ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation. James Stourton
Читать онлайн.Название Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007493432
Автор произведения James Stourton
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
Jane’s elegance and dress sense were much admired. She favoured the house of Schiaparelli, and wore its gowns to great effect, along with jewellery specially designed for her by the sculptor Alexander Calder. Guests found her bewitching, and according to Colin, when in the presence of great men ‘she would open her eyes very wide and gaze at them with genuine admiration’.21 She might indeed sometimes hero-worship, but Jane could also be sharp. To a dinner guest who had murmured about possessing some yellow Sèvres she is said to have coolly responded, ‘Yes, but you’re rich.’22 Entertaining was very much her forte. Without Jane, Clark would have been quite happy to have remained – in Max Beerbohm’s great division of mankind – a guest. People wanted to be invited to Portland Place: it was chic. To the diarist and socialite ‘Chips’ Channon, who complained that they had never asked him to dinner, Jane smiled sweetly and said, ‘But Chips, we don’t know anyone grand enough to invite with you.’23 Jane was naturally extravagant where her husband was frugal (except in buying art). She would send everybody she met, from her hairdresser to the royals, expensive presents. It was part of her generous and warm personality.
The Clarks were in demand and invited everywhere. As Maurice Bowra, in a parody of a popular church hymn, wrote: ‘Jane and Sir K is all around I see.’ They were enjoying what Logan Pearsall Smith used to call a ‘swimgloat’. Jane’s diary entry for 9 April 1937 is typical: ‘We lunch with the Kents, Belgrave Square. I sit between [Gerald] Chichester and Ivor [Churchill] …’24 The Clarks may have had the intellectuals’ horror of the landed gentry, whom they considered bores and philistines, but it was necessary for the director of the National Gallery to make an exception for the inheritors of the great art collections. They would stay at Drumlanrig Castle and Chatsworth with the Dukes of Buccleuch and Devonshire, and the Clark archive preserves press cuttings of a house party at Chatsworth for the Princess Royal to which they were invited.25 In his homme du peuple moments Clark liked to give the impression that this was a passing phase: ‘With the approach of war the grand people returned to their country houses and the artists remained our friends.’26 This was not the whole story, as he remained close friends for life with such great châtelaines as Molly Buccleuch and Sybil Cholmondeley.
If the Clarks did not generally like the upper classes, their son Colin believed that ‘they didn’t like the middle class any better. “How dreadfully bourgeois” was one of their favourite ways of dismissing something.’27 Clark’s fastidiousness would occasionally emerge: after a Mediterranean cruise he wrote to Edith Wharton: ‘There was not one person on board who spoke English with an educated accent, and in most cases the lack of polish went deeper than pronunciation.’28 But for Clark there was one group who could do no wrong: the artists. His patience with them exceeded anything possible in the other compartments of his life. The painter Graham Bell came to live on the top floor of Portland Place; Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, Ted McKnight Kauffer and Marion Dorn, and the Graham Sutherlands were all regular dinner guests. Indeed, the two artist couples who would become the Clarks’ closest friends, John and Myfanwy Piper, and Henry and Irina Moore, had no interest at all in grand social life, but accepted their friendship with gratitude and affection. Colin later wrote: ‘The sweet kind gentle artists were a complete contrast to our parents’ usual circle of friends. None of those socially important people would ever have taken any notice of children.’29
Anthony Powell claimed that the Clarks were famously ruthless on their way up in society. Those who replied late to invitations were told that their places had already been filled.30 His automaton-like, often terrifying, efficiency gave Clark a bad name in some circles, and he frequently caused offence. It would be difficult to exaggerate how busy he was during the 1930s, travelling, lecturing, writing, entertaining, as well as fulfilling two important jobs, with the result that he could be off-hand and impatient. Occasionally this was misleading: when Ben Nicolson went up to him at a private view at the National Gallery to find out about his internship, ‘K refuses to shake hands or address one word to me. This distressed me for the rest of the evening because I thought probably it meant that I had been refused for the NG. I cannot put on any other interpretation of his extraordinary behaviour.’31 This was followed by a letter from Clark: ‘I am so sorry I didn’t have a chance of speaking to you at our Gulbenkian party on Wednesday. I was being torn in pieces by the most ferocious bores who always victimize one on an occasion like that. If I could have spoken to you I should have said how much I hoped you would be able to come here as honorary attaché next January.’32 St John (Bobby) Gore used to tell a story of being invited to a white-tie dinner at Portland Place at which Ben Nicolson was a fellow guest. Notoriously dishevelled, Nicolson arrived late, having struggled into a black tie. As he was shown into the room, Gore noticed Clark slip out, to return minutes later having changed into his dinner jacket with a black tie. He cited this as an example of Clark’s impeccable manners.33
The Clarks were taken up by two of the great hostesses of the 1930s, Sibyl Colefax and Emerald Cunard. Lady Colefax lived at Argyll House on the King’s Road, dubbed the ‘Lions’ Corner House’. There she introduced the Clarks as ‘my young people’ to the likes of H.G. Wells, Max Beerbohm and the influential American political commentator Walter Lippmann. They were only supplanted in this role after she ran into Clark one day lunching with a ravishingly beautiful woman at Wheeler’s – always his favourite restaurant. With an impish tease, Clark failed to introduce Vivien Leigh (then married to Laurence Olivier). Sibyl rang up later to enquire who his companion was. Ten days later the Clarks were invited to meet the Oliviers at Argyll House, and were greeted with, ‘Have you met my young people?’
Emerald Cunard mixed music, literature and politics at her lunches in Grosvenor Square, ‘a rallying point for most of London society’ where the conversation was quick-witted and ‘brilliant’; it glided from subject to subject in an exchange of epigrams and bons mots. Clark felt that this was a diet of hors d’oeuvres, and preferred to linger over a subject, ‘to the fury of the other guests; but Emerald forgave me’.34 Something of this slick brilliance, however, did enter Clark’s bloodstream. Many found his gift for summary to be glib, especially when it was witty. A little of it crept into his lecture style – what the German émigré architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner,35 brought up in a more rigorous school of art history, described as ‘thrown away to the flippancies of the amateur’.36 For Clark, terror of bores was only exceeded by the fear of becoming one.
With the ascension to the throne of George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the Clarks reached the zenith of their influence. In early 1939 the royal couple came to luncheon at Portland Place. Jane wrote to BB about the visit: ‘He is difficult to rouse but she is charming … they liked the magpie mixture in the house … she had never seen a Cezanne before, and thought them v.g. … the King gazed at the large early Matisse but was too polite to say anything.’37 Alan recalled the visit years later: ‘I remember once George VI came to lunch and I was produced in my short trousers and satin shirt, and he was very splendid and he offered me some ice cream, which was extremely good as I was never allowed ice cream because