Kenneth McKenzie Clark, Baron Clark, OM, CH, KCB, FBA (13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983) was a British author, museum director, broadcaster, and one of the best-known art historians of his generation. In 1969, he achieved an international popular presence as the writer, producer, and presenter of the BBC Television series, Civilisation.

Biography[link]

Early years[link]

Clark was born in London, the only child of Kenneth MacKenzie Clark and Margaret Alice McArthur. The Clarks were a wealthy Scottish family with roots in the textile trade (the "Clark" in Coats & Clark threading). His great-great-grandfather had invented the cotton spool. Kenneth Clark the elder had retired in 1909 at the age of 41 to become a member of the 'idle rich' (as described by W. D. Rubinstein in The Biographical Dictionary of Life Peers).

Clark was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied the history of art. In 1927 he married a fellow Oxford student, Elizabeth Jane Martin, who was Irish. The couple had three children: Alan, in 1928, and twins Colette (known as Celly) and Colin in 1932.

Early career[link]

A protégé of the most influential art critic of the time, Bernard Berenson, Clark quickly became the British art establishment's most respected aesthetician. After a stint as fine arts curator at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, in 1933 at age 30, Clark was appointed director of the National Gallery. He was the youngest person ever to hold the post. The following year he also became Surveyor of the King's Pictures, a post he held until 1945. As Director of the National Gallery he oversaw the successful relocation and storage of the collection to avoid the Blitz and continued a programme of concerts and performances. He was a controversial figure however, in part due to his distaste for much of modern art and Post-Modernist thought. Nevertheless, he was an influential supporter of modern sculptor Henry Moore and, as Chairman of the War Artists Advisory Committee, he persuaded the government not to conscript artists thus ensuring that Moore found work. He was also an advisor to the Ministry of Information commissioning Dylan Thomas amongst others to write scripts for propaganda films. In 1946 Clark resigned his directorship in order to devote more time to writing. Between 1946 and 1950 he was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. He was a founding board member and also served as Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1955 to 1960, and had a major role in the art programme of the Festival of Britain.

Kenneth Clark was created Knight Commander of the Bath in 1938, and made a Companion of Honour in 1959. He also received the Order of Merit in 1976. In 1955 he purchased Saltwood Castle in Kent.

Clark the broadcaster[link]

An indefatigable lecturer in both academic and broadcast settings, Clark's mastery was to make accessible complex and profound subject matter that could then be appreciated by an extremely broad audience. He was one of the founders, in 1954, of the Independent Television Authority, serving as its Chairman until 1957, when he moved to ITA's rival BBC. In 1969 he wrote and presented Civilisation for BBC television, a series on the history of Western civilisation as seen through its art. Also broadcast on PBS in 1969, Civilisation was successful on both sides of the Atlantic, gaining Clark an international profile. According to Clark, the series was created in answer to the growing criticism of Western Civilisation, from its value system to its heroes. In 1970, the Irish national newspaper TV critics honoured Clark with a Jacob's Award for Civilisation.^[1]

A self-described "hero-worshipper", Clark proved to be an ardent pro-individualist, Humanist and anti-Marxist. His comments on the subject of 1960s radical University students, from a final episode of Civilisation, are but one example of his extremely rational view of Post Modernism in all its contemporary forms: "I can see them [the students] still through the University of the Sorbonne, impatient to change the world, vivid in hope, although what precisely they hope for, or believe in, I don't know." - Clark, Civilisation, Episode 12.

Later life[link]

He was Chancellor of the University of York from 1967 to 1978 and a trustee of the British Museum. Clark was awarded a life peerage in 1969, taking the title Baron Clark, of Saltwood in the County of Kent (The British satirical magazine Private Eye nicknamed him Lord Clark of Civilisation). In 1972, he was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Letters) from the University of Bath.^[2]

In 1975 he supported the campaign to create a separate Turner Gallery for the Turner Bequest and in 1980 agreed to open a symposium on Turner at the University of York, of which he had been Chancellor, but illness compelled him to back out of that commitment, which Lord Harewood undertook in his place.

His wife Jane died in 1976 and the following year Lord Clark married Nolwen de Janzé-Rice, the ex-wife of Edward Rice, and daughter of the Count of Janzé alias Comte Frederic de Janze (a well-known French racing driver of the 1920s and 1930s) by his wife Alice Silverthorne (better known by her married names as Alice de Janzé or Alice de Trafford), a wealthy American heiress resident in Kenya.

Family[link]

Clark's elder son, Alan Clark, became a prominent Conservative MP and was a writer-historian and celebrated diarist. Alan's younger brother Colin Clark was a writer and filmmaker.

Styles and honours[link]

• Mr Kenneth Clark (1903–1938)
• Sir Kenneth Clark KCB (1938–1946)
• Prof. Sir Kenneth Clark KCB (1946–1949)
• Prof. Sir Kenneth Clark KCB FBA (1949–1950)
• Sir Kenneth Clark KCB FBA (1950–1959)
• Sir Kenneth Clark CH KCB FBA (1959–1969)
• The Rt. Hon. The Lord Clark CH KCB FBA (1969–1976)
• The Rt. Hon. The Lord Clark OM CH KCB FBA (1976–1983)

Bibliography[link]

• The Gothic Revival (1928)
• Catalogue of the Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of HM King at Windsor Castle (1935 2 vols)
• Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of his development as an Artist (1939, rev. ed. 1952)
• Florentine Painting: The Fifteenth Century (1945)
• Piero della Francesca (1951)
• Landscape into Art (1949), adapted from his Slade Lectures
• Moments of Vision (1954), the Romanes Lecture for 1954. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• The Nude: a study in ideal form (1956) A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, delivered in 1953.
• Looking at Pictures (1960)
• Ruskin Today (1964) (edited and annotated by)
• Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance (1966)
• The Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of HM Queen at Windsor Castle (1968/9 with Carlo Pedretti 3 vols)
• Civilisation: A Personal View (1969), book version of the television series
• Blake and Visionary Art (1973)
• The Romantic Rebellion (1973), book version of the television series
• Another Part of the Wood (1974) (autobiography)
• Animals and Men (1977)
• The Other Half (1977) (autobiography)
• What is a Masterpiece? (1979)
• Feminine Beauty (1980)

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Meryle Secrest. Kenneth Clark: A Biography (1985)
• Vital Vulgarity Clark's role in the founding of ITV (from the Transdiffusion group of TV history websites)
• http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/message/an/localities.africa.general/435.3 – for Clark's second marriage to Nolwen, and her maternal affiliation
• http://www.cousinconnect.com/d/a/11502 – for Lady Clark's mother
• Leigh Rayment's Peerage Pages ^{[self-published source?][better source needed]}

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Kenneth Clark

• Portraits of Kenneth Clark at the National Portrait Gallery, London
• The Sir Kenneth Mackenzie Clark Collection at the Victoria University Library at the University of Toronto