Discover the Best Books Written by Kenneth Clark

Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron Clark OM CH KCB FBA (13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983) was a British art historian, museum director, and broadcaster. After running two important art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television, presenting a succession of programs on the arts during the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the Civilisation series in 1969.

The son of wealthy parents, Clark was introduced to the arts at an early age. Among his early influences were the writings of John Ruskin, which instilled in him the belief that everyone should have access to great art. After coming under the influence of the connoisseur and dealer Bernard Berenson, Clark was appointed director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford age of twenty-seven. Three years later, he was put in charge of Britain's National Gallery. 

His twelve years there saw the gallery transformed to make it accessible and inviting to a wider public. During the Second World War, when the collection was moved from London for safekeeping, Clark made the building available for a series of daily concerts which proved a celebrated morale booster during the Blitz.

After the war and three years as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, Clark surprised many by accepting the chairmanship of the UK's first commercial television network. Once the service had been successfully launched, he agreed to write and present programs about the arts. These established him as a household name in Britain, and he was asked to create the first color series about the arts, Civilisation, first broadcast in 1969 in Britain and in many other countries soon afterward.

Among many honors, Clark was knighted at the unusually young age of thirty-five and three decades later was made a life peer shortly before the first transmission of Civilisation. Three decades after his death, Clark was celebrated in an exhibition at Tate Britain in London, prompting a reappraisal of his career by a new generation of critics and historians. Opinions varied about his aesthetic judgment, particularly in attributing paintings to old masters, but his skill as a writer and his enthusiasm for popularising the arts were widely recognized. 

Both the BBC and the Tate described him in retrospect as one of the most influential figures in British art of the twentieth century. Clark was born at 32 Grosvenor Square, London, the only child of Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (1868–1932) 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. 

Kenneth Clark senior worked briefly as a director of the firm and retired in his mid-twenties as a member of the "idle rich," as Clark junior later put it: although "many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler." 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. 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." Clark was educated at Wixenford School and, from 1917 to 1922, at Winchester College. The latter was known for its intellectual rigor 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 and 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 honors 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."

While at Oxford, Clark was greatly impressed by the lectures of Roger Fry, the influential art critic who staged the first Post-Impressionism exhibitions in Britain. Under Fry's influence, he developed an understanding of modern French painting, particularly the work of Cézanne. Clark attracted the attention of Charles F. Bell (1871–1966), 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 research into his first full-length book, The Gothic Revival (1928). In 1925, Bell introduced Clark to Bernard Berenson, an influential scholar of the Italian Renaissance and consultant to major museums and collectors. Berenson was working on a revision of his book Drawings of the Florentine Painters and invited Clark to help. The project took two years, overlapping with Clark's studies at Oxford.