The Gentleman Aesthete

By ROBERT HUGHES

Kenneth Clark: 1903-1983

In his last years Kenneth Clark's energies as a writer waned, and it is hard for anyone born after 1950 to grasp what a role he once played in art criticism. He was pushing 80 when he died on May 21, and he seemed an archaic figure, the last of the gentlemen aesthetes, a man who--as it was said after Civilisation went to air nearly 15 years ago--tended to discuss the Renaissance as though he had commissioned it. Yet no English writer since Roger Fry, perhaps not since John Ruskin, had more effect on the way a general public thought and felt about art.

No critic can make people see, but he can encourage them to look, and that was Clark's mission. Of course, he was not another Ruskin; he was incapable of Ruskin's attachments and enmities, his biblical moralizing and the descriptive genius of his prose. Nor was Clark, being essentially a 19th century critic at work in the 20th, able to bring to his work the array of insights about perception and psychology that distinguished contemporaries like Ernst Gombrich or Adrian Stokes. Clark was a pre-Freudian and, though he was too wise to try to dismiss the sort of art that comes from the dark side of the mind, he felt ill at ease with extreme expressions. Pascal's dictum that the ego is detestable--Le moi est haissable--was his motto, and he lived up to it with guarded mandarin decorum.

Clark's principal mentors were Walter Pater and Bernard Berenson. To the latter he maintained a long though not always harmonious apprenticeship. In an autobiography, Another Part of the Wood, he spoke of Berenson "perched on the pinnacle of a mountain of corruption." In return, Berenson complained that when Clark sold a painting, he was a gentleman improving his collection, whereas when Berenson did the same thing, he was a dealer turning a profit. It is certainly true that Clark's inherited wealth--his great-great-grandfather had invented the cotton spool--enabled him to do his work without conflict of interest in an art world that even then was a shady, manipulative place, if not the deep swamp it has since become. That was one reason why people trusted his taste. Another was his skill with boards and committees and his firm belief in public responsibility. He understood the difference between being a public man and settling for mere celebrity. But the third was, quite simply, his ability to communicate his enthusiasm freshly and directly. At his best, as in his texts on Leonardo and Piero della Francesca, and parts of The Nude and Looking at Pictures, he had a lovely, supple prose style, short on ornament and full of sense, that guided the neophyte to the heart of the work.

The climax of Clark's career, though not of his talents as a writer, came with Civilisation, the 13-part series that he wrote and narrated for the BBC in 1969. When Civilisation first appeared in England, the reviews were respectful, on the whole, but tepid. Among art historians, there was a good deal of scorn for its generalizations. Many television people thought it an oldfashioned, static affair, hobbled by Clark's unbudgeable penchant for writing scripts that were really slide lectures, with the narrator too much in view--"I am standing in front of the Cathedral of X, which you cannot see because I am standing in front of it." It was also felt that Clark's image of history as a saga of noble names and sublime objects without much regard for the shaping forces of economics or Realpolitik was, to say the least, archaic.

So although Civilisation won a large audience in England, nobody thought it was likely to change the shape of cultural TV itself. In this, everyone was wrong. If it had not been for Civilisation, none of the didactic series that came after it, starting with Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man and Alistair Cooke's America, would have been made. What clinched the BBC's enthusiasm for the large format was the American market. Nobody in England in 1969 could possibly have foreseen how America would take Lord Clark of Civilisation to its heart.

Looking back, one can see two main reasons why it did. The first was the cynicism and stupidity of most American TV. Essentially, Civilisation succeeded because educated people were sick of being talked down to by the networks, whose cultural coverage, or lack of it, was a byword for inadequacy. They refused to buy Civilisation because they thought there would be no audience for it. So instead of being dropped into some Sunday-morning coffin slot on network, it went out on prime time on PBS, straight to 5 million refugees from electronic gunk. The size of this audience would not have impressed Fred Silverman, but enough people tuned in for their weekly fix of what Paul Claudel called "l' allure du vrai gentleman Anglais" to make a star of Clark. Thus he became the Leonard Bernstein of the visual arts, a fate that enormously surprised him: once, after running the gauntlet of hysterical fans at a ceremony in his honor at the National Gallery in Washington, he was so overcome with embarrassment that he had to lock himself in a bathroom and weep. He could not see why they saw him as a healer, but the reason is clear today.

For nearly a decade, the American middle classes had been battered by the Oedipal vengeance of their offspring. Throughout the '60s they had been told they were the otiose relics of a clogged, oppressive culture, whose values would soon be flushed away by the irresistible tide of revolution, spontaneity and relevance. But then the TV screen opened and delivered its thaumaturge: not Jerry Rubin with his plastic rifle, but Clark, talking imperturbably of continuity, authority and masterpieces. Clark's analgesic effect was immediate, and it went beyond snobbery. Embattled American viewers identified him with culture itself, shared his mistrust of the late 20th century and his resignation to being in but not of it, and turned him into a figure of fantasy: a Beatle, as it were, for the middleaged. His best writings will survive all that. In them, he made an unanswerable case for reason, attentiveness, and the delight that is their reward.

-- By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.