Early years Clark was born at 32
Grosvenor Square, London, the only child of Kenneth Mackenzie Clark and his wife, (Margaret) Alice, daughter of James McArthur of Manchester. The Clarks were a Scottish family 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. The Clarks maintained 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. As an only child not especially close to his parents, the young Clark had a boyhood that was often solitary, but he was generally happy. He later recalled that he used to take long walks, talking to himself, a habit he believed stood him in good stead as a broadcaster: "Television is a form of soliloquy". On a modest scale Clark senior collected pictures, and the young Kenneth was allowed 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". , whose writings inspired the young Clark Clark was educated at
Wixenford School and, from 1917 to 1922,
Winchester College. The latter was known for its intellectual rigour and – to Clark's dismay – enthusiasm for sports, but it also encouraged its pupils to develop interests in the arts. The headmaster,
Montague Rendall, was a devotee of Italian painting and sculpture; he 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, not 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 study of art". Clark attracted the attention of
Charles F. Bell, Keeper of the Fine 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 study had been published since the nineteenth century. Although Clark's main area of study was the
Renaissance, his admiration for Ruskin, the most prominent defender of the neo-Gothic style, drew him to the topic. He did not complete the thesis, but later turned his researches into his first full-length book,
The Gothic Revival (1928).
Early career :
Head of Leda, in the
Royal Collection|upright In 1929, as a result 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 before outside Italy, many of them from private collections. The exhibition covered 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 not convinced that 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 as Keeper of the Fine Art Department at the Ashmolean. Over the next two years Clark oversaw the building of an extension to the museum to provide a better space for his department. The development was made possible by an anonymous benefactor, subsequently revealed as Clark himself. His acquisitions while at the Ashmolean included a large piece of mid-19th-century furniture known as the
Great Bookcase. Victorian art and architecture were out of fashion in the 1930s, "generally despised and derided", according to the art historian Matthew Winterbottom, but Clark believed that they should be represented in the collection, although the bookcase was not put on display until 2016.
National Gallery 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 behind the scenes the National Gallery "was in considerable turmoil; the staff and the trustees were in a state of continual warfare with each other." The chairman of the trustees,
Lord Lee, convinced 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 offer of the post, Clark was not enthusiastic. He thought himself too young, aged 30, and once again felt torn between a scholarly and an administrative career. He accepted the directorship in January 1934, 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".,
Trafalgar Square, LondonAt about the same time as accepting MacDonald's offer of the directorship, Clark had declined one from King
George V's officials to succeed
C. H. Collins Baker as
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 change 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 making fine art accessible to everyone, and while at the National Gallery he devised many initiatives with this aim in mind. In an editorial,
The Burlington Magazine said, "Clark put all 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 frames 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. 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 represent 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 maintained that good art must be accessible to everyone 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. Other important acquisitions, listed by Piper, were
Rubens'
Watering Place,
Constable's
Hadleigh Castle,
Rembrandt's
Saskia as Flora, and
Poussin's
The Adoration of the Golden Calf. He saw them in 1937 in the possession of a dealer in Vienna, 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. He set up 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 advance booking, and audience members were free to eat their sandwiches and walk in or out during breaks in the performance. The concerts were an immediate 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 given 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 institution of a "picture of the month" was retained after the war, and, at 2025, has continued 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.
Postwar '' by
Piero della Francesca, subject of Clark's 1951 study In July 1946 Clark was appointed
Slade Professor of Fine Art at
Oxford for a three-year term. The post required him to give 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. 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 support 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. 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 on BBC radio's
The Brains Trust.
Broadcasting: ITV, 1957–1966 , the last of Clark's
Five Revolutionary Painters series (1960) Clark's first series for ATV,
Is Art Necessary?, began in 1958. Both he and television were finding their way, and programmes in the series ranged from the stiff and studio-bound to a film in which Clark and Henry Moore toured the
British Museum at night, flashing their torches at the exhibits. When the series came to an end in 1959, Clark and the production team reviewed and refined their techniques for the next series,
Five Revolutionary Painters, which attracted a considerable audience. The
British Film Institute observes: By the time in 1960 when he presented a programme about
Picasso, Clark had further honed his presentational skills and came across as relaxed as well as authoritative.
The Royal Palaces, unlike its predecessors, was shot on 35mm colour film, but transmission was still in black and white, at which Clark chafed. The BBC was by this time planning to broadcast in colour, and his renewed contact with the corporation for this film paved the way for his eventual return to its schedules. In the interim he remained with ITV for a 1966 series,
Three Faces of France, featuring the works of
Courbet,
Manet and
Degas.
Civilisation, 1966–1969 David Attenborough, the controller of the BBC's new second television channel,
BBC2, was in charge of introducing colour broadcasting to the UK. He conceived the idea of a series about great paintings as the standard-bearer for colour television, and had no doubt that Clark would be much the best presenter for it. Clark was attracted by the suggestion, but at first declined to commit himself. He later recalled that what convinced him that he should take part was Attenborough's use of the word "civilisation" to sum up what the series would be about. After initial mutual antipathy, Clark and his principal director,
Michael Gill, established a congenial working relationship. They and their production team spent three years from 1966 filming in a hundred and seventeen locations in thirteen countries. The filming was to the highest technical standards of the day, and quickly went over budget; it cost £500,000 by the time it was complete. Attenborough rejigged his broadcasting schedules to spread the cost by transmitting each episode twice in a week. There were complaints, then and later, that by focusing on a traditional choice of the great artists over the centuries – all of them male – Clark had neglected women and presented "a saga of noble names and sublime objects with little regard for the shaping forces of economics or practical politics". and he described himself on screen as a hero-worshipper and a stick-in-the-mud. He commented that his outlook was "nothing striking, nothing original, nothing that could not have been written by an ordinary harmless bourgeois of the later nineteenth century": 's
The School of Athens, reproduced on the cover of the book and DVD versions of
Civilisation The broadcaster
Huw Wheldon believed that
Civilisation was "a truly great series, a major work ... the first magnum opus attempted and realised in terms of TV." There was a widespread view among critics, including some unsympathetic to Clark's selections, that the filming set new standards.
Civilisation attracted unprecedented viewing figures for a high art series: 2.5 million viewers in Britain and 5 million in the US. In 2016,
The New Yorker echoed the words of
John Betjeman, describing Clark as "the man who made the best telly you've ever seen". The
British Film Institute notes how
Civilisation changed the shape of cultural television, setting the standard for later documentary series, from
Alastair Cooke's
America (1972) and
Jacob Bronowski's
The Ascent of Man (1973) to the present day. With the aid of a grant from the
National Endowment for the Humanities, the
National Gallery of Art in Washington DC acquired copies of the series and distributed them to colleges and universities throughout the US. In 1973 he made
Romantic Art Versus Classic Art for ITV. In 1976 Clark returned to the BBC, presenting five programmes about
Rembrandt. Clark was
chancellor of the
University of York from 1967 to 1978 and a trustee of the
British Museum. ==Family and personal life==