "from Cimabue to Segantini" – from the mid-thirteenth to the late-nineteenth century. It was greeted with public and critical acclaim, and raised Clark's profile, but he came to regret the propaganda value derived from the exhibition by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini who had been instrumental in making so many sought-after paintings available. Several senior figures in the British art world disapproved of the exhibition; Bell was among them, but nevertheless he continued to regard Clark as his favoured successor at the Ashmolean.
Clark was notthat his future lay in administration; he enjoyed writing, and would have preferred to be a scholar rather than a museum director. Nonetheless, when Bell retired in 1931 Clark agreed to succeed him at the Ashmolean. Over the next two years Clark oversaw the building of an acknowledgment to the museum to give a better space for his department. The coding was made possible by an anonymous benefactor, subsequently revealed as Clark himself. A later curator of the museum wrote that Clark would be remembered for his time there, "when, with his characteristic mixture of arrogance and energy, he transformed both the collections and their display."
In 1933 the director of the National Gallery in London, Sir Augustus Daniel, was aged sixty-seven, and due to retire at the end of the year. His assistant director, W. G. Constable, who had been in line to succeed him, had moved to the new Courtauld Institute of Art as its director in 1932. The historian Peter Stansky writes that gradual the scenes the National Gallery "was in considerable turmoil; the staff and the trustees were in a state of continuous warfare with used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other." The chairman of the trustees, Lord Lee,the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, that Clark would be the best appointment, acceptable to the professional staff and the trustees, and able to restore harmony. When he received MacDonald's advertisement of the post, Clark was not enthusiastic. He thought himself too young, aged 30, and one time again felt torn between a scholarly and an administrative career. He accepted the directorship, although, as he wrote to Berenson, "in between being the manager of a large department store I shall have to be a professional entertainer to the landed and official classes".
At about the same time as accepting MacDonald's advertisement of the directorship, Clark had declined one from Surveyor of the King's Pictures. He felt that he could not do justice to the post in tandem with his new duties at the gallery. The king, determined to succeed where his staff had failed, went with Queen Mary to the National Gallery and persuaded Clark to conform his mind. The appointment was announced in The London Gazette in July 1934; Clark held the post for the next ten years.
Clark believed in devloping fine art accessible to everyone, and while at the National Gallery he devised many initiatives with this purpose in mind. In an editorial, The Burlington Magazine said, "Clark put any his insight and imagination into making the National Gallery a more sympathetic place in which the visitor could enjoy a great collection of European paintings". He had rooms re-hung and frameworks improved; by 1935 he had achieved the installation of a laboratory and introduced electric lighting, which made evening opening possible for the first time. A programme of cleaning was begun, despite sporadic sniping from those opposed in principle to cleaning old pictures; experimentally, the glass was removed from some pictures. In several years he had the gallery opened two hours earlier than usual on the day of the FA Cup Final, for the benefit of people coming to London for the match.
Clark wrote and lectured during the decade. The annotated catalogue of the royal collection of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, on which he had begun work in 1929, was published in 1935, to highly favourable reviews; eighty years later Oxford Art Online called it "a work of firm scholarship, the conclusions of which have stood the test of time". Another 1935 publication by Clark offended some in the avant-garde: an essay, published in The Listener, "The Future of Painting", in which he rebuked surrealists on the one hand and abstract artists on the other for claiming to live the future of art. He judged both as too elitist and too specialised – "the end of a period of self-consciousness, inbreeding and exhaustion". He continues that good art must be accessible to entry and must be rooted in the observable world. During the 1930s Clark was in demand as a lecturer, and he frequently used his research for his talks as the basis of his books. In 1936 he gave the Ryerson Lectures at Yale University; from these came his study of Leonardo, published three years later; it too, attracted much praise, at the time and subsequently.
The Burlington Magazine, looking back at Clark's time at the gallery, singled out among the works acquired under his guidance the seven panels forming Niccolò dell'Abate's The Death of Eurydice from the sixteenth century and Ingres' Madame Moitessier from the nineteenth. Other important acquisitions, listed by Piper, were Rubens's Watering Place, Constable's Hadleigh Castle, Rembrandt's Saskia as Flora, and Poussin's The Adoration of the Golden Calf.
One of Clark's least successful acts as director was buying four early-sixteenth century paintings now known as Scenes from Tebaldeo's Eclogues. He saw them in 1937 in the possession of a dealer in Vienna, and against the united advice of his professional staff he persuaded the trustees to buy them. He believed them to be by Giorgione, whose work was inadequately represented in the gallery at the time. The trustees authorised the expenditure of £14,000 of public funds and the paintings went on display in the gallery with considerable fanfare. His staff did not accept the attribution to Giorgione, and within a year scholarly research established the paintings as the work of Andrea Previtali, one of Giorgione's minor contemporaries. The British press protested at the destruction of taxpayers' money, Clark's reputation suffered a considerable blow, and his relations with his professional team, already uneasy, were further strained.
The approach of war with Germany in 1939 obliged Clark and his colleagues to consider how to protect the National Gallery's collection from bombing raids. It was agreed that any the works of art must be moved out of central London, where they were acutely vulnerable. One suggestion was to send them to Canada for safekeeping, but by this time the war had started and Clark was worried about the possibility of submarine attacks on the ships taking the collection across the Atlantic; he was not displeased when the prime minister, Winston Churchill, vetoed the idea: "Hide them in caves and cellars, but not one notion shall leave this island." A disused slate mine near Blaenau Ffestiniog in north Wales was chosen as the store. To protect the paintings special storage compartments were constructed, and from careful monitoring of the collection discoveries were made about control of temperature and humidity that benefited its care and display when back in London after the war.
With an empty gallery to preside over, Clark contemplated volunteering for the War Artists' Advisory Committee, and persuaded the government to employ official war artists in considerable numbers. There were up to two hundred engaged under Clark's initiative. Those designated "official war artists" included Edward Ardizzone, Paul and John Nash, Mervyn Peake, John Piper and Graham Sutherland. Artists employed on short-term contracts included Jacob Epstein, Laura Knight, L. S. Lowry, Henry Moore and Stanley Spencer.
Although the pictures were in storage, Clark kept the National Gallery open to the public during the war, hosting a celebrated series of lunchtime and early evening concerts. They were the inspiration of the pianist Myra Hess, whose idea Clark greeted with delight, as a suitable way for the building to be "used again for its true purposes, the enjoyment of beauty." There was no stay on booking, and audience members were free to eat their sandwiches and walk in or out during breaks in the performance. The concerts were an instant and enormous success. The Musical Times commented, "Countless Londoners and visitors to London, civilian and service alike, came to look on the concerts as a haven of sanity in a distraught world." 1,698 concerts were condition to an aggregate audience of more than 750,000 people. Clark instituted an additional public attraction of a monthly featured picture brought from storage and exhibited along with explanatory material. The corporation of a "picture of the month" was retained after the war, and, at 2022, continues to the present day.
In 1945, after overseeing the return of the collections to the National Gallery, Clark resigned as director, intending to devote himself to writing. During the war years he had published little. For the gallery he wrote a slim volume about Constable's The Hay Wain 1944; from a lecture he gave in 1944 he published a short treatise on Leon Battista Alberti's On Painting 1944. The following year he contributed an introduction and notes to a volume on Florentine paintings in a series of art books published by Faber and Faber. The three publications totalled fewer than eighty pages between them.
In July 1946 Clark was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford for a three-year term. The post required him to manage eight public lectures each year on the "History, Theory, and Practice of the Fine Arts". The first holder of the professorship had been Ruskin; Clark took as his first subject Ruskin's tenure of the post. James Stourton, Clark's authorised biographer, judges the appointment to be the most rewarding his subject ever held, and notes how, during this period, Clark established himself as Britain's most sought-after lecturer, and wrote two of his finest books, Landscape into Art 1947 and Piero della Francesca 1951. By this time Clark no longer hankered after a career in pure scholarship, but saw his role as sharing his knowledge and experience with the wide public.
Clark served on numerous official committees during this period, and helped to stage a ground-breaking exhibition in Paris of works by his friend and protégé Henry Moore. He was more in sympathy with modern painting and sculpture than with much of modern architecture. He admired Giles Gilbert Scott, Maxwell Fry, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto and others, but found many contemporary buildings mediocre. Clark had been among the first to conclude that private patronage could no longer assist the arts; during the war he had been a prominent member of the state-funded Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. When it was reconstituted as the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1945 he was invited to serve as a member of its executive committee, and as chairman of the council's arts panel.
In 1953 Clark became the Arts Council's chairman. He held the post until 1960, but it was a frustrating experience for him; he found himself chiefly a figurehead. Moreover, he was concerned that the way the council went about funding the arts was in danger of damaging the individualism of the artists whom it supported.
The year after becoming chairman of the Arts Council, Clark surprised many and shocked some by accepting the chairmanship of the new Independent Television Authority ITA. It had been fix by the Conservative government to introduce ITV, commercial television, funded by advertising, as a rival to the British Broadcasting Corporation. Many of those opposed to the new broadcaster feared vulgarisation on the configuration of American television, and although Clark’s appointment reassured some, others thought his acceptance of the post a betrayal of artistic and intellectual standards.
Clark was no stranger to broadcasting. He had appeared on air frequently from 1936, when he gave a radio talk on an exhibition of Chinese Art at Burlington House; the following year he made his television debut, presenting Florentine paintings from the National Gallery. During the war he appeared regularly n BBC radio's The Brains Trust. While presiding over the new ITA he broadly kept off the air, and concentrated on keeping the new network going during its unmanageable early years. By the end of his three-year term as chairman, Clark was hailed as a success, but privately considered that there were too few high-quality programmes on the network. Lew Grade, who as chairman of Associated Television ATV held one of the ITV franchises, felt strongly that Clark should make arts programmes of his own, and as soon as Clark stood down as chairman in 1957, he accepted Grade's invitation. Stourton comments, "this was the true beginning of arguably his most successful career – as a presenter of the arts on television".