Contemporary Authors

• Great Collectors of Our Time: Art Collecting since 1945 Scala Arts & Heritage (London, England), 2008
• The British as Art Collectors: From the Tudors to the Present Scala Arts Publishers (London, England), 2012
• Great Houses of London Frances Lincoln (London, England), 2012
• Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and "Civilisation" Knopf (New York, NY), 2016

1. Kenneth Clark : life, art and Civilisation LCCN 2016940293 Type of material Book Personal name Stourton, James, author. Main title Kenneth Clark : life, art and Civilisation / James Stourton. Edition First United States edition. Published/Produced New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. ©2016 Description xvii, 478 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm ISBN 9780385351171 (hardback) 0385351178 (hardback) (ebook) CALL NUMBER N7483.C55 S76 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Institute of Historical Research - http://www.history.ac.uk/about/james-stourton

  Mr James Stourton
  British Art History
  James Stourton MA FSA is an Art Historian who is writing the authorised biography of Kenneth Clark, Lord Clark of Saltwood. He graduated from Cambridge Art History Faculty in 1979 and joined Sotheby’s Old Master paintings department. Over the next thirty years he organised many famous sales and became Deputy Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe in 1997, Chairman of Sotheby’s Institute of Education in 1999 and Chairman of Sotheby’s UK in 2007.

  Alongside his Sotheby’s career James developed an academic interest in Patronage and Collecting, publishing many articles for Apollo, Country Life, The Independent, The Spectator and The Times as well as lecturing to The Art Fund, Cambridge Art History Faculty and Sotheby’s Institute. James has published five books including Great Collectors of Our Time: Art Collecting since 1945 (2007 Apollo Book of the Year); The British as Art Collectors, from the Tudors to the Present (2012 with Charles Sebag-Montefiore) and Great Houses of London (2012).

  James Stourton left Sotheby’s in 2012 to pursue his academic interests. Today he sits on the Panel of the Heritage Memorial Fund and also the Acceptance in Lieu Panel.

• Penguin Random House - http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/179037/james-stourton

  James Stourton
  J S
  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JAMES STOURTON, the former chairman of Sotheby’s U.K., is the author of many books, including Great Houses of London and Great Collectors of Our Time. A lecturer on history, he is also a senior fellow of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.

  ===

  Kenneth Clark
  LIFE, ART AND CIVILISATION
  By JAMES STOURTON

  Category: Art | Arts & Entertainment Biographies & Memoirs
  Kenneth Clark by James Stourton
  Look Inside

  Paperback +
  Hardcover –
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  Nov 01, 2016 | 496 Pages

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  ABOUT KENNETH CLARK

  The definitive biography of this brilliant polymath–director of the National Gallery, author, patron of the arts, social lion, and singular pioneer of television–that also tells the story of the arts in the twentieth century through his astonishing life.

  Kenneth Clark’s thirteen-part 1969 television series, Civilisation, established him as a globally admired figure. Clark was prescient in making this series: the upheavals of the century, the Cold War among others, convinced him of the power of barbarism and the fragility of culture. He would burnish his image with two memoirs that artfully omitted the more complicated details of his life. Now, drawing on a vast, previously unseen archive, James Stourton reveals the formidable intellect and the private man behind the figure who effortlessly dominated the art world for more than half a century: his privileged upbringing, his interest in art history beginning at Oxford, his remarkable early successes. At 27 he was keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean in Oxford and at 29, the youngest director of The National Gallery. During the war he arranged for its entire collection to be hidden in slate mines in Wales and organized packed concerts of classical music at the Gallery to keep up the spirits of Londoners during the bombing. WWII helped shape his belief that art should be brought to the widest audience, a social and moral position that would inform the rest of his career. Television became a means for this message when he was appointed the first chairman of the Independent Television Authority. Stourton reveals the tortuous state of his marriage during and after the war, his wife’s alcoholism, and the aspects of his own nature that he worked to keep hidden. A superb work of biography, Kenneth Clark is a revelation of its remarkable subject.

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  PRAISE

  “[A] crisp and authoritative biography…[told] with grace and wit…a pre-eminent figure of cultural life during the 20th century…Clark recognized that in dark times there is a yearning for serious art, music and literature…Civilization is fragile, he understood. About its development, and about the possibility of succumbing to forces of chaos, he warned, ‘We got through by the skin of our teeth, and it might happen again.’”
  –Dwight Garner, The New York Times

  “Learned…eloquent…[Stourton] carefully chronicles Clark’s rather loveless childhood, his apprenticeship with Berenson in Italy, his appointment as keeper of fine art at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, at the astonishing age of 27, his rise to command the National Gallery at 30…[and his] influence in the world of television.”
  –Dan Hofstadter, The Wall Street Journal

  “Outstanding…Stourton proves to be a highly capable guide to this significant 20th-century life…A sparkling, thoroughly entertaining portrait of a brilliant popularizer who brought art to the masses.”
  –Kirkus Reviews

  “James Stourton leaves no stone unturned in Kenneth Clark, his magisterial and engrossing biography, which achieves a perfect balance between Clark’s complex private world and his hugely successful career.”
  –Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War

  “Superb…Stourton, a former chariman of Southeby’s, is the ideal choice for Clark’s official biographer and has produced an accomplished book that is scholarly, entertaining, beautifully written and sympathetic, while far from uncritical.”
  –Michael Prodger, The Times

  “Richly detailed, colourful and astute…a resplendent biography.”
  –John Carey, The Sunday Times

  “An astute study…Stourton has dissected his subject’s multiple personae and unpicked his ambiguities and evasions…[He] astutely analyses Clark’s emotional and intellectual contradictions.”
  –Peter Conrad, The Guardian

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• Sothebys - http://www.sothebys.com/de/specialists/james-stourton/bio.html

  Highlights
  Joined Sotheby’s Painting department in 1979
  Organised many important sales, including the Montefiore manuscripts sale
  An expert on the history of collecting
  A consultant to The Economist’s art collecting supplement
  Frequently lectures to the Cambridge University Faculty of Art History
  James Stourton joined Sotheby's Paintings department in 1979. For ten years he was a specialist in English and European Paintings before becoming Director of the European Valuation department and subsequently became Deputy Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe in 1997.

  He has organised many important sales, including The Ava Gardner Collection, The Bentinck-Thyssen Old Master Painting Collection, The Edward Fattorini Dutch Painting Collection, The Arturo Lopez-Wilshaw Silver sale, the Palazzo Corsini sale in Florence, the Guy de Rothschild sale in Monte-Carlo and the sale of Charles de Beistegui at Château de Groussay. He organised the Montefiore manuscripts sale in New York in 2004 and arranged the successful private sale of the Montefiore printed books to Yarnton Manor, the Centre for Jewish Studies near Oxford.

  Mr Stourton has written widely on collecting for Apollo, The Art Newspaper, Matrix, The Independent and The Spectator. He also serves as a Consultant to The Economist’s art collecting supplement. His other publications include Great Collectors of our Time: Art Collecting Since 1945 (2007) and Great Smaller Museums of Europe (2003). He is currently writing A History of British Collecting. He also regularly lectures to Sotheby’s Institute of Education and the Cambridge University Faculty of Art History.

  A bibliophile and book collector, Mr Stourton was the proprietor of the Stourton Press, which printed, edited and published more than 30 books of poetry, essays and philosophy. He has been a frequent writer on printing and typography, particularly for Matrix, as well a writer of reviews, obituaries and articles for The Independent, The Spectator, Country Life, Apollo, and The Art Newspaper.

  Mr Stourton studied History of Art at Cambridge and is an expert on the history of collecting.

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Print Marked Items
Kenneth Clark
Carolyn Mulac
Booklist.
113.5 (Nov. 1, 2016): p17. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Kenneth Clark. By James Stourton. Nov. 2016.496p. illus. Knopf, $35 (9780385351171). 709.
Long before he embarked on Civilisation, the 1960s, now-iconic television series, Clark, at age 29, became the youngest director of Britain's National Gallery. During WWII, he saw to it that the museum's collection was safely hidden away in Welsh slate mines, and he helped organize Dame Myra Hess' daily concerts in the gallery's emptied space, even conducting one of them himself. In this comprehensive biography, Stourton ((Great Houses of London, 2012) introduces us to both the extraordinarily accomplished public figure and the complex private man, writing: "There are many Kenneth Clarks to describe." Stourton does so in a thorough and captivating biography rich in detail, bringing forward Clark's passion and scholarship as an influential art historian (particularly his standing as a Leonardo expert), his famous lectures, work as a journalist and a professor, achievements as a television performer and mogul, a "darling of society," a lover, and a family man. Art enthusiasts and Anglophiles will enjoy the story of a remarkable individual and an illumination of the art world in Britain during the last century.--Carolyn Mulac
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mulac, Carolyn. "Kenneth Clark." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 17. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471142769&it=r&asid=0a50d4526db04b768ed5fcc17adc68cf. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471142769
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Special K
Meryle Secrest
Spectator.
332.9817 (Oct. 22, 2016): p36. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation by James Stourton
Collins, 30 [pounds sterling], pp. 496
Our collective attention spans may not be as short as is widely cited, but they are pretty short. Take the case of the art historian Kenneth Clark. If anyone remembers anything about him, it is as the presenter of Civilisation, a TV series of the 1960s that rocketed him to stardom, and the author of the accompanying book, which sold over a million copies. He died in 1983 when he was a mythical figure, and any attempt to show his human dimensions was anathema, as I discovered to my cost. My own biography of Clark was published a year later.
Nowadays, one can hardly get anyone to take him seriously. One reviewer dismissed Civilisation as a period piece, the narrator 'a patrician' in a tweed suit. Another spoke of 'a figure of derision'. He was 'the great arts panjandrum', said a third. The word means a powerful figure but also a pretentious one --a snob.
Nobody reads his first volume of autobiography, Another Part of the Wood, any more, and so no one has understood what special qualities of mind invigorate his works, though they are clear enough on the page: honesty, insight, humour and a complete lack of self-importance. He described his parents as the idle rich: 'Many people were richer, but there can have been few who were idler'. He introduced their competing temperaments: an emotionally blocked mother and grandly alcoholic father. 'He put up with her bouts of self-pity and she devoted her whole life to an unsuccessful attempt to stop him drinking.'
They might have been, as Clark said, 'as ignorant as swans', but they recognised their gifted son's love of art. Their innate understanding of his career path was at odds with their colossal ignorance of his emotional needs. His mother glided through his life like a somnambulist. She was reading in the library one day when she smelled smoke, so she got up and moved to another room. Shortly after, the floor fell in.
Clark claims she never touched him. Correct that to 'seldom'--Stourton shows a photograph of her with an awkward arm around him; he looks equally uncomfortable. He was brought up by servants and by Lam, an understanding governess whom he loved.
He also loved his father, but there was a price to be paid. He told me that, whenever they were in London, his father's bouts of drunkenness would become unusually heavy. 'He would stagger into the lobby of a hotel, or his club, and collapse on the sofa.' People would complain, and,
I'd have to go and get him into a cab. A porter
and I between us would get him up to the flat.
My father wasn't an angry drunk, just an incapable
drunk. I couldn't explain to people what
a dear old boy he was really, and I felt terribly
embarrassed and never got over it.
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Among the challenges Stourton had to face is the biographer's eternal conundrum: how to convince the reader of the accomplishments of his subject. He has done this brilliantly, not only exploring his gifts as author, lecturer, film-maker and champion of British art but also as public figure. He takes pains to show the reader Clark's human dimensions, and his impish sense of humour. I saw this trait at close quarters.
One day K, as he liked to be called, and I were waiting in the car while K's second wife Nolwen made a stop at her dressmaker's. She was taking too long. K took over. He rolled up a piece of newspaper, got out of the car and started walking around the neighbourhood, which contained more than its share of chained dogs. The barking reached fever pitch. Nolwen ran out, full of apologies.
As a former chairman of Sotheby's, the author is naturally interested in Clark's career as a public figure: director of the National Gallery, work with the Ministry of Information in the second world war and efforts to mould the Independent Television Authority after it. I would say, a bit too interested. Do we really need to know about Clark's influence on the trustees of the British Museum's policies in 1968?
One wishes, too, that Stourton had spent more time considering the effect on Clark of the accident of fate that gave him an alcoholic father, an alcoholic wife, Jane, and an alcoholic son, Colin. Surely K had puzzled over this, but he seemed too easily satisfied with excuses. He said of Jane, 'I asked her about it but she said she liked to drink.' On another occasion, he said that he had tried to probe, but 'she bit my head off'.
It is possible that he felt an uncomfortable sense of guilt. His factotum, Mr Lindley, once gave K a report on Jane after he picked him up at the station. She had been in fine fettle during K's absence and had not 'touched a drop'. K replied searchingly, 'You mean it's my fault then?'
His son Alan presented other problems. It is true that his volatile mother took a dislike to him. Alan retaliated by hating her back, at considerable emotional cost, as can be discerned in his diaries, particularly the later ones. 'She became the enemy,' he told me. I remember he said it with no apparent emotion, but he was hugging himself. 'I flinched when she touched me.' What did his father make of this antagonism? It is hard to tell. Colette--Colin's twin--recalled that, during these rows, her father would send them loving glances but did not intervene. He acted more like 'a child among us children'. Alan's hatred never wavered. When Jane lay dying he said, 'Why doesn't she get on with it?'
What layers of affection, need and obligation lay behind Clark's long marriage to Jane, which was punctuated by so many affairs, is another unanswerable question. In his own way, he found a bearable solution. Jane, sober, could be intolerable; but when drunk her mood changed and she became wistful, Ophelia-like. Mr Lindley saw him on his way to her bedroom with her first drink of the day every morning.
I fully expect that this assiduous and accomplished biography will bring about a second Great Clark Boom. In the meantime, a correction: publicity for the book claims this is the first biography of Kenneth Clark. It isn't.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Secrest, Meryle. "Special K." Spectator, 22 Oct. 2016, p. 36+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467315118&it=r&asid=2f7976467691523b40d885feabf7c30b. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A467315118
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Civilised and civilising; Culture in Britain
The Economist.
421.9009 (Oct. 1, 2016): p80(US). From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
A fascinating biography of Kenneth Clark that shows how much cultural life in Britain has changed--and for the better
Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation. By James Stourton. William Collins; 478 pages. To be published in America by Knopf in November.
LORD CLARK OF SALTWOOD, who was ennobled by Harold Wilson in 1969 after the triumph of his epic television series "Civilisation", became known more familiarly as Lord Clark of Civilisation. To one unsympathetic academic critic in the art world, he was Lord Clark of Trivialisation. Friends and colleagues called him simply "K".
Neil MacGregor, formerly director of the National Gallery and the British Museum, argues that K "was the most brilliant cultural populist of the 20th century". "Nobody can talk about pictures on the radio or on the television without knowing that Clark did it first and Clark did it better." Clark's hero was John Ruskin, who believed that beauty was everyone's birthright; and his achievement was to make this sound like common sense. But his reputation was not sustained. After his death, he was probably better known as the father of Alan Clark, a flamboyant politician, seducer and diarist.
In his working life, K had more pies than fingers to put them in: director of the National Gallery when it symbolised the cultural contribution to the war effort, with famous recitals by Myra Hess and the removal of the collection to the security of a Welsh quarry; chairman of the Arts Council and the authority that established commercial television in Britain; deeply involved in the revival of the Royal Opera House and the creation of the National Theatre; author of studies on Leonardo da Vinci and the nude in art.
These positions made him a quintessential figure of the British establishment, admired and feared, though behind the facade he was prone to shafts of self-doubt. He was the only son of a family that founded mills making fine cotton thread in Paisley, and he inherited immense wealth, but he always insisted that he was a socialist. King George V was so anxious to have Clark as Surveyor of the King's Pictures that he ignored protocol and visited him personally in the National Gallery to persuade him to take the job, which he did. Clark understood that the life he liked depended on close co-operation with the governing classes, but he could also despise them.
James Stourton's delightfully readable and authoritative biography is absorbing on the rise and rise of a gilded, lucky young man in a hurry. After Winchester (a school he did not like) and Oxford, he began work in Florence as a researcher for Bernard Berenson, a great student of the Renaissance. He was nearly 28 when he was offered the chance to become keeper of fine art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, 30 when he was appointed director of the National Gallery. He already had a reputation for automaton-like, and often terrifying, efficiency, and he could be off-hand and impatient. But he was very good at running things.
There was, however, more to his life. Mr Stourton, a former chairman of Sotheby's in Britain, describes Lord Clark as a man who loved being in love. These affairs and dalliances must have stirred his vanity, but one result was that his wife, Jane, drank heavily. K remained a loyal social partner, but he did once confess: "All the ladies I loved took to the bottle."
His story could be read as a morality tale. For after Jane's death, Lord Clark married Nolwen Rice, a woman he scarcely knew. She fought for possession with Janet Stone, the great love of the second half of his life. It was an ugly battle for succession in which Clark, all vanity spent, played no part. For a career that was propelled by a relentless
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pursuit of elegance, it was an inelegant finale. Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and "Civilisation". By James Stourton.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Civilised and civilising; Culture in Britain." The Economist, 1 Oct. 2016, p. 80(US). PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465037402&it=r&asid=155446191a178e2ee5e40d449df67837 Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465037402
.
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Kenneth Clark: Life, Art, and 'Civilisation'
Publishers Weekly.
263.33 (Aug. 15, 2016): p60. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Kenneth Clark: Life, Art, and 'Civilisation'
James Stourton. Knopf, $35 (496p) ISBN 978-0-385-35117-1
Stourton (Great Collectors of Our Time) traces the extraordinary trajectory of the life of Kenneth Clark, the youngest director of the British National Gallery (appointed at 29), lifelong educator and popularizer of the arts, and star of BBC's groundbreaking documentary series Civilisation, which propelled the tweed-wearing polymath into improbable celebrity status on both sides of the Atlantic. Though Clark's wide circle of acquaintances included the royal family and a staggering array of famous artists, writers, composers, and celebrities, Stourton throughout emphasizes Clark's Ruskinian mission to make art accessible to everyone, as movingly exemplified by the free concerts and Picture of the Month exhibitions Clark hosted at the mostly empty of artwork British National Gallery during WWII to keep morale alive. But Stourton's meticulously researched biography also addresses Clark's many contradictions and eccentricities, like his acrimonious relationship with his wife, and his many convoluted extramarital romances, which Clark entertained into his 70s, supplying humanity to a life that outwardly radiated with a Midas touch. Written with a relish for anecdote (and with Clark's wide social circle, there are many to be told), this book may suffer from an American readership largely unfamiliar with Clark; but those who have seen his epochal Civilisation series will appreciate the chance to explore the life of the man hailed by Neil MacGregor, a former director of the British Museum, as "the most brilliant cultural populist of the twentieth century." B&w photos. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kenneth Clark: Life, Art, and 'Civilisation'." Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 60+. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444568&it=r&asid=0d864aacac9e9d88b6a329eeedc35235. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461444568
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Doorstopping; Illustrated books
The Economist.
405.8812 (Nov. 24, 2012): p89(US). From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
COFFEE-TABLE books are expensive, doorstop-heavy and mostly unreadable--or at least unread. What counts are the beautiful photographs, the thick glossy paper; not the words. One notable exception is a new book that opens the door on many of the finest houses that survive behind London's sobre facades as embassies, billionaires' residences, offices, clubs and casinos.
James Stourton, the outgoing chairman of Sotheby's who is soon to begin working full-time on the authorised biography of Britain's great post-war culture panjandrum, Kenneth Clark, was inspired to write "Great Houses of London" by his morning walk to the office. As he strode through Green Park, his eye roved over the great houses of St James's: Wimborne, Spencer, Bridgewater, Warwick, Stornoway and Lancaster. In contrast to the many books that appear every year on British country houses, Mr Stourton realised that there was none that told of the hidden riches of London houses, which is odd given that in the 18th and 19th centuries they were better known than their country cousins.
Among the places he unveils are the Tower House, built for an energetic patron, the Marquess of Bute, and a magnificent tribute to the 1930s that was designed by Serge Chermayeff and Erich Mendelsohn--and wholly restored by Paul Hamlyn. Best of all are the author's personal asides on builders and those who inspired them. Who else could say of a house commissioned by a cerebral American architect, Charles Jencks, a pulpiteer for postmodernism: "The fun starts at the front door. It is a hominoid with head and hands" and has a postbox for a heart? Inside it is a treasure; much like Mr Stourton's book.
Great Houses of London.
By James Stourton. Photographs by Fritz von der Schulenburg.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Doorstopping; Illustrated books." The Economist, 24 Nov. 2012, p. 89(US). PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA309552858&it=r&asid=16216418ae156ae87456e43dc15418a3. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A309552858
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A weakness for beauty
Paul Johnson
Spectator.
319.9598 (Aug. 11, 2012): p37. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
The British as Art Collectors
by James Stourton and Charles Sebag-Montefiore
Scala, 60 [pounds sterling], pp. 352, ISBN 9781857597493
James Stourton is not only a successful auctioneer and chairman of Sotheby's but also an accomplished writer, the author of the delightful Art Collectors of Our Time (2007). He has now produced a book about how the English, and subsequently the British, set about acquiring and presenting works of art. He has been helped by Charles Sebag- Montefiore, another successful businessman, who has assembled a magnificent art library on which the research for this volume has been based. It is a hefty tome which has the merit of showing, in most cases, what these private collections looked like in their original shape before their dispersal among public national or American collections.
This is as it should be, for architecture is the basis of all English collecting. English aristocrats and plutocrats built magnificent houses either for their own sake or to display their works of art, and sometimes they deliberately formed collections to fill their houses. The book begins with Henry VIII, the greediest and richest of the Tudors, who combined acquisitiveness with a flexible conscience, seizing Wolsey's vast Hampton Court and expanding it, and turning Whitehall into the largest palace in Europe. His taste was dubious. His contemporary and rival François I noted: 'He likes everything to be heavily gilded.' But Henry had the sense at least to employ Holbein, the finest portrait painter of his day.
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And what the English really like, as this book points out, are portraits--above all by van Dyck--as well as landscapes-- especially by Claude and Canaletto. English collections amassed these three artists in prodigious quantities, and built rooms for them--like the Earl of Pembroke's Double Cube Room, or the Landscape Room at Holkham Hall, or the Duke of Bedford's Canaletto Room at Woburn Abbey.
In fact it is hard to think of three rooms which sum up more comprehensively the merits of English collecting. They are also, in a curious way, cosy--whereas the Long Gallery at Hardwick, the grandest display place in the country, is repellent. Not that Bess of Hardwick, who created it, was a poor collector. Stourton praises her 'rapacious and successful use of the marriage market', which enabled her to 'accumulate four fortunes', build 'the most advanced house of the time', and become 'the matriarch of English collecting'. Her grand-daughter married a superb collector, the 14th Earl of Arundel, and she begat three outstanding collecting families, the Devonshires, Portlands and Newcastles. Bess was an unlovable person, but success in collecting has never had much to do with charm, greatness in statecraft or morals.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The great medieval English kings like Edward III or Henry V collected little or nothing. The only time Edward I, probably the most formidable of the Plantagenets, is mentioned even remotely in an artistic context is in the Pipe Roll for 1348: 'Item, seven shillings, for repairing the crown which the King in his rage did cast into the fire.' The most avid collector in this line, Henry III, was the feeblest.
And the same applied to the Stuarts, with Charles I, the weakest king, being also the most artistic, presiding over an equally discerning court. Of the Hanoverians, George IV, a hopeless king, had exquisite taste. His Sèvres collection remains the best in the world and he acquired Rubens' magnificent 'Landscape with St George' and Rembrandt's 'Shipbuilder and his Wife'. (He was also among the first to spot the genius of Jane Austen, and had a set of her works in each of his houses.)
The book incudes some good material on the Victorians, especially on Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812--95), who formed the greatest of all collections of English ceramics. Having survived a horrible childhood, she married an ironmaster twice her age, had ten children, outlived him, married her children's tutor half her age and finally left her loot to the V&A, of which it remains one of the glories. Her journals give a fine insight into the excitement of collecting.
There is also much entertaining material on the moderns. A well-deserved tribute is paid to Herbert Read, who educated the English in the best of modern art, including Henry Moore; and there is a more quirky one to Edward James, who made famous Dali's lobster telephone and the Mae West lips sofa. Also included is the Picasso collector Douglas Cooper, shown in a photograph towering over his idol, while a beautiful dalmatian turns aside in disgust. Cooper, a monster on the scale of Henry VIII, used an honestly acquired American inheritance to buy Picassos, and was once knocked down by John Rothenstein, Director of the Tate. Collecting is full of rows as well as glories, and this ravishing book is a splendid introduction.
Johnson, Paul
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Johnson, Paul. "A weakness for beauty." Spectator, 11 Aug. 2012, p. 37+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA301871210&it=r&asid=37a60704dc47f94afec2edccb626f2f5. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A301871210
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Old palaces for new plutocrats
Spectator.
320.9609 (Oct. 27, 2012): p42. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Great Houses of London
by James Stourton
Frances Lincoln, 40 [pounds sterling], pp. 352, ISBN 9780711233669 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Having lived in London for 35 years, I thought I knew its architectural highlights pretty well, but this book is a revelation. It shows an aspect of the city that I hardly realised existed. I had always believed that, in what must now be called the Downton years, Britain's grandest families preferred to sacrifice their London palaces in order to hang onto their country seats. The French had their priorities the other way about, our attachment to rural life being one of the things that made us British. Devonshire House, on Piccadilly, which was demolished in the 1920s, along with so many other Georgian buidlings, symbolised this retreat from the capital. This narrative remains broadly true, but the joy of Great Houses of London is that it shows how much more survived than one might have thought.
Beginning with the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lambeth Palace and Ashburnham House, owned by Westminster School, the author takes us suavely around Marlborough House, 10 Downing Street, the Mansion House, Spencer House, 20, St James's Square--all familiar enough. But it is the cumulative effect which is impressive. There are also some surprises.
While Spectator readers might have visited Home House (a club, if not quite of the kind they usually frequent), Sir John Soane's Museum, Apsley House (another museum, although still partly occupied by the Duke of Wellington's son) and even the Speaker's House in the Palace of Westminster, they may not have entered the House of St Barnabas, the Georgian corner house which Stourton hails as 'the mistress of Soho Square'. Although 1 Greek Street, as it is otherwise known, began life as a speculation, it was souped up by the sugar planter Richard Beckford, uncle of the Regency collector William Beckford, in the 1750s. Dollops of creamy Rococo plasterwork were ladelled onto the walls and ceiling, shown here in delicious photographs by Fritz von der Schulenburg.
As might be imagined from a Chairman of Sotheby's UK, Stourton's prose is as limpid as it is learned. He has also got through doors that might normally be closed. Seaford House, 'the grandest house in Belgrave Square', with its 'gorgeous interior of onyx halls and gilt drawing rooms,' is maintained by the Ministry of Defence.
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William Burges's Tower House in Melbury Road, more medieval than the Middle Ages, is owned by Jimmy Page, former guitarist of Led Zeppelin--who has, incidentally, kept it up to the nines. 3 Grafton Street, Mayfair, which Sir Robert Taylor designed as a speculation for the 3rd Duke of Grafton in the 1760s, was first occupied by Admiral Howe, who would trounce the French in the Glorious First of June (1794). Having declined into corporate use as--don't laugh--a Greek bank, it has been restored to domestic splendour, Edwardian staircase hall (marble-lined in the Giant's Lavatory style) and all, by a private individual. Wow!
It might be objected that the title of this book has been stretched, particularly in the modern period. The astounding cabinet of curiosities which is Malplaquet House on the Mile End Road, home of the museum curator Tim Knox and the garden designer Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, is glorious more than great. Charles Jencks's Holland Park house, one of the defining works of postmodernism, isn't on the same scale as the Brazilian Embassy in Mount Street. Richard Rogers's house in Chelsea, which eviscerates a perfectly pleasant corner of St Leonard's Terrace, built in the 1840s, is a kind of anti-house. How different are Quinlan Terry's Regent Park villas--though I'm not sure I'd call them 'great' either.
These modern examples, though, illustrate a fundamental truth about Great Houses of London . If ever there was a book which had found its time, this is it. While the old 'In and Out' on Piccadilly--Matthew Brettingham's Egremont House--is, for the moment, in a sorry state, it is now the exception. Debenham House, 15 Kensington Palace Gardens and Dudley House are all being restored at this moment. This brings Stourton to 'the curious realisation that more of the great houses of London are back in private occupation today than at any time since the second world war'.
Throughout what estate agents call 'prime central London', architects are busily engaged in creating opulent dwellings, often behind old facades, thanks to Russian, Indian and Asian billionaires, royal families in the Middle East, Greeks escaping the meltdown. (As one Khazakhstani plutocrat was overheard to say recently, 'London is the only city where I can hold my wife's hand in public.' He could dismiss his bodyguards.)
Watch the property values rise: according to the estate agent Savills, London's top real estate should be regarded as a major export, given the foreign exchange that it generates. Natives who despair of inhabiting the centre of their own capital city, or of ever entering the new palaces--secret, if under-occupied--that arise, will need more books like Stourton's to reveal the domestic world that such superwealth creates.
Aslet, Clive
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Old palaces for new plutocrats." Spectator, 27 Oct. 2012, p. 42. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA308005707&it=r&asid=e2d7a34d211f710cbe2c653c72667faf. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A308005707
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Not just an eye for a bargain; Collecting art
The Economist.
386.8565 (Feb. 2, 2008): p96(US). From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2008 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
ART addicts will gather in London next week to get their fix when Sotheby's and Christie's sell impressionists and contemporary pictures by the hundreds. Market analysts will also be watching closely. Last November, when both auction houses held the year's biggest impressionist and modern art sales in New York, Sotheby's fell well short of its estimate and Christie's did less well than hoped. Economic and financial clouds have thickened since then, and there are fewer bonuses to spend on art. But many collectors will still turn up, motivated by passion rather than money.
Why do people collect, many will be asking themselves? Kenneth Clark, a British grandee in the art world of the 20th century, thought it was like asking why people fall in love: the reasons were various. This book, surveying about 130 eminent art collectors and collections since the second world war, bears him out. From banker to couturier, from civil servant to tycoon, they are a group of fascinating diversity with a wide array of tastes.
Some are flamboyant, some reclusive. A surprising number come in couples. Quite a few are scions of art- collectingdynasties. Many are artists or dealers as well as collectors, and often they become friends with the artists they champion (Picasso liked to have a particularly large coterie of collectors around him). A disproportionate number are Jewish. Many collectors started buying when they were very young, some later in life, and at least one of those featured in the book not until he reached his 80s.
"Great wealth is unquestionably an assistance in collecting," says the author, who as chairman of Sotheby's British arm meets a fair number of rich individuals. But some of his subjects started off with few financial advantages. Take Dorothy and Herb Vogel, a quiet New York couple, he a post office clerk, she a librarian, who over the years acquired around 4,000 pieces of mainly minimal and conceptual art, some of which now hang in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Or consider James Hooper, whose day job was with Thames Conservancy, the body that used to manage the river in south-east England, but whose real passion was searching for tribal art in the junk shops of the Thames valley. He never went near the places where his trophies came from.
Collectors try to get in before the object of their passion has been discovered by the world at large. Typically they are buying a generation ahead of the market, which explains how people of relatively modest means have managed to buildup collections that have since becomeimmensely valuable.
But most of the book is about those who either started off very rich or made a fortune and then spent much of it on art: people like the Rothschilds, the Sainsburys, Peter Ludwig and Charles Saatchi in Europe, or Peggy Guggenheim, the Rockefellers, the Mellons and J. Paul Getty in America, and a few famous collectors in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. This is a glamorous, colourful and often eccentric crowd. Mr Stourton met most of them, was shown round their collections and sumptuous houses and came away with lots of excellent stories, as well as a number of insights about what makes the art world tick.
Before the second world war, collectors mostly gloated over their treasures in private. These days they have more of a sense of public mission, and most of them exhibit, lend or catalogue their possessions or even give them away.
As fashions in collecting since the war have swung from old masters, English 18th-century art and artefacts and 19th- century impressionists to contemporary art, some of the collectors may have had little choice: a lot of the modern stuff is too big or unwieldy to be displayed within even the grandest apartment.
Are collectors just magpies, or is there something creative in the act of collecting itself? Some are self-confessed
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omnivores, others become deeply knowledgeable about their chosen field and exercise great taste and discipline in putting their collections together. But many feel, as Henri Focillon, an art historian, once put it, that the collector creates "from the genius of others a nectar which belongs to him alone".
Great Collectors of Our Time: Art Collecting Since 1945 . By James Stourton.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Not just an eye for a bargain; Collecting art." The Economist, 2 Feb. 2008, p. 96(US). PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA174076020&it=r&asid=5b20b733a174003193ca97b6165f740e. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A174076020
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Stourton, James. Great Smaller Museums of Europe
Jack Perry Brown
Library Journal.
129.1 (Jan. 2004): p106. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Scala, dist. by Antique Collectors' Club. 2003. 272p. photogs. index. ISBN 1-85759-284-0. $45. FINE ARTS
The deputy chair of Sotheby's Europe, Stourton takes a quick look at 35 smaller museums in 12 European countries, a preponderance of which are in France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Each institution receives a brief historical overview, followed by comments on the collections' highlights. These institutions were frequently the work of a single individual (e.g., Mayer van den Bergh in Antwerp, Canova in Possagno, Lenbach in Munich, Sir John Soane in London) or an earlier dynastic family. The character of the individual founders is delineated in a positive way--even in cases where there might be other views. This book is not critical in any sense of the word; it is instead a brief tour of art object highlights, frequently in the form of an imaginary walk through the museum. Each collection has from ten to 20 color illustrations, which are generally of very good quality. Stourton writes from personal pleasure and experience, and his enthusiasm throws strong light on his chosen museums. Detailed scholarly handbooks and catalogs exist fur some of the collections Stourton has chosen, but this book will provide the general reader and traveler with an accessible point of entry to some supreme art collections.--Jack Perry Brown, Art Inst. of Chicago Libs.
Brown, Jack Perry
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Brown, Jack Perry. "Stourton, James. Great Smaller Museums of Europe." Library Journal, Jan. 2004, p. 106.
PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA112482552&it=r&asid=b241146840f54c6d94d1c6170cade2d4. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A112482552
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Gallery crawl with a guiding star
Bevis Hillier
Spectator.
293.9145 (Nov. 15, 2003): p48. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2003 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
GREAT SMALLER MUSEUMS OF EUROPE by James Stourton Scala, 29.95 [pounds sterling], pp. 272, ISBN 1857592840
In the ancien regime of John Murray (before the publishing firm was taken over by Hodder Headline) it used to be joked that their typical book title would be Sideways Through Abyssinia by Freya Stark. Rupert Hart-Davis suggested as a characteristic Faber title How to Grow Grass on an En Tout Cas Court. In the 1960s, when George Weidenfeld was in his dynamic prime, the idea of an Ur Weidenfeld title was Great thimbles of the World, with countless co-editions in foreign languages--Les Plus Beaux Des a Coudre du Monde; Wichtige Fingerhutte der Welt; Importanti Ditali del Mondo--the Japanese title momentarily escapes me.
The title Great Smaller Museums of Europe has a touch of Great Thimbles ... about it, and James Stourton, who is deputy chairman of Sotheby's Europe, admits he had difficulty in striking the right note. He thought the book should properly be called Great Smaller and Middle-Sized Museums ... but knew that no publisher would wear that. This voracious cultural tourist, who has saved us endless rides in garlic-smelling carriages and on bumpy trams, was on the look-out for three things: great works of art, an interesting history and a good setting. And goodness, he found them. Indulging, as he often does, in deft Audenesque epigram, he calls it 'a book about small museums in large places and large museums in small places'. He shoehorned the Bowes Museum and Schloss Wilhelmshohe into the contents because he felt they were sufficiently unknown outside England and Germany to stretch a point.
It must have been agonising to draw up the short list. Stourton's choice is judicious, but it won't please everybody. He can surely be forgiven for omitting the Russell-Cotes Gallery in Bournemouth, which Sir John Drummond, of Edinburgh Festival and BBC renown, describes like this in his sparkling memoirs, Tainted by Experience (2000):
[It] was [in his childhood] a hilarious
junkshop ... Most of the collection was the
loot of a round-the-world trip undertaken by
the town's first Mayor in the 1880s. It had a
bit of everything money could buy most of
it awful, but some of it intriguing. There were
negatives of photographs of English cathedrals
set between two layers of glass in the
morning room windows; there were samurai
costumes picked up in Japan. But my
favourite was a full-sized statue, on the stairs.
of a young woman carrying a child. The
woman's entire body was encased in a knitted
one-piece garment, every stitch of which
was lovingly chiselled out of the marble. The
statue rejoiced in the title 'The Bathers'.
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I'm a little sad that the Watts gallery in Compton, Surrey, does not get a look in. The collection them shows how inspired the painter of that lugubrious allegory 'Hope' could be, especially in the early self-portrait which rivals Samuel Palmer's and Stanley Spencer's. (G.K. Chesterton. no less, wrote a glowing book about him.) Visitors also get the chance to enter the fabulous art nouveau chapel at Compton, a weird science fiction grotto. The gallery is mentioned in James Lees-Milne's diary of 1978:
I told John [Betjeman] that A[lvide, the
diarist's wife] and I had just been to the Watts
Museum. He said the picture called 'The First
Oyster' was meant as a deliberate joke, Watts
having been piqued when told that he had no
sense of humour.
The museums Stourton has chosen are of six main kinds: dynastic collections; museums linked with art schools and universities; patrician and bourgeois collections (in every case in this book, the founders of that group died childless); museums formed by artists, sometimes self-glorifying; museums under state or civic patronage; and 20th-century museums, dominated by Impressionist and Modern paintings. Stourton has tried to represent as many countries as possible. 'I was defeated by Spain,' he writes; but the defeat was temporary. 'The honour of Spain was saved only by DaWs eccentric creation at Figueres" (which includes a Cadillac that rains inside on the press of a button).
Stourton emphasises that his choice is a personal one; luckily, like Lord Curzon he is a Most Superior Person. First, living amid the moveable feast that is Sotheby's, he is learned in most art disciplines, from paintings to porcelain to snuffboxes. Second, he doesn't just give us and art-historical summaries of works of art and objets, but tells us the impression they made on him so we enjoy them vicariously. Third, on the sound journalistic principle that 'people are interested in people, not things', he draws vivid pen-portraits of the people--some of them certifiable nutcases--who formed the collections and those who have curated them (though perhaps he misses a trick in making no mention of
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Anthony Blunt, scholar and spy, at the Courtauld Institute of Art). Finally, he is no dour cicerone, but one with a dancing sense of humour.
He writes with extreme vivacity. There are all kinds of clever apercus that would not occur to most of us: for example, that Cezanne's 'Le Lac d'Annecy' at the Courtauld is 'like a detail of a painting blown up'. All the way through, one's interest is quickened by witty, piquant phrases that bring things to life. Count Lamberg, who enriched the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, appears in his portrait as 'a stiff, alert Mozartian doll'. Any other writer, with the possible exception of Cyril Connolly, would have omitted that masterstroke 'Mozartian'. Three Alexander Calder mobiles beside the sea at the Louisiana Museum, Humelbaek, are 'liberatingly beautiful'. Lucas Cranach the Elder (portrait of Luther, Schlossmuscum, Weimar) 'found himself a front-row seat on the Protestant Reformation'. Poussin's 'Bacchic Scene' in Schloss Wilhelmshohe shows 'a nymph being piggy-backed by a satyr'. The east pediment of the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina (reconstructed in the Glypothek, Munich) stirs the reflection that '[the Greeks'] quest was not so much for realism as for idealism'. Bernini's first mature sculpture, 'Aeneas and Anchises' (Galleria Borghese, Rome), 'lacks the fluidity of later works'. Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who founded that gallery, was not just 'a rich, rapacious bully'; 'his talent-spotting of both Bernini and Caravaggio sings for the defence'. A less spirited writer would have put 'speaks for ...'
The classical purity of Canova's house gallery is offset by 'the slightly giddy impression of so many gods, heroes, beauties, poets and grieving figures'. The rooms at the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, destroyed in 1943, were 'in the style of neo-everything: Romanesqne, Moorish, mediaeval and Renaissance'. In that museum Stourton finds 'a beautiful twilight Guardi of "A Gondola on the Lagoon", almost like a Whistler nocturne'. Also there, Vittore Ghislandi's extraordinary portrait of a Knight of the Constantinian Order, c. 1740, 'seals in our mind forever the image of decadent aristocracy'. (Yes: the face is uncannily like that of the late disgraced Marquess of Bristol.) With Watteau in the Wallace Collection, we are 'in the world of the enchanted picnic'. Dali was 'the court jester who delights and infuriates in equal measure' and visiting his museum is 'like walking into a cross between a funfair, church, toyshop and brothel all at once'--one is 'whirled around ... in a sort of cumulative hallucinogenic dream'.
In introducing us to the works of art, Stourton does not rely on his own sensibility alone. He is well versed in the literature of the history of art, and can effortlessly lay his hand on the right reference at the right time. For example, when he turns to Leonardo's wonderful 'Lady with an Ermine' in the Princes Czartoryski Museum, Krakow, he tells us that the first description he ever rend of it was in Cecil Gould's 1975 book on the artist. Gould wrote:
She is a kind familiar in the 20th century--the
highly intelligent, highly sophisticated,
attractive, slightly neurotic young woman,
who holds a responsible job with men as her
subordinates. Everyone knows she is the mistress
of a prominent statesman ... She is often
to be seen at high-level parties, a glass of
champagne in one hand, a cigarette in the
other, and three or four men around her.
Stourton comments, 'I wondered then if he was talking nonsense, but when I first saw the painting in 1994 my first reaction was that the portrait does accept this description.'
Another gem Stourton plucks out of the air is Kenneth Clark on Lord Hertford, of Wallace Collection fame: 'He sometimes failed to recognise that between a silk shirt of Watteau and a satin doublet by Meissonier lay the whole secret of art.' By the way, this reference is wrongly indexed as 'Juste-Aurele Meissonier', who was an 18th-century rococo silversmith and designer, not the flashy 19th-century painter to whom Clark was referring. (Of Meissonier's paintings of armoured soldiers, the acidic Degas remarked, 'Everything is metallic--except the metal.') Another minor mistake: a transparency of Chantilly has got reversed on the page: Chantilly lace, about face.
Stourton has at the back of his mind an arsenal of offbeat, almost gossipy information which enlivens his text. In noting that Egon Schiele was accepted by the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, in 1906, he reminds us that 'the academy
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earned an unwanted footnote in history when it rejected Adolf Hitler for admission in 1907'. He tells us that Van Gogh and Gauguin, visiting the Courbet and Delacroix paintings in the Musee Fabre in 1888, had 'electric arguments' over the works. Writing about (and gloriously illustrating) Grunewald's Isenheim altarpiece in the Musee d'Unterlinden, Colmar--"the supreme masterpiece of the Northern Renaissance'--he pays tribute to the novelist J.-K. Huysmans, whose critical essay on the artist (1904) proved that an acute dilettante can beat the art historians at their own game.
Stourton recalls the memorable moment when Monet 'announced to the surprised stationmaster of the Gare St-Lazare, "I have decided to paint your station" '. (A pun is hovering on the lines of, 'Monsieur, I think you have met your Waterloo', but I'll let it go.) You can rely on Stourton to know that M. R. James, once director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 'wrote a good ghost story' and that Cole Porter once rented the palazzo Ca' Rezzonico, Venice ('but even that couldn't revive it'). And he has a nice anecdote about Napoleon's sister, Princess Pauline Borghese. When a shocked somebody asked, 'How could you pose in the nude?' (for her serene statue by Canova), she replied, 'Oh, but the studio was heated.'
The book has a ponderous preface by Charles Saumarez Smith, the man who is dumbing down our National Gallery with Turner Prize-type video 'installations'. He ends his piece, 'I am looking forward to an opportunity to pack my bags to go to Kassel.' I'm afraid I can't help recalling two lines from a parody of the song 'How Much is that Doggie in the Window?':
You must make a trip to California?
Then how I do wish you would go ...
Hillier, Bevis
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hillier, Bevis. "Gallery crawl with a guiding star." Spectator, 15 Nov. 2003, p. 48+. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA111359832&it=r&asid=6646469f8f5b9eed07b1a9d950082244. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A111359832
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The new arbiters of taste
John Martin Robinson
Spectator.
306.9361 (Jan. 26, 2008): p35. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2008 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
GREAT COLLECTORS OF OUR TIME: ART COLLECTING SINCE 1945 by James Stourton Scala, 45 [pounds sterling], pp. 480, ISBN 9781857595147 [telephone] 36 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655
MOVING ROOMS: THE TRADE IN ARCHITECTURAL SALVAGE by John Harris Yale University Press, 30 [pounds sterling], pp. 240, ISBN9780300124200 [telephone] 24 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655
Both these books are dominated by the American connection, over half of each being devoted to transatlantic collecting in the 20th century. James Stourton's theme is post-war art collecting, and his US section is headed 'America Triumphant'. He describes the 60 years when the USA dominated the international art market through sheer buying power but also because of the vitality and originality of the contemporary American art scene in New York. John Harris, by contrast, paints a hilarious picture of the earlier 20th-century trade in historic interiors and architectural bric- a-brac when 'period rooms' were a must-have in American houses and art museums, though most of the latter have now been de-accessioned as fake.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The two books intersect at Basildon Park in Berkshire where Harris records the removal and export of the 18th-century interior fittings and Carr of York's dining-room to the Waldorf Astoria in New York in 1930, whilst Stourton describes the post-war restoration of Basildon, and the Italian paintings collected to fill it by Lord and Lady Illiffe in the 1950s, when the lost Waldorf Astoria bits were replaced with other fixtures by Carr of York from Panton Hall, Lincolnshire.
Harris traces the origins of the antiques market and antiquarian taste in 19th-century Britain, and the emergence of a distinct strand trading in 'period rooms' and supplying millionaires with instant historic backdrops. This architectural salvage--much of it from demolished buildings--was assembled and titivated by wily London dealer-decorators who
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made up complete interiors out of old bits, copies and outright forgery, the identical chimneypiece or plasterwork sometimes being sold to several different clients.
Harris plays sleuth and unmasks many of these frauds in an amusing narrative underpinned by original research. There is a whole chapter on that megalomaniac, avaricious magpie, William Randolph Hearst (the original of Citizen Kane) who filled warehouses with panelling and ancient architectural fragments which he then never used.
James Stourton's book deals with more serious and respectable collectors, including scholarly connoisseurs. All the great names are here: Mellon, Getty, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Annenberg. Stourton's book is a brilliant and succinct survey of art-collecting between 1945 and 2005 in Europe and the US but with some forays to the East, though the most interesting sections are those on England, France and New York. Near-contemporary history is especially fascinating. Many of the collectors covered are still alive. This is a book rich in personal detail, but also with an intelligent structure.
His theme is that the second world war was a watershed between European cultural primacy and that of America. 'France is the father and mother of this book and America its virile child.' He also traces the changes in the nature of collecting over the past 60 years, from an essentially private activity, part of the douceur de vivre, to a more public- orientated one. Some discerning collectors of the post-war period, like Paul Mellon or the Wrightsmans, formed their collections specifically with public museums in mind, while fashionable Modern and Contemporary Art, because of its character and gigantism, is increasingly created for exhibition--like the Saatchi Collection--rather than the embellishment of a private house or a setting for civilised living.
The central story is of American collecting 'pulling up its European anchor and moving gradually across the Atlantic and into a largely 20th-century time-zone'. There is an aspect of Old Testament and New Testament here--Old Europe and Modern America--though not everybody will agree unreservedly with the picture of French primacy giving way to American. It is debatable how far France still enjoyed any real cultural pre-eminence after the second world war, most of the great Parisian collections in that period being assembled by foreigners, Greek ship-owners and South American tin millionaires. Twentieth-century American taste has often been narrow and limited, with an over-emphasis on modern and contemporary art, whose value it is too early to judge, and a conventional lust for late-19th-century French pictures of an easy-on-the-eye variety in expensive frames. Anybody who saw last year's exhibition at the National Gallery of Renoir landscapes from American collections may have well-justified reservations about that field of activity.
The great boom in American collecting has been partly underpinned by a generous tax regime which enables the rich to pay their income tax by giving art to museums, and so both encourages people to buy, and has also filled the vast exhibition temples of North American cities. This has not been the case in England, where the Treasury has always opposed such fiscal encouragements. Instead, the post-war period was dominated by a group of educated scholar- collectors like Kenneth Clarke, Denis Mahon and Brinsley Ford, who used specialist knowledge of particular areas-- the Italian Seicento, Chinese pots or ethnic artefacts--to create magnificent collections on relatively modest incomes, by American standards. Stourton also charts the rise of London as international art capital in the 1950s and 1960s, which he attributes to air travel and the role of the two big auction houses in creating a powerful global art trade, as well as the emergence of acclaimed living English artists, pop culture and the School of London.
What makes this book so interesting is the strong human dimension. It is part based on interviews with the collectors themselves. As a result, the individual personal nature of collecting is strongly underlined. It provides a colourful insight into one aspect of contemporary society and culture. Hugh Trevor-Roper said that writing about the present is the hardest task for a historian, as the narrative is so difficult to discern. James Stourton makes a good stab at it here, with a clear storyline, vivid detail and excellent illustrations.
Robinson, John Martin
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Robinson, John Martin. "The new arbiters of taste." Spectator, 26 Jan. 2008, p. 35+. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
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p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA174058724&it=r&asid=2423273e88de13d4a8196e4144b021b6. Accessed 8 May 2017.
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Mulac, Carolyn. "Kenneth Clark." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 17. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471142769&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017. Secrest, Meryle. "Special K." Spectator, 22 Oct. 2016, p. 36+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467315118&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017. "Civilised and civilising; Culture in Britain." The Economist, 1 Oct. 2016, p. 80(US). PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465037402&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017. "Kenneth Clark: Life, Art, and 'Civilisation'." Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 60+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444568&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017. "Doorstopping; Illustrated books." The Economist, 24 Nov. 2012, p. 89(US). PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA309552858&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017. Johnson, Paul. "A weakness for beauty." Spectator, 11 Aug. 2012, p. 37+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA301871210&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017. "Old palaces for new plutocrats." Spectator, 27 Oct. 2012, p. 42. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA308005707&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017. "Not just an eye for a bargain; Collecting art." The Economist, 2 Feb. 2008, p. 96(US). PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA174076020&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017. Brown, Jack Perry. "Stourton, James. Great Smaller Museums of Europe." Library Journal, Jan. 2004, p. 106. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA112482552&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017. Hillier, Bevis. "Gallery crawl with a guiding star." Spectator, 15 Nov. 2003, p. 48+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA111359832&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017. Robinson, John Martin. "The new arbiters of taste." Spectator, 26 Jan. 2008, p. 35+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA174058724&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017.

• The Guar
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/18/kenneth-clark-life-art-civilisation-james-stourton-review
  Word count: 1331

  Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation by James Stourton – review
  An astute study of the broadcaster and art historian reveals a complex individual ashamed of his privileges
  Kenneth Clark above Grasmere in the Lake District in a still from 1969’s Civilisation series
  Kenneth Clark above Grasmere in the Lake District in a still from 1969’s Civilisation series. Photograph: BBC
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  Peter Conrad
  Sunday 18 September 2016 01.30 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.39 EDT
  Kenneth Clark aged into a monument, as venerable and as archly defensive as the castle in Kent where he lived with his antiquarian library and his private museum of paintings. When his televised Grand Tour of the European Patrimony earned him a life peerage, he was nicknamed Lord Clark of Civilisation (which an envious colleague altered to Lord Clark of Trivialisation). Retiring to a custom-built bungalow modelled on a Japanese imperial pavilion, he moaned that he had dwindled into Lord Clark of suburbia: his new home in the castle grounds was so déclassé that you could hear the traffic.

  Onlookers wondered whether Clark might be more or less than human. His brain, someone said, was hard and cold as a diamond; other sceptics likened him to a snooty emu, or claimed that he had the profile of a marine iguana. Lifelong friends confessed to finding him unknowable: Henry Moore felt he was always on the other side of a “glass wall”.

  In 1974, as a very young Oxford don, I wrote an admiring review of his memoir Another Part of the Wood; I was astonished to receive a letter from Clark – in microscopic, spidery handwriting, made worse by the shaky train that was returning him to his castle after a week of networking lunches and toff-heavy dinners in London – saying that I was the only reviewer who’d told him something about himself that he didn’t know. Typically, he didn’t disclose what my aperçu was. Baffled by his success and ashamed of his inherited privileges, Clark thought of himself as a fraud, a playboy undeservedly promoted to the status of a sage. When a boozy clubman described him as a shit, Clark reflected that it was “good to hear the truth occasionally”.

  Artists need to be subsidised, and Clark secretly deposited funds in the bank accounts of those he admired
  Now James Stourton, helped by Clark’s vast personal archive and by the anecdotal wisdom of his daughter, Colette, has dissected his subject’s multiple personae and unpicked his ambiguities and evasions. In Stourton’s view he was shy not smug, a populist not a snob, and his abiding sense of being an outsider made him prefer the homespun company of artists to that of the air-headed socialites and Tory nitwits who courted him.

  True, Clark was a product of the idle Edwardian plutocracy, and as a boy he accompanied the Empress Eugénie on afternoon walks whenever his gambling father transferred the household to a hotel he owned in Monaco. George V personally entreated Clark to take charge of the royal art collection. His education at Winchester and Oxford ensured that his career was eased by cronyism, and when he went to Buckingham Palace for a lunch with fellow members of the Order of Merit he reported that the other 23 grandees were “just the old gang”.

  Yet he flinched from ceremonial swank and once assured an audience feting him in New York that he was grateful for “this horror” rather than “honour”. Far from being a royal plaything, he enraged the Queen by narrating a television documentary about her palaces with a curdled, sarcastic tone, “devoid of the slop and unction to which she is conditioned”. While living in Hampstead, he sometimes escaped from the privileged guests in his house and sat writing in a car that he kept parked down the lane. (The car, I should point out, was a Bentley.) He even had a low taste for Mars bars, which he kept locked in the safe at his castle.

  Kenneth Clark's Civilisation reviewed - archive
  19 May 1969: Visually this has been a thoroughly exciting series. All manner of art objects, paintings, carvings, manuscripts, buildings, have been brought before us
  Read more
  A socialist conscience prodded Clark into public service, and for decades his afternoons filled up with worthy, dreary committees. As director of the National Gallery, he opened the building early on the day of the FA Cup final in 1938, so that “provincial supporters” could see the paintings that in theory belonged to them. During the war he loaned pictures from his private collection to a cut-price canteen in East Ham. Although he did not own a TV set, in 1954 he accepted the chairmanship of the Independent Television Authority and, to the consternation of the BBC, defended the “vital vulgarity” of the new commercial channel. He loathed the megalomania of Versailles, and wanted to exclude it from Civilisation; the series also avoided Spain, off limits for Clark because it was still ruled by Franco.

  Stourton astutely analyses Clark’s emotional and intellectual contradictions. He solemnly stuck by his wife Jane, despite her demonic temper and her habit of keeling over drunk at embassy parties, but he maintained a repertory company of mistresses and commuted between perfumed boudoirs. Jane was his enabler: he meekly accepted the torment and humiliation she inflicted because she served, Stourton says, as “his excuse to disengage”.

  As an art historian, Clark’s motives were equally mixed. He revered both John Ruskin and Walter Pater, but the hardy evangelism of the one clashed with the sensual refinement of the other. Clark the Ruskinian admired the bucolic simplicity of John Piper’s farmhouse; the Pateresque Clark sniffed at his baby son Alan as “abnormally ugly”, though he responded to things of beauty – including his own empurpled prose – by having hot flushes or bursting into tears.

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  Artists need to be subsidised, and Clark secretly deposited funds in the bank accounts of those he admired; but the work the impoverished bohemians produce repays the favour by enriching those who acquire it and trade in it. Clark’s mentor Bernard Berenson made a fortune by authenticating dodgy old masters for a dealer who sold them at a premium to American nouveaux riches. Clark was never so venal, but he could be chillingly proprietorial: when Sidney Nolan sent a painting of a cyclamen to Clark’s cook to thank her for lunch, her employer said: “I think this belongs to both of us” and commandeered the canvas.

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  When planning his great BBC survey, Clark defined civilised values as moral virtues: examples were the courtesy of 13th-century France, the rationality of the Enlightenment, and the humanitarianism of the Victorians. Contrary evidence from his own life suggests, however, that civilisation may be implicated in or even dependent on acquisitive vice.

  Alan Clark – one of Thatcher’s ministers, but most famous for his alley-catting sex life – summed up this collusion between culture, graft and smarmy hypocrisy. He took over the castle when his father retreated to the bungalow, then seethed as the old man sneaked back to remove prized volumes from the library. He considered his begetter and benefactor “a nuisance”, but made a note in his diary “to keep in with him for inheritance purposes”. Is that what civilisation and our treasured cultural heritage amount to – a pile of ill-gotten booty, miserably hoarded until death and then snatched by the greedy next generation?

  Peter Conrad’s book, Mythomania: Tales of Our Times, from Apple to Isis, is published by Thames & Hudson.

  Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation is published by Harper Collins (£30). Click here to buy it for £24

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/01/kenneth-clark-life-art-civilisation-james-stourton-review
  Word count: 1768

  Kenneth Clark by James Stourton review – Mary Beard on Civilisation without women
  Clark’s patrician manner, and the ‘great man’ approach of his famous TV series, now seem outdated. This biography retrieves his influence, but has worrying sexual politics
  Sir Kenneth Clark at Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol.
  Kenneth Clark … keeping the barbarians from the gates. Photograph: BBC
  Mary Beard
  Saturday 1 October 2016 02.30 EDT Last modified on Friday 5 May 2017 13.06 EDT
  In February 1969, I watched the first episode of Kenneth Clark’s famous TV series, Civilisation. I can still picture him, standing on barbaric northern headlands, explaining that “our” civilisation had barely survived the collapse of the Roman empire. We had come through only “by the skin of our teeth”. It was an incongruous scene: Clark – Winchester and Oxford educated, connoisseur and collector, former director of the National Gallery – looked every inch the toff as he walked in his brogues and Burberry over the battered countryside, where wellington boots and a woolly would have been more appropriate. But I tingled slightly as he repeated that phrase, “by the skin of our teeth”. I was just 14, and it had never struck me that “civilisation” might be such a fragile thing, still less that it might be possible to trace a history of European culture, as Clark was to do, in 13 parts, from the early middle ages to the 20th century.

  Civilisation had shown us that there was something in art and architecture that was worth talking, and arguing, about
  A few years later, now more a devotee of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (a TV series and book devised in hostile reaction to Civilisation), I began to feel decidedly uncomfortable with Clark’s patrician self-confidence and the “great man” approach to art history – one damn genius after the next – that ran through the series. I was very doubtful, too, about the image of wild barbarians at the gates that Clark conjured up in that first episode: it was as crude an oversimplification of barbarism as his dreamy notion of ideal perfection was an oversimplification of classicism. Nonetheless, Civilisation had opened my eyes, and those of many others; not only visually stunning, it had shown us that there was something in art and architecture that was worth talking, and arguing, about.

  Some of the best chapters in James Stourton’s careful biography discuss the making of this series. Clark was then in his early 60s and a considerable catch for its commissioner David Attenborough, who was trying to give the first wave of colour TV on BBC2 a more highbrow image than it had acquired in the US. What better than a series that would feature “all the most beautiful pictures and buildings” of the last 2,000 years of western European history?

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  Despite the commonly held belief that Clark was an upper-crust scholar plucked from some dusty museum basement who luckily proved to be a “natural” on screen, he had already made dozens of programmes for ITV, including one featuring an argument with Berger over Picasso’s Guernica (the two men were ideological enemies but personal friends). He was the obvious man for the job. Less obvious was the director assigned to the series: Michael Gill, father of the critic AA Gill, who did not share Clark’s aesthetic viewpoint (“Michael would probably have wanted to be the barbarian at the gate,” his wife observed). To begin with, getting the pair to collaborate was, according to one BBC source, rather like “mating pandas”.

  For some viewers, Civilisation was life-changing. In the letters Clark received after the broadcasts, no fewer than nine correspondents claimed they had been dissuaded from suicide simply by watching (modestly, Clark wasn’t sure whether to believe them). Even the Sun hyped Clark as “the Gibbon of the McLuhan age”, and he was promptly given a peerage. The rumour was that Mary Wilson said to Harold, after one of their regular Sunday evening viewings in 10 Downing Street: “That man must go to the House of Lords.” And so he did.

  But Civilisation was not an instant ratings success. At its first showing, it captured less than 2% of the available audience (compared with 35% for The Forsyte Saga). And Berger was not the only critic of Clark’s “top-down” approach to cultural politics; others complained that they were watching the elitist musings of an Edwardian critic. Clark’s silly jibes at “pseudo-Marxists” (for some reason, a notch below “real” ones), and his boasts of being a “stick-in-the-mud” laid him open to this.

  On one of his ITV programmes on 'good taste' he seems to have taken a line closer to Grayson Perry than to Brian Sewell
  As Stourton shows, some of the criticisms do not stick. Although the programmes concentrated on western Europe, Clark was not blind (as he was charged) to other artistic traditions: he had been devoted to Japanese art since childhood. And however patrician his manner, he was a lifelong Labour voter. In fact, in one of his ITV programmes on “good taste” he seems to have taken a line closer to Grayson Perry than to Brian Sewell.

  But Stourton frankly concedes one glaring omission in Civilisation. This was a “great man” approach in the most literal sense. Hardly any women got a look-in, and when very occasionally they did, it was not as creative artists or even patrons, but as hostesses, temptresses, Virgin Marys, or something woolly called the “female principle”. Almost the only woman credited, briefly, with an independent role was Elizabeth Fry, the prison reformer – and, it so happens, the ancestor of one of Clark’s long-standing mistresses.

  Contested though they still are, it is far easier to evaluate Clark’s TV programmes than the rest of his life. On the surface, his was a golden career. Born in 1903 into a family of the idle rich (“many richer … few idler”, as he put it), he made his way through school and university against the usual background of loyal nannies, vicious schoolmasters and cranky dons, before managing to get himself apprenticed briefly to the art historian Bernard Berenson in Florence. A glittering CV followed: keeper of fine art at the Ashmolean, director of the National Gallery, keeper of the king’s pictures, chairman of the Independent Television Authority, and so on, ending up a member of the Order of Merit, an august body that he found, predictably enough, full of his old pals.

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  Reading between the lines of Stourton’s account, it seems clear that he was good at big ideas, not so good at attention to detail (always a peril for men, like Clark, who don’t actually need a salary to survive). His tenure at the National Gallery is a case in point. Appointed when he was just 30 in 1933, he scored some great successes: he installed electric light; he opened up early on FA Cup final day to encourage fans to visit; he masterminded the evacuation of the major paintings to the Welsh mines during the second world war; and he reinvented the gallery as a cultural centre for wartime London (with hugely popular concerts organised by Myra Hess). Yet the staff were almost entirely against him, and it was partly their opposition that led to his resignation as soon as the war ended.

  Clark’s supporters tend to paint his subordinates as small-minded bureaucrats, narrow scholars or, occasionally, psychopaths; and so they may have been. But one of Stourton’s anecdotes hints at a different story. Clark was going home one evening when he was surprised to see a newspaper hoarding: “National Gallery. Grave Scandal.” It turned out that one of the gallery’s accountants had had his fingers in the till for years, and all had been made public. Although director, Clark knew absolutely nothing about it.

  It is dangerous to investigate marital wars from beyond the grave, and even more presumptuous to try to apportion blame
  But it is women, again, who are the most uncomfortable part of Clark’s story. His wife, Jane, had read history at Oxford; they married in 1927 and soon had three children (including Alan Clark MP, of Diaries and other fame). By the end of the 30s, Clark “started being unfaithful to his wife” and had multiple dalliances – “a vigorous private life” in Stourton’s euphemism – until her death in 1976. Jane, meanwhile, is said to have become increasingly difficult and dependent on alcohol and prescription drugs. It is always dangerous to investigate marital wars from beyond the grave, and even more presumptuous to try to apportion blame. But biographers should watch their rhetoric and at least let the different parties keep their dignity. Stourton tries, but does not always succeed.

  There is little room for independent women in Stourton’s version of Clark’s life. Jane wins his praise early on for her elegance and her dress sense; she was “a natural and beautiful hostess”. When she doesn’t fit that type, she gets written up as the monstrous, unstable spouse of a long-suffering husband: “The more she tormented him, the more he sought solace elsewhere.” Stourton occasionally recognises that this logic could be reversed: “The more he screwed around, the more screwed up she got.” There are simply different ground rules for men and women. When Clark breaks down and cries in a gents’ lavatory in Washington DC in response to a rapturous reaction to Civilisation, that is a sign of his sensitive ambivalence to fame. When the women cry, they are being hysterical.

  The mistresses generally fare no better than the wife. Stourton only mentions in passing that Janet Stone, the descendant of Elizabeth Fry and mistress of Clark for almost 30 years, was an important photographer in her own right. But he does clearly see the poignant side of a discovery made after Clark’s death: a box of letters from her that he had never bothered, or brought himself, to open.

  Clark’s television presentation of women as objects of desire or inspiration was not all that far from the way women in his own life continue to be portrayed: “a muse without a role”, as he once dubbed Jane.

  • Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation is published by HarperCollins. To order a copy for £24 (RRP £30) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/books/kenneth-clark-biography-james-stourton.html
  Word count: 1293

  ‘Kenneth Clark’ Paints a Portrait of a Cultural Titan
  Books of The Times
  By DWIGHT GARNER NOV. 15, 2016
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  Does culture matter in times of national crisis?

  During World War II, Kenneth Clark, the subject of James Stourton’s crisp and authoritative new biography, was director of the National Gallery in London. To prevent the collection from being destroyed in the Blitz, he oversaw the successful relocation of nearly 2,000 paintings to an abandoned slate quarry in northern Wales.

  (Some of the museum’s trustees had argued that the art should be shipped to the United States or Canada for safekeeping. Clark took this idea to Winston Churchill, who scribbled in red ink on the memorandum, “Bury them in the Bowels of the Earth, but not a picture shall leave this Island.”)

  Next, Clark (1903-1983) did something no one anticipated. Bereft at how emergency orders had shut down so much of the cultural life in London, he began to open the now-empty and echoing National Gallery for a vastly popular series of noontime concerts.

  The BBC took notice and began to broadcast them. “At the beginning of the war,” Mr. Stourton writes of the BBC, “the Corporation had not understood the mood of the nation, and believed that people wanted nothing but light music.”

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  Clark recognized that in dark times there is a yearning for serious art, music and literature. The concerts, he said, “were the first sign that we were recovering from a sort of numbness which overcame our sensibilities for a week or two after the war was declared.”

  The concerts were not the end of it. Clark elected to take one master painting at a time out of storage, and to show each selection in a series of exhibitions titled “Picture of the Month.” Nearly 40,000 people came to see Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus.”

  “The gallery had become a symbol of national defiance” to Hitler, Mr. Stourton writes. This story, in his telling, is moving to encounter once again. The National Gallery was hit by bombs nine times during the war; the final concerts had to be moved to another location. Clark became a heroic figure. He simply believed, Mr. Stourton writes, “that art and culture were central to the very values that Britain was fighting to defend.”

  Photo

  The British historian Kenneth Clark in 1977 at Saltwood Castle, his home in southeast England. Credit Terence Spencer/The Life Images Collection, via Getty Images
  Clark is not especially well known in America, but in Britain he was a pre-eminent figure of cultural life during the 20th century. He lingers in the British popular imagination primarily, oddly enough, as a television presenter.

  In 1969 he was the tweedy, droll and learned host of “Civilisation,” a 13-part BBC documentary that he also wrote. It outlined the history of Western thought and culture since the Dark Ages, with a special emphasis on art.

  The show was enormously successful, so much so that, Mr. Stourton writes: “Evensong was rearranged in some country parishes so the congregation could see the program on Sundays, and ‘Civilisation’ parties were held in the homes of those who owned a color television. At a time when mass travel was only just beginning, for most people the series represented the grand tour they would never make, and they trusted Kenneth Clark to take them to the best places.” In the United States, the program was broadcast by PBS.

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  As Mr. Stourton’s “Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and ‘Civilisation’” demonstrates, this man led a big, busy, chaotic life. He was born to wealthy parents and attended Oxford University in the 1920s, where he befriended the future literary titans John Betjeman and Cyril Connolly, as well as the witty and influential scholar Maurice Bowra.

  An art historian, Clark was charming, socially ruthless, terrifying in his confidence and, as one observer put it, “supernaturally debonair.” At 27 he became keeper of fine art at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, the oldest public museum in Britain. He became the youngest-ever director of the National Gallery at 29. Over a long career, he wrote many books about art.

  Alongside his wife, Elizabeth Martin, known to all as Jane, he became a fixture in upper reaches of London society, befriending the Queen Mother and Churchill, as well as cultural figures like Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster, Henry Moore and Yehudi Menuhin.

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  James Stourton Credit via Alfred A. Knopf Publishers
  Eventually the couple would entertain in Saltwood Castle, the enormous pile they purchased in Kent. If they wished you to leave quickly after lunch, coffee would be served at table rather than in the library. It was a sign of their adoration if you were asked to remain for afternoon tea and cake. Mr. Stourton writes, “Very rarely guests would be considered ‘cake-worthy.’”

  Clark was a serial womanizer whose affairs drove his wife, already a somewhat unstable personality, over the edge. To cope, she found a doctor who “gave her a nasal spray containing morphine and cocaine, and from then on she would reappear after a puff, puff, puff ‘in a beautiful haze.’”

  Mr. Stourton is the former chairman of Sotheby’s in Britain and the author of several books. He tells Clark’s story with dispassionate grace and wit. His prose is unobtrusive but well tailored. He delivers any number of well-observed set pieces, such as the time Clark visited Andy Warhol’s Manhattan studio and found the art so bogus he had a sneezing fit.

  Scholars sometimes sneered at Clark’s work. Some found his books and lectures slapdash; others disliked his social climbing and occasional rudeness. At dinner parties, if he found you a bore, he would simply talk to someone else over your head. An elitist in many ways, he nonetheless felt, he wrote, that “art is not the prerogative of nobs and snobs, but the right of every man.”

  In the final episode of “Civilisation,” Clark delivered his personal credo. It included these ringing lines: “I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole, I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.”

  Civilization is fragile, he understood. About its development, and about the possibility of succumbing to forces of chaos, he warned, “We got through by the skin of our teeth, and it might happen again.”

• London Review of Books
  https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n01/nicholas-penny/blame-it-on-his-social-life
  Word count: 283

  Blame it on his social life
  Nicholas Penny
  BUYKenneth Clark: Life, Art and ‘Civilisation’ by James Stourton
  William Collins, 478 pp, £30.00, September 2016, ISBN 978 0 00 749341 8
  This book review is only available to LRB subscribers. Register for free to read it now and access our entire archive for 24 hours. Email address: Your email will be added to our mailing list. By registering you agree to our terms.
  Each and every place in the life of Kenneth Clark has been investigated by James Stourton, from the country house in Suffolk where, as a boy, Clark judged the dresses of female dinner guests, to the château in Normandy belonging to his second wife, Nolwen, where, in his later years, he tried to find ways to communicate with the lovers who had once hoped he would marry them. Stourton is particularly informative about Clark as a schoolboy at Winchester and about his relations with television directors and crews, but he has also discovered new information about Clark’s work at I Tatti, at the Ashmolean, at the National Gallery, at Windsor Castle, for Covent Garden and for the cause of conservation; he documents committees attended and lecture tours undertaken, books written and unwritten, houses bought and sold, acts of charity discreetly performed and romances secretly conducted. Even if we take into account the services of secretaries, chauffeurs and cooks, it is hard to understand how Clark contrived to achieve so much. Stourton has expertly reconstructed the kaleidoscopic variety, and defined with precision the numerous paradoxes, of Clark’s public and private lives.

  The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.

• The Spectator
  https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/kenneth-clark-from-the-sublime-to-the-ridiculous-to-the-sublime/#
  Word count: 1222

  Kenneth Clark: from the sublime to the ridiculous to the sublime
  The revered art historian, whose series on Civilisation enthralled audiences in 1969, has since been pilloried as ‘the great arts panjandrum’. James Stourton sets the record straight
  Meryle Secrest

  Art historian Kenneth Clark (Photo: Getty)
  Meryle Secrest
  22 October 2016
  9:00 AM

  Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation
  James Stourton
  Collins, pp.496, £30
  Our collective attention spans may not be as short as is widely cited, but they are pretty short. Take the case of the art historian Kenneth Clark. If anyone remembers anything about him, it is as the presenter of Civilisation, a TV series of the 1960s that rocketed him to stardom, and the author of the accompanying book, which sold over a million copies. He died in 1983 when he was a mythical figure, and any attempt to show his human dimensions was anathema, as I discovered to my cost. My own biography of Clark was published a year later.

  Nowadays, one can hardly get anyone to take him seriously. One reviewer dismissed Civilisation as a period piece, the narrator ‘a patrician’ in a tweed suit. Another spoke of ‘a figure of derision’. He was ‘the great arts panjandrum’, said a third. The word means a powerful figure but also a pretentious one — a snob.

  Nobody reads his first volume of autobiography, Another Part of the Wood, any more, and so no one has understood what special qualities of mind invigorate his works, though they are clear enough on the page: honesty, insight, humour and a complete lack of self-importance. He described his parents as the idle rich: ‘Many people were richer, but there can have been few who were idler’. He introduced their competing temperaments: an emotionally blocked mother and grandly alcoholic father. ‘He put up with her bouts of self-pity and she devoted her whole life to an unsuccessful attempt to stop him drinking.’

  They might have been, as Clark said, ‘as ignorant as swans’, but they recognised their gifted son’s love of art. Their innate understanding of his career path was at odds with their colossal ignorance of his emotional needs. His mother glided through his life like a somnambulist. She was reading in the library one day when she smelled smoke, so she got up and moved to another room. Shortly after, the floor fell in.

  Clark claims she never touched him. Correct that to ‘seldom’ — Stourton shows a photograph of her with an awkward arm around him; he looks equally uncomfortable. He was brought up by servants and by Lam, an understanding governess whom he loved.

  He also loved his father, but there was a price to be paid. He told me that,
  whenever they were in London, his father’s bouts of drunkenness would become unusually heavy. ‘He would stagger into the lobby of a hotel, or his club, and collapse on the sofa.’ People would complain, and,

  I’d have to go and get him into a cab. A porter and I between us would get him up to the flat. My father wasn’t an angry drunk, just an incapable drunk. I couldn’t explain to people what a dear old boy he was really, and I felt terribly embarrassed and never got over it.
  Among the challenges Stourton had to face is the biographer’s eternal conundrum: how to convince the reader of the accomplishments of his subject. He has done this brilliantly, not only exploring his gifts as author, lecturer, film-maker and champion of British art but also as public figure. He takes pains to show the reader Clark’s human dimensions, and his impish sense of humour. I saw this trait at close quarters.

  One day K, as he liked to be called, and I were waiting in the car while K’s second wife Nolwen made a stop at her dressmaker’s. She was taking too long. K took over. He rolled up a piece of newspaper, got out of the car and started walking around the neighbourhood, which contained more than its share of chained dogs. The barking reached fever pitch. Nolwen ran out, full of apologies.

  As a former chairman of Sotheby’s, the author is naturally interested in Clark’s career as a public figure: director of the National Gallery, work with the Ministry of Information in the second world war and efforts to mould the Independent Television Authority after it. I would say, a bit too interested. Do we really need to know about Clark’s influence on the trustees of the British Museum’s policies in 1968?

  One wishes, too, that Stourton had spent more time considering the effect on Clark of the accident of fate that gave him an alcoholic father, an alcoholic wife, Jane, and an alcoholic son, Colin. Surely K had puzzled over this, but he seemed too easily satisfied with excuses. He said of Jane, ‘I asked her about it but she said she liked to drink.’ On another occasion, he said that he had tried to probe, but ‘she bit my head off’.

  It is possible that he felt an uncomfortable sense of guilt. His factotum, Mr Lindley, once gave K a report on Jane after he picked him up at the station. She had been in fine fettle during K’s absence and had not ‘touched a drop’. K replied searchingly, ‘You mean it’s my fault then?’

  His son Alan presented other problems. It is true that his volatile mother took a dislike to him. Alan retaliated by hating her back, at considerable emotional cost, as can be discerned in his diaries, particularly the later ones. ‘She became the enemy,’ he told me. I remember he said it with no apparent emotion, but he was hugging himself. ‘I flinched when she touched me.’ What did his father make of this antagonism? It is hard to tell. Colette — Colin’s twin — recalled that, during these rows, her father would send them loving glances but did not intervene. He acted more like ‘a child among us children’. Alan’s hatred never wavered. When Jane lay dying he said, ‘Why doesn’t she get on with it?’

  What layers of affection, need and obligation lay behind Clark’s long marriage to Jane, which was punctuated by so many affairs, is another unanswerable question. In his own way, he found a bearable solution. Jane, sober, could be intolerable; but when drunk her mood changed and she became wistful, Ophelia-like. Mr Lindley saw him on his way to her bedroom with her first drink of the day every morning.

  I fully expect that this assiduous and accomplished biography will bring about a second Great Clark Boom. In the meantime, a correction: publicity for the book claims this is the first biography of Kenneth Clark. It isn’t.

  Meryle Secrest wrote her own in 1984. Her other biographical subjects include Bernard Berenson, Steven Sondheim and Elsa Schiaparelli.

  Subscribe to The Spectator today for a quality of argument not found in any other publication. Get more Spectator for less – just £12 for 12 issues.

• Country Life
  http://www.countrylife.co.uk/culture/book-of-the-week-kenneth-clark-life-art-and-civilisation-132131
  Word count: 718

  Book of the week: Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation
  Country Life September 29, 2016
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  Michael Hall applauds an exemplary new biography of the man who introduced the British to art history.

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  Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation by James Stourton
  Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation by James Stourton
  (William Collins, £30)

  Like many people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s with an interest in art and architecture, I have my Civilisation story. When the series was repeated on BBC1 (we couldn’t get BBC2, where the series first aired), my parents suggested I might stay up beyond my bedtime to watch it. I can remember the thrill of this unexpected privilege more clearly than the programmes’ content, but even this trivial recollection supports the main argument of James Stourton’s outstanding biography of Civilisation’s author and presenter.

  Kenneth Clark brought an appreciation of the history of art to a new, unprecedentedly large audience. My parents had almost no interest in the subject, but they knew that the series was a significant event.

  Even when the programmes were first broadcast, in 1969, quite a few young critics thought Clark antediluvian in his patrician demeanour and unembarrassed focus on a European cultural elite. The reply to such views was given by an unnamed journalist in an anecdote related by Mr Stourton. Listening to the future head of Radio 3, John Drummond, complain about Clark’s grasp of political history, she interrupted: ‘My father is 74 years old and lives in Stoke-on-Trent. He has never been interested in art. Last week, he came to London to see me, and his first question was “Where is the National Gallery?”’ As Drummond observed: ‘That is what Civilisation achieved, and I felt properly reproved.’

  Rightly, Civilisation takes centre stage in Mr Stourton’s biography. His analysis of its origins and historical context takes us back to Clark’s childhood.

  Although very rich–thanks to a family fortune derived from the cotton mills of Paisley—he was no aristocrat and his love of art was partly a rebellion against his philistine upbringing. Even at the height of his swift, smooth rise to eminence—he became director of the National Gallery when only 30—he preferred the company of artists to that of the grandees of the British pre-Second World War establishment and he voted Labour all his life.

  Mr Stourton’s great achievement is to make a unity of Clark’s career. As he explains, the link between the gilded youth of the 1930s and the cultural panjandrum of the 1950s and 1960s —chairman of the Arts Council, the independent Television Authority and much else—was a conviction that the Arts were the birthright of everyone, a lesson that Clark said he had learned from Ruskin.

  His opening of the National Gallery early on Cup Final day in 1938 so that travelling fans could visit was an expression of the same sense of social mission that brought Civilisation into being.

  It’s more difficult, as Mr Stourton admits, to make a unity of Clark as a man. Although supportive of his difficult, alcoholic wife, Jane, he depended, partly in consequence, on the adoration of a circle of women, some of whom were his lovers and most of whom he treated with a degree of selfishness that Mr Stourton more than once describes as ‘chilling’. how does this lack of empathy relate to what the novelist Anthony Powell referred to as that ‘gift of extra-sensory perception’ so evident in Clark’s work as an art historian and, in particular, the book that I think is his masterpiece, Leonardo da Vinci?

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  This puzzle lingered in my mind long after I had finished this exemplary biography, which combines Clark’s strengths of clarity and concision, with the quality he so painfully lacked, warmth.

  Read more at http://www.countrylife.co.uk/culture/book-of-the-week-kenneth-clark-life-art-and-civilisation-132131#PbSVb51qr7m1KjIR.99

• Daily Mail
  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3771760/A-new-book-reveals-revered-Civilisation-presenter-Kenneth-Clark-bed-hopping-wife-stealing-rogue.html
  Word count: 2796

  Cultural colossus... and a cruel cad: A new book reveals revered Civilisation presenter Kenneth Clark was also a bed-hopping, wife-stealing rogue
  Kenneth Clark was known for 1969 television documentaries Civilisation
  But the 'happily' married man was a serial adulterer and seeker of affairs
  The trait is revealed in a new book by official biographer, James Stourton.
  By Tony Rennell for the Daily Mail
  PUBLISHED: 19:52 EDT, 2 September 2016 | UPDATED: 21:38 EDT, 2 September 2016
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  Full-bosomed, voluptuous and with long golden hair, she gazes wistfully into the middle distance. And the grand cultural connoisseur (some might say, commissar) Kenneth Clark adored this vision of pure womanhood so much that he made her the showpiece of his many grand houses.

  The nude Baigneuse Blonde by the French impressionist Renoir was ‘my blonde bombshell’, as he liked to call her, and she took pride of place on his art-filled walls.

  And who could fault his judgment? Here was a man with impeccable taste, a giant of the artistic world who swept all before him in 20th century Britain, laying down markers of what was good art and what was not, expanding awareness of beauty, bringing culture to the masses, all culminating in his ground-breaking series of television documentaries in 1969, the brilliant and unrivalled Civilisation.

  Secret life: Kenneth Clark was feted by the art world but was unfaithful to his wife Jane +3
  Secret life: Kenneth Clark was feted by the art world but was unfaithful to his wife Jane

  Together with his actual peerage, it earned him the accolade by which he will always be known — Lord Clark of Civilisation. For decades he was the haughty panjandrum of the arts, admired and feared in equal measure. Kings and prime ministers sought his advice, the great and the good flocked to his salon parties, artists sat at his feet and courted his patronage.

  Jobs cascaded into his lap like manna, from Oxford professorships to running the National Gallery at the age of 30 and presiding over the likes of the Arts Council and Covent Garden Opera House. He was even invited to be a founding father of ITV, despite at the time not even owning a television set.

  There were few figures quite so respected in public life, and seemingly respectable to a fault.

  But behind all this grandness and glamour, Clark had a secret — to which his adoration of the ‘blonde bombshell’ was a clue. Though ostensibly a happily married man with a dutiful and caring wife by his side in all his high endeavours, he couldn’t keep his manicured hands or his swooning heart away from other women. He was a serial adulterer, a constant seeker of affairs, even with the wives of his close friends.

  This upright pillar of the Establishment was in fact, as one of his detractors put it most succinctly, ‘a frightful s**t’.

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  This side of Clark’s character is revealed in a new book by his official biographer, James Stourton. An art historian and until recently UK chairman of Sotheby’s, he hails Clark’s great achievement as a populiser of the arts and a disseminator of culture and taste.

  But he does not shy away from the murky private life that lay behind it.

  Clark’s behaviour was unseemly and sordid. He drove his wife to drink, dumped at least one mistress in circumstances that were downright shameful and passed his penchant for bed-hopping onto his son and heir, the outrageous Conservative politician Alan Clark. It is not a pretty picture.

  Kenneth Clark was born into family money, lots of it, a fortune equivalent to more than £500 million by today’s standards, made from cotton. His father was a drunken extrovert, his mother shy and retiring, and the boy grew up rattling around virtually alone in a large country mansion on a vast sporting estate in Suffolk. Much to his bluff father’s disgust he opted for the books in the library rather than taking a gun to the pheasants.

  At prep school, he already had the solemn and self-assured air of an archbishop about him, but it was tempered, even then, by a delight in the company of girls. He met some for the first time at a school dance and ‘I was enchanted beyond words by the aura of femininity,’ he recalled. That enchantment, for good and ill, lasted the rest of his life.

  From Winchester, where he frequently had to ‘sport an a**e’ (ie, bend over to be caned) for precocity and speaking his mind, he progressed to Oxford, in whose quads he quickly made his name as an aesthete and an intellectual.

  H is chums were the brightest dons of the Twenties’ generation, clever, witty, well-read, aloof. He fitted the pattern perfectly. A summer vacation in Italy introduced him to the artistic and intellectual delights of Florence, and his future course in life was set.

  Oxford also provided him with a wife. He’d flirted around until then — there was an Eileen and a Sybil — but with Jane Martin it was the real thing. She was Irish with large blue eyes and dark hair, middle-class, elegant, high-spirited, a history graduate and . . . engaged to one of Clark’s best friends.

  When the friend had to go overseas for a while, Clark offered to keep an eye on her. When the friend got back, there was a letter from Clark saying he was about to marry Jane himself. He told the abruptly jilted lover that, ‘in the end you will find this is better for everybody’.

  Jayne Wrightsman, a glamorous multi-millionaire New Yorker, who Clarke romanced +3
  Jayne Wrightsman, a glamorous multi-millionaire New Yorker, who Clarke romanced

  It was typical Clark arrogance. He always assumed that, however caddish his behaviour, what was good for him would be fine for everybody else.

  It was the same with their wedding.

  Jane wanted romance, bridesmaids, the full works, but Clark was having nothing so commonplace. He insisted on a quick hitch in a church — just 14 minutes from start to finish, he recorded proudly — followed by a stiff lunch with his parents.

  However, they proved to be good for each other at many levels, and things were going well. With his family wealth and his work as an art historian blossoming, money was no problem. They set up a home with staff, son Alan was born, they travelled and entertained lavishly, throwing dinners and parties for the high-society set where the fashionably dressed Jane was as much of a magnet as he was.

  She was a bewitching hostess, open and affable where he could be more diffident and reserved. The combination worked.

  Increasingly, the Clarks were on the radar of those who mattered, a power couple much in demand for their conversation, company and connections.

  The cracks were covered up. Behind her party face, Jane was moody and mercurial, with a fierce and frequent temper and a drink problem.

  She carried what she called ‘cough medicine’ in her handbag and a nasal spray containing morphine and cocaine to calm herself down in times of stress. She was always prone to drama and quarrels, dividing the world into allies and friends. The placid and appeasing Clark usually bent with the wind when she was in one of her strops, but there were still too many nights at home when he stomped out because she was being ‘so bloody’ and walked the streets wondering if he’d made a terrible mistake in marrying her.

  He was, of course, partly to blame. His wandering eye cannot have helped her state of mind, though which came first — her tantrums or his infidelities — is an unresolved chicken-and-egg argument.

  For a long time, Jane suspected he was being unfaithful. His high-powered jobs gave him access to lots of women and he lunched a deux with the likes of actress Vivien Leigh. There were also secretaries he dallied with, and once Jane caught him cuddling one of the maids at home.

  But in the late-Thirties, things escalated when he began seeing Edith, the married sister of ballet choreographer Frederick Ashton, and fell in love. They would meet at her house when her naval officer husband was away, and we can only speculate at what happened there. On this occasion, Clark confessed his indiscretion to his wife and was forgiven.

  S tourton argues that the upper-class Clarks were not unusual among their kind in having affairs, and that Jane was not short of her own admirers anyway. These included the composer William Walton, with whom she had a prolonged romance when living away from London during World War II.

  A particular French ambassador took to calling on her and was seen in a passionate embrace, while the sculptor Henry Moore, one of her husband’s proteges, was a long-time admirer.

  But the bonds between husband and wife ran really deep, and neither Clark nor Jane ever seriously contemplated divorce, which anyway would have been social death in those days.

  Nonetheless, they tested each other’s devotion on a regular basis. Feeling hard done by, he felt justified in seeking solace for his wife’s bad behaviour, pouring out his troubles to this fancy woman and that. His cheating did nothing to cool Jane’s temper or her need for escape via alcohol. They were trapped in a vicious matrimonial circle, which he showed no wish to break out of.

  As his eminence increased, so, too, did his tally of lady friends and lovers. He became sly, urging them to write to him at his club in Pall Mall, a safe place because letters arriving at home were intercepted.

  Clark told Mary Potter ¿you are, without exception, the most lovable human being I have met¿ +3
  Clark told Mary Potter ‘you are, without exception, the most lovable human being I have met’

  It is impossible to say how much physical sex was actually involved in these liaisons. Undoubtedly there was some but, tellingly, he dismissed one woman he was close to as ‘too lecherous, don’t like her’.

  What mainly captivated him and sent him weak at the knees was that ‘aura of femininity’ he had first noticed as a boy, typically over an illicit, intimate lunch or dinner at the Etoile or Wheeler’s fish restaurant.

  He found women generally ‘more receptive, more appreciative and more stimulating’ and basked in their adoration. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it was all very much about him. His own daughter, Colette, nailed the truth when she said: ‘He was a compulsive charmer and very put out if women did not fall in love with him.’

  Occasionally love knocked him for six. Mary Kessell was a young artist who wore exotic clothes and ribbons in her hair and lived in a little house he bought for her close to his grand Georgian semi-mansion in Hampstead.

  He visited when he could and she wrote to him about ‘a most perfect unforgettable evening. There is no one else in the world for me. When I put my arms around you, I feel whole. God means us for one another’.

  She begged for more of his time — raising a crucial question about Clark and his lovers. With all the committees he was now sitting on, all the different jobs he held down, all the receptions, dinners and parties he attended, not to mention a wife and three children, how did he ever find time for such a promiscuous love life as well?

  The answer was that everything was rigorously compartmentalised and timetabled, including the mistresses. Nothing overlapped, so poor Mary was dumped. Jane had got wind of her, saw the danger and this time threatened to leave Clark unless he stopped seeing her.

  He complied, leaving Mary bereft. ‘I shall always love you,’ she wrote to him but never to see him again was ‘a bitter blow’. Broken-hearted, she died an alcoholic. And still he philandered.

  There was another Mary, surname Potter, to whom he declared, ‘you are, without exception, the most lovable human being I have ever met’. And Morna Anderson, wife of an old Oxford friend, to whom he wrote: ‘I love you, and have for years, and always shall.’

  And Myfanwy, wife of Welsh artist John Piper. And university lecturer Maria Shirley. And librarian Margaret Slyth. And glamorous multi-millionaire New Yorker Jayne Wrightsman.

  To Jane, he dismissed all his flings and fancies, whether sexual or just platonic, as ‘my silly fits’. He hoped to ‘contain them better and become less tiresome’, he wrote to her, before instantly falling into the arms of red-haired Barbara Desborough from Australia, who left her husband and children for him.

  The indiscretions piled up, the pledges of undying love, the false promises, but through all the mess he created in his and other people’s lives, Clark clung onto Jane, now getting older and sicker, ‘tumbling’ more and more (the family’s word for falling over when drunk), lonely at their new home, Saltwood Castle in Kent while he was a star in London.

  A stroke knocked her flat and with all the love and care he could muster he nursed her until her death in 1976. He was bereft. All the sparkle went out of him. For all his dalliances, she had been the love of his life.

  As Stourton puts it: ‘Jane was ultimately the ringmaster in the curious performance of Clark and his girlfriends. She had been his excuse to disengage.’ He missed her terribly.

  At which point came perhaps Clark’s greatest betrayal of all.

  Photographer Janet Stone, a bishop’s daughter and married to a master wood engraver, had been his most devoted mistress for the past 15 years. He unburdened all his problems on her, particularly about Jane, in a mass of letters and at their clandestine meetings once a month. He led her to believe he was madly in love with her and would one day leave his wife for her.

  She — perhaps not grasping the truth about all the other ladies in his life — believed him. With Jane now gone, Janet was, as she saw it, on a promise. In a letter six months later, he declared his love for her . . . followed by the bombshell news that, despite this, he was marrying someone else! He was lonely, needed a wife and a reason to live, and had settled on a rich widower he’d briefly met in France, Nolwen Rice.

  Janet was understandably devastated. So, too, were his family, convinced their illustrious father had been picked off by a predator.

  N olwen turned out to be a toughie. She was not going to put up with all the nonsense Jane had. Clark’s roving days were over. When Janet tried to renew her relationship with him — encouraged, surprise, surprise, by Clark himself, a little spirit still left in the old dog — she was told firmly by Nolwen to ‘go get a life’ and leave her husband alone.

  He was now firmly on a marital leash for the first time in his life and remained there until his death in 1983.

  It was the end of a great and grand life, which enriched the world in many ways. Sometimes this paragon seemed too aloof and remote to be real. Many people felt put down and put off by him. His feet of clay, exposed in this biography, bring Lord Clark of Civilisation down to earth. It’s no bad thing.

  n Adapted from Kenneth Clark: The Authorised Biography by James Stourton, published by William Collins on September 22, at £30. © James Stourton 2016. To buy a copy for £22.50, P&P free, call 0844 571 0640 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk. Offer valid until September 9.

  Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3771760/A-new-book-reveals-revered-Civilisation-presenter-Kenneth-Clark-bed-hopping-wife-stealing-rogue.html#ixzz4gVyuX5tY
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• Apollo Magazine
  https://www.apollo-magazine.com/kenneth-clark-biography-review/
  Word count: 922

  Charting the life and times of Kenneth Clark
  Giles Waterfield 2 NOVEMBER 2016

  Kenneth Clark
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  Interest in Kenneth Clark (1903–83) has been rising in the past few years. As James Stourton points out, in 2009 there was a seminar and radio programme about him, as well as Jonathan Conlin’s illuminating study of Clark’s 13-part BBC series Civilisation, for which the art historian is perhaps best known. In 2014 Tate Britain presented ‘Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation’, an unusual exhibition for concentrating on the public life and the collecting of an individual. Yet at this point a major biography of this intriguing and paradoxical man was unforthcoming. Now Stourton, in a compelling, thoroughly researched, and ambitious biography, has brought his wide experience of the art world (and one might say, of the upper echelons of British society) to elucidating the life and character of a man who, in retrospect, consistently impresses. He characterises Clark as ‘the writer who loved action, the scholar who became a populariser, the socialist who lived in a castle, the committee man who despised the establishment, the indefatigable self-deprecator whom many found arrogant, the shy man who loved monsters, the “ruthless” man who hated confrontation, the brilliantly successful man who considered himself as a failure, the mandarin who had a passion for lemonade and ice cream’.

  As the above extract suggests, Clark was phenomenally active – always anxious not to waste time, yet restless; when engaged in study, he became impatient for the active world; when busy, he longed for the world of contemplation. His ability to arouse strong feelings of dislike is evoked here, as is the contempt felt for him by many art historians (though by no means all) who may have been more profound scholars but whose popular reputations in no way matched his. Stourton manoeuvres these complexities with delicacy, enriching his account of Clark’s later years with numerous interviews with his contemporaries and particularly with his colleagues involved in making Civilisation.

  Quite at odds with the common characterisation of Clark as patronising is his radical modernity and ability to look far ahead of his time – not only in his making of television programmes and his realisation of their potential, but also in his interest in opening up the National Gallery (where he was director) to as broad a public as possible – an approach disapproved of by his colleagues. During the Second World War he invited members of the public to give their views on which work should be shown in Trafalgar Square as Painting of the Month. Clark’s espousal of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee in 1939, his understanding of the importance of press and public relations and of the photographic department at the National Gallery, his creation there of a scientific department, and his involvement in CEMA (the forerunner of the Arts Council), all testify to his realisation that the world was changing and that it was the duty of people like himself to adapt to its opportunities.

  Stourton has worked closely with members of Clark’s family in researching this book. About Clark’s first marriage he writes sensitively, analysing the appeal of Jane Clark, the nature of the relationship, and her drunken and sometimes destructive decline. But the most lasting impression is of her stylishness, of their brilliant social life in the 1930s and of the support she gave her husband. It is hard to imagine how such a private and contradictory man as Clark could be more effectively characterised than in these pages, assisted not only by the memories of his friends and enemies, but by Clark’s surprising gift for ironic self-deflation. His happy and unstuffy relationship with the film crew of Civilisation shows him at his most attractive.

  Stourton had a vast quantity of material to deal with – too much, in fact, for a book of some 400 pages. He manages this problem efficiently, although at times he moves briskly through the subject matter, leaving the reader with only partially answered questions. Especially intriguing is the account of Clark’s tenure at the National Gallery, both the splendid period up to 1939 and the difficult but brilliantly resourceful wartime years, including his peculiar and ultimately frustrated wooing of Calouste Gulbenkian. Clark’s own books such as The Art of Landscape and The Nude, which have opened the eyes of many people to the delights and complexities of looking at art, are discussed in measured terms, as are the books that did not succeed, especially the study of ‘Motives’, which Clark thought would be his greatest work but which he never accomplished. His determination to become a skilled television presenter is entertainingly and vividly portrayed.

  Stourton writes with a spare elegance and a sense of period as well as an eye for the revealing anecdote: he lets one imagine, for example, what is was like to visit Clark’s home, Saltwood Castle, for lunch (where very few people were considered ‘cake-worthy’ and invited to stay for tea). The nature of Clark’s career means that the period up to 1945 may stand out more vividly than the post-war years when he became heavily involved in committee work, but the changing nature of Clark’s identity and the analysis of his achievements remain central to the narrative. This is a hugely enjoyable and valuable book.

  Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation by James Stourton is published by William Collins (£30)

• LA Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/when-people-wanted-civilisation-reassessing-kenneth-clark/
  Word count: 2721

  When People Wanted Civilisation: Reassessing Kenneth Clark
  By Kevin McMahon

  23 0 1

  JANUARY 7, 2017

  JAMES STOURTON’S Kenneth Clark is a biography of a civil servant. Clark wouldn’t have minded. After all, in his 1969 Civilisation TV miniseries (Ci-vi-li-SA-tion not Ci-vi-li-ZA-tion), he himself quipped that French Classical architecture “was the work not of craftsmen, but of wonderfully gifted civil servants.”
  The civil servant known as Lord Clark of Saltwood has gained unexpected relevance in the era of Brexit and President-elect Odoacer. An impeccably credentialed conservative English aristocrat, Clark devoted most of his life, in person and behind the scenes, to making European cultural heritage comprehensible and interesting to the general public. He was part of a generation of public educators born just before World War I, which also included Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin books; Nikolaus Pevsner of the guide books; and E. H. Gombrich of the still-ubiquitous art history book.
  Stourton doesn’t ignore the more colorful elements of Clark’s life, like his upbringing by mismatched eccentrics — eccentric even compared with other Edwardian millionaires — his career as art historian, patron, and collector; his life as a philandering celebrity in ’30s London; or his ubiquitous TV presence in the ’70s. But Stourton’s book really comes alive when discussing Clark’s public service, beginning in 1931 as Keeper of Fine Art at the Ashmolean Museum, his appointment as Director of the National Gallery in 1933, and, that same year, as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures.
  This last was an honor Clark originally declined, until he was recruited in person by George V, during the first visit by a sovereign to the National Gallery. This visit so fascinates Stourton the he makes it the first scene of his book. Rightly so. It is — iconographically speaking — an emblem in which we see Clark’s most significant attributes: the authority and deference he was able to command even before accomplishing anything to merit it (he was 30 years old at the time). The visit was also an early demonstration of Clark’s awareness of publicity: he stage-managed it to make sure the press and photographers had unobstructed sight lines. And then there’s the touch of absurdity, the characteristic flavor of interwar British high life. When Clark led the King past works by England’s greatest painter (Clark’s lifelong conviction), George V exclaimed, “Turner was mad.” (In his memoir, Clark added the King’s annihilating final word: “My grandmother always said so.”)
  It’s a delicious moment, but books about interwar Britain always run the risk of becoming anthologies of aristocratic howlers. The task of the biographer wading into this terrain consists largely of scaling the Himalayan mountain range of memoirs, diaries, and letters of interwar literati like Harold Acton, Cecil Beaton, Lord Berners, Cyril Connolly, the Mitfords, Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury Set, not to mention the novels of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, et al. These have covered the ground so articulately, with such nuance and malice-fueled acuity, that later writers struggle to be heard. Stourton succeeds in making himself audible above this chatter by spinning adventure yarns out of Clark the administrator and indefatigable committee-joiner.
  To do so, Stourton makes effective use of the available resources, especially Clark’s 1974 memoir Another Part of the Wood, a minor masterpiece of the Empire’s Twilight style — a snapshot of the vanished beau monde with glamorous names, plus a deflating pinprick punch line to vaccinate against criticism. (John le Carré employs this style with panache in his recent memoir The Pigeon Tunnel.)
  And so the first third of Stourton’s book is a summary of Another Part. As reading matter, it suffers by comparison. Moreover, Stourton fails to give Clark’s father, mother, or wife Jane independent voices. He also omits Clark’s description of Mary Berenson enraging Edmund Gosse with a gaga account of how, years earlier, Gosse had pushed her through the larder window of Walt Whitman’s house in Camden so that they could meet the American poet. It’s the great set piece of Clark’s memoir, and the funniest thing the elegant stylist ever wrote. And it’s also characteristic of the way Clark describes people in terms of their performances. He presents everyone as actors putting on a show, playing the parts of C. F. Bell, Bernard Berenson, Maurice Bowra, David Crawford, Henry Moore, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, and the rest.
  But exactly where Another Part itself starts to lose steam, Stourton’s biography comes alive.
  One reason Stourton succeeds in making Clark’s public activities interesting is that he was able to quote Clark’s intimate correspondence with Janet Stone from the 1930s through the ’70s. Their romantic relationship seems to have been largely epistolary, with Janet cast as confidante, as in a 17th-century French drama. Some of Clark’s letters demonstrate astonishing callousness, which Stourton tops up by noting that, after his death, his secretary found a “large box” of Janet’s letters that he had never even bothered to open.
  Stourton puts these documents to use, providing a catty running commentary on Clark’s public activities at the Ministry of Information during World War II, the War Artists Advisory Committee, the committees that created the Arts Council, the Royal Opera, the Royal Ballet, and on independent TV in Britain, et cetera. All the same, it’s hard to characterize Clark’s letters to Stone as candid. The lordliness — he was a lord, after all — is never really dropped. Clark merely exchanges a public mask for an intimate mask.
  Clark polished his public mask at the podium. He was an immensely popular lecturer, but not to everyone’s taste. Nikolaus Pevsner detected “an arrogance for which I could box his ears,” and fumed at Clark’s “blasé jokes […] to make the students laugh.” The semi-unstudied outrageous gag was Clark’s preferred mode of jolting people awake, and was deployed effectively in Civilisation. Stourton notes the revealing fact that Clark never took questions while lecturing.
  One on one, Clark could be charming, when he felt it necessary. He was often gracious with public antagonists, like Herbert Read, Reyner Banham, and John Berger — whom he proposed as a more suitable host for Civilisation. Stourton records how disappointed Clark was that his 1958 TV debate with Berger on Picasso’s Guernica turned out so “polite”; a rousing argument would have been more entertaining TV.
  Clark had a wide circle of friends who valued his company, but all noted his fundamental isolation. Henry Moore spoke of the “glass wall” surrounding him. He accepted the sexism of his time and place without question, which marred his scholarly work and damaged the women who tried to connect with him. John Piper observed that “Clark used women to protect himself from women.”
  The public mask was put to good use during Clark’s years at the National Gallery. Stourton reminds us how different things used to be in museums. Many of the activities we take for granted were innovations introduced by people like Clark. One of his first acts as director was to hire a PR firm. He commissioned audience surveys and scrutinized attendance figures. Before Clark arrived, the National Gallery had started charging admission four days a week, in order to keep attendance down (for the convenience of the copyists working in the gallery, apparently). Clark advocated removing accumulated varnish and dirt from pictures, and was viciously attacked for it.
  Stourton’s chapters on Clark’s activities during World War II are the high point of the book. He gives a better account than Clark himself.
  One of Clark’s most astonishing accomplishments was to evacuate 1,800 pictures — the cream of the National Gallery’s collection — to underground storage in Wales the day before war was declared. With the National Gallery empty, Clark instituted hugely popular, morale-boosting programs: lunchtime concerts, previously unthinkable temporary exhibitions of war artists and contemporary art, and a “Picture of the Month” series, featuring a single painting brought back from storage.
  Clark’s subsequent work at the Ministry of Information — which he characterized as worthless — put Clark in touch with the movie industry and led him into public education (“propaganda,” if you prefer), shaping his postwar career. No wonder Jane Clark — providing perhaps the best aristocratic howler of the book — argued that duty on a minesweeper seemed more attractive, because it “gives one lots of time for reading.”
  Stourton also notes how by 1941, Jane had taken on a lover of her own, William Walton, while struggling to keep up appearances at the Clark estate in Gloucestershire, Upton House. This allows Stourton to include a memorable cameo by the cook, Mrs. Nelson, who was not only the ex-dancing partner of Jane Avril of Toulouse-Lautrec fame but claimed that her daughter had been fathered by composer Edward Elgar.
  After this Put Out More Flags period, Clark became involved in the War Artists Advisory Committee, which was certainly more agreeable work, and arguably more consequential. The main goal of the War Artists Advisory Committee — for Clark, if not for their public proclamations about documenting the struggle — was to keep artists out of harm’s way. It didn’t entirely succeed; Eric Ravilious, for one, was killed on assignment. But it did underwrite the most memorable visual expression of the Blitz, Henry Moore’s Tube Shelter drawings. (His sketchbook is at the British Museum, the gift of Jane Clark.)
  This raises the issue of Clark’s relationship to the art of his time. Stourton declares that what led him to write on Clark was the man’s “focus and complete absorption in art at a time when — artists aside — this was a singular quality.” Aestheticism was far from an aristocratic reflex in the ’20s; in fact, it constituted rebellion.
  But unlike his more uninhibited peers, like Harold Acton, Lord Berners, or Herbert Read, Clark never overcame his initial distrust of modernism. Some of his remarks about abstract art are pure Bertie Wooster. This has made him seem a reactionary booby. And yet he wrote perceptively and movingly about his discoveries of Mondrian, Pollock, and Rothko, and even expressed qualified approval of Roy Lichtenstein. His valedictory exhibition at the National Gallery was a Paul Klee retrospective (seven months after VE Day), and he collected Ben Nicolson while scuffling with him in the press. While his reservations might be unfounded, his conscientiousness in voicing them seems singularly honorable.
  The living (British) artists he supported — Moore, Piper, Sutherland — are not leading figures of blue chip international modernist triumphalism. But as that narrative frays and fractures, their provincialism seems a strength, as well as their geniality and humanism — discredited echt-Clarkian epithets!
  Stourton provides a plausible summary of Clark’s art historical approach: a synthesis of Bernard Berenson’s connoisseurship, Roger Fry’s formalism, John Ruskin’s moralism, Walter Pater’s word-painting, Aby Warburg’s iconography, and Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegl’s sense of the broader cultural movements embodied in styles. But he accepts Clark’s art historical writings at face value, and offers no new perspectives. That’s a shame, because Clark’s books — especially the genre diptych Landscape into Art (1949) and The Nude (1955) — remain rewarding, despite their unfashionable idiom. Landscape is full of helpful rules of thumb for appreciating specific painters (e.g., on Poussin: “if any upright line inclines slightly from the vertical, we may be sure to find another slightly off the horizontal which is at right angles to it”). And while The Nude has been hacked to bits by feminists, with justification, it also includes a stimulating running commentary on antique Greek sculpture playing contrapuntally with a subversive diatribe against “those blockish parodies, the oldest and grubbiest inhabitants of any cast-room” upon which modern knowledge of the antique sculpture is based. This is only one expression of Clark’s conviction that certain aspects of the past might be inaccessible.
  Stourton does a better job when tackling the production and reception of the Civilisation series. He points out that the much-mocked talking head format for art documentaries had already been creatively subverted years earlier in the BBC’s own Monitor series, which included Ken Russell’s daring Elgar (1962) and completely bonkers The Debussy Film (1965). As soon as Clark finished the first drafts of the scripts in 1967, he began sparring with the producer, Michael Gill, whom he described to Janet Stone as “an ectoplasmic emanation from the New Statesman correspondence columns.” The tension dissipated, however, when Clark realized that Gill was not trying to reform him ideologically, but, on the contrary, to create a less (bogusly) objective and more personal form of documentary, with Clark’s idiosyncratic voice at its heart.
  Now a team, their priorities became clear. Accepting an award in 1970, Clark the showman insisted, “[W]e never for a moment thought about educating people. We simply hoped to entertain them [and] kindle their enthusiasm.” Clark adapted his public lecture style. Episodes could contain only a handful of works and names, “and what is said about them must usually be said without qualification. Generalizations are inevitable and, in order not to be boring, must be slightly risky.” Clark admitted privately that the series was “a kind of autobiography disguised as a summary of Western Civilization.” And that was exactly what Gill had wanted, to subvert the omniscient expert with a human being, whose quirkiness and partisanship were center stage.
  Civilisation was wildly popular in the United Kingdom and in the United States. The show made Clark a star. The media frenzy and public acclaim Clark received in Washington, DC, moved and rather frightened him. Naturally, Clark’s voice and bearing also made him a punching-bag for anti-establishment rage. A Monty Python episode from 1973 features “Boxing Tonight: Jack Bodell v. Sir Kenneth Clark.”
  Fifty years on, the flaws of Civilisation are obvious. In fact, the sexism and the silence on colonialism were already retrograde in 1969. But if these issues are fatal, then all European commentary on art from Plato to Baudelaire is also condemned. In the end, Michael Gill’s strategy seems to have worked: the irredeemably personal and subjective point of view gives the series a portrait-in-time quality that automatically qualifies Clark’s pronouncements. Moreover, the personal tone provides a positive, progressive example. Clark talks about aesthetic experiences as something available to everybody who takes the trouble to look with sympathy, and who finds a way to entertain different cultures. And his lordly dismissals (of Versailles, for example) demonstrated that it was okay to have idiosyncratic responses. It was not necessary to love it all.
  Whatever you make of the series, it unquestionably established a genre of personal takes on vast topics, beginning with John Berger’s 1972 critical riposte Ways of Seeing (in which Berger channels Walter Benjamin more than speaks for himself), through Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973), David Attenborough’s Life on Earth (1979), Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New (1980), and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) and its 2014 sequel hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
  Taking a cue from the Cosmos sequel, the BBC, PBS, and a handful of other partners have announced a sequel to Civilisation to premiere in late 2017. In the new Civilisations (with two esses), a three-person team consisting of Simon Schama, Mary Beard, and David Olusoga will tackle “the story of art from the dawn of human history to the present day, for the first time on a global scale.”
  But in the wake of 2016, I wonder how a global vision can be sustained. I think Clark would have grasped what has been happening.
  He was a product of the Edwardian world, after all. He had already experienced nationalism overtaking internationalism around the world, and the idea of cultural heritage — European cultural heritage especially — critiqued to death by progressives and dismissed as boring by the new oligarchs. He knew that most of it was already lost, or disfigured by mis-preservation. But much remained, and he devoted his life to making people feel it was not merely important but theirs — their property, their identity. Not bad for a masked lord behind his glass wall.

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