The Pleasures of Clark

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

In a medium full of talk, Kenneth Clark remains television's only great conversationalist, and he is better--more relaxed, more personal, able to avoid the least hint of the lecture hall--in The Romantic Rebellion (PBS, Monday, Jan. 13, 9 p.m. E.S.T.) than he was in Civilisation.

Manifestly, the romantic movement, as it showed itself in the painting and sculpture of the 19th century, is for him a subject at once more manageable and more familiar than the rise of all of Western civilization, his previous topic. Despite the pleasure of his company, the earlier series was often torrential in its outpouring of images, facts and opinion.

In contrast, The Romantic Rebellion is a quiet, smooth-flowing distillation of a lifetime's thought. It examines just twelve artists in the 14 half-hour episodes that follow this week's hour-long introduction. And even within these shows, there is no attempt to examine a subject's entire work. Instead, Lord Clark picks out key examples for close contemplation--discerning for us, in the modeling of a figure, the curve of a line or the choice and application of colors, the rise and fall of individual careers, artistic ideals and even cultural ideas.

At no time does he lose sight of the larger historical drama in which these artists were players. The "rebellion" of the title was against the classicism of 18th century art, with its obsessive search for ideal form, its demand that artists find and paint such general moral principles as they could discern in nature and in history. As Clark suggests, totalitarian painting and scholarship must still obey these formalist principles. Though the romantic rebels would not have known about that, they did insist on the sanctity of the individual sensibility, their right to paint man and nature as they envisioned them.

It was not a struggle, as Clark wryly makes clear, that can be neatly schematized. The same movement, after all, encompasses Ingres, "imprisoned within his obsession with the outline," and Turner, experimenting with pure, nearly formless color. Indeed, Clark finds romanticism's unconscious beginnings in the work of the last great classicist, David, and in Goya, deaf, hating and isolated beyond the Pyrenees. As before, Clark is wonderfully deft at demonstrating the cross-pollination of ideas and more than ever willing to express his own impatience with the second-rate. Even his beloved Turner is charged with doing some "corny" paintings.

These irreverent moments lie close to the heart of the series' remarkable appeal, for they are the flip side of Clark's enthusiasm for his subject. His business, he implies, is not uplifting masses, but holding a civilized conversation among equals. It is an endearing conceit, one that makes you want to break out the port and cigars when he raps on the electronic door.

qed Richard Schickel

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