Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation - James Stourton

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      To Clark’s delight, the Queen started to assemble a small but distinctive collection of contemporary British paintings. Most of her acquisitions were made post-war, but in 1938 she purchased the portrait of Bernard Shaw by Augustus John entitled When Homer Nods. Clark wrote her an enthusiastic letter: ‘May I say how extremely valuable to all of us who care for the arts is Your Majesty’s decision to buy the work of living painters. It is not too much to say that it will have an important effect on British art in general … you will make them [the painters] feel that they are not working for a small clique but for the centre of the national life.’25 He formed a warm and productive relationship with the Queen, who wrote to him: ‘It is so important that the monarchy should be kept in touch with the trend & life of modern, as well as ancient Art, and I hope that you will advise & help us along those lines?’26 Clark took the hint, and over the coming years would write to her, ‘May I take this opportunity of telling Your Majesty about several other things which are happening in the arts.’27 He arranged visits for the young Princesses to the National Gallery, and became a fixture of social life at Windsor. The Queen had her own taste, but the advice proffered by Clark, and later by the chairman of the Tate, Jasper Ridley, was a great stimulation to her interest in this field.

      It was building work at Hampton Court which enabled Clark to have what he called ‘the glorious opportunity of rehanging the pictures’ there. He had previously written to BB: ‘I have always hated palaces as a tourist & I hate them even more as a servant. The exception is Hampton Court, which is of course really a public gallery, tho’ as badly run as if it were private … There are an immense number of pictures tucked away … which … few can have seen since you first went there – chiefly Bassanos, of course, but a few interesting sub Titianesque Venetians.’28 Clark believed that his predecessor had treated the place too much like a public gallery and not enough as a palace. He was fortunate that Philip Sassoon was at the Office of Works at the time, and persuaded Lord Duveen to pay for the redecoration of the state rooms with red and gold brocade. The result was that a very moribund palace came back to life, and Clark’s rehang was much admired.

      However much Clark enjoyed his role as artistic chevalier servant to the Queen, he found the courtiers and palace administrators tiresome and generally ignorant. As he told Gerald Kelly, ‘I was amused by your references to the life of the courtier. It is interesting to find how educated people, when they are in a position of a servant, take on the servant’s mentality with its touchiness, jealousy, etc. Having been attached to the Court myself for about six years, I now begin to think of the domestic servant with more understanding.’29 Clark’s impatience with courts, and the life they sustained, was to emerge again in Civilisation, when he spoke of their ‘odious pomposity’. Although he gave high marks to the courts of Urbino and Mantua, he virtually left Versailles out of the series. When he made Royal Palaces (1966), which was the first time television cameras were allowed into Windsor and Buckingham Palace, his tone offended the Queen and Prince Philip, who found him ‘sarcastic’ – an incomprehensible judgement by today’s standards. Up until then Clark had been welcomed at state banquets, and described one of them to Janet Stone: ‘The state banquet last night was really beautiful – gold is undoubtedly life-enhancing, and I have never seen so much. All the waiters covered with it, all the plates and cutlery made of it, all the walls lined with it. Into the middle of this over-civilised display came the Black Watch Pipers – making this deafening, but to me intoxicating noise. I wept with joy greatly to the scandal of my neighbour … I had an agonising ten minutes with the Q – she was tired and longing to get away.’30

      At the very end of his life Clark suggested to his publisher a new book of essays: ‘I thought of calling this volume “Afterthoughts” and it would include an essay on royalty – a very amusing subject on which I am expert.’31 Apart from the various members of the British royal family, he became well acquainted with Prince Paul, the Regent of Yugoslavia, and the King of Sweden. Despite his qualms and the later temporary fallout over Royal Palaces, Clark was a very successful courtier. Apart from being a conscientious curator, he recognised the unifying power of monarchy, which was to become so important during the coming war. Both Kenneth Clark and the royal family were about to embrace paternalistic populism.

      12

       The Great Clark Boom

       We have lots of friends and know the King and Queen and lots of famous people … we are very well off and very happy … also a dog called Tor.

      Diary of COLETTE CLARK (aged six)

      ‘I now come to the strangest period in our lives: what can only be described as the Great Clark Boom. It lasted from about 1932 till 1939, and was as mysterious as a boom in Australian gold shares.’1 In fact there is little mystery about the matter. At a very young age Clark held a commanding position in the art world that required him to circulate in what used to be called society, and Jane was a natural and beautiful hostess. The Clarks were ambitious, young and attractive, and found themselves fashionable. Cyril Connolly, looking back on his Oxford generation, reflected how little politics had impinged on it and how unworldly was his generation, of whom ‘The most realistic, such as Mr Evelyn Waugh and Mr Kenneth Clark, were the first to grasp how entirely the kind of life they liked depended on close co-operation with the governing classes.’2

      Clark portrayed himself and Jane as ‘Innocents in Clover’ (a description which might have been truer of Roger Fry in his shabby suits). The Clarks acquired a grand and elegant London house, where they entertained everybody from the King and Queen downwards. As Clark’s first authorised biographer Fram Dinshaw observed, ‘the point about the Clark boom was that it was the link between society and art’.3 They were an integral part of the more literate end of the beau monde, and the two worlds met at their house – although the Clarks succeeded, in their own minds at least, in maintaining a detachment from the social vortex through his writing and their friendship with artists. For the remainder of his life the latter group was to ground Clark in the values he most believed in.

      The backdrop of the Great Clark Boom was a large house at 30 Portland Place, between Oxford Circus and Regent’s Park, on which they took a lease from the Howard de Walden estate. It was like an embassy in scale, with Adam-style reception rooms and a grand entrance hall. Early in 1934 Clark commissioned the fashionable architect Lord Gerald Wellesley to make a report on the house. Wellesley was impressed, and thought the first-floor drawing rooms extremely pretty; he designed modish bookcases for the downstairs library in which the Clarks usually sat and received visitors. The house is surprisingly undocumented. Most accounts focus on the art collection and the elegant curtains, some in yellow silk – others were designed by Duncan Grant (with a pattern of Apollo pursuing Daphne in creamy pinks, terracotta, beige and brown).4 Marion Dorn, the American designer who also acted as the children’s art teacher, created many of the textiles and carpets. The large Adamesque dining room on the ground floor contained a big Matisse painting, L’Atelier, which Clark acquired from the Gargoyle Club.5

      The 1930s was the main decade of growth for Clark’s art collection, and by 1937 the young art historian Ben Nicolson wrote in his diary: ‘On to K Clarks at Portland Place. Talked to Jane about Giorgione whilst K interviewed [Robin] Ironside [for the position

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