Читать книгу Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation - James Stourton, James Stourton - Страница 14

What a horrible affair the whole thing is! I wonder if … Italian friendship is worth the risk?

LORD BALNIEL to Kenneth Clark1

On 18 December 1929 there sailed into the East India Docks in East London the greatest cargo of art ever brought to Britain’s shores. The priceless hoard of over three hundred works – paintings, sculpture and drawings – was placed in the hold of a single boat, the Leonardo da Vinci, which made its way from Genoa through winter storms off the coast of Brittany to London. With it came Kenneth Clark’s first great opportunity in the London art world: his involvement in the extraordinary exhibition of Italian art that opened at the Royal Academy on 1 January 1930.

The exhibition’s aims were shamelessly political – it was an attempt by Mussolini to promote italianita, or what Francis Haskell, in his entertaining account of the saga, described as ‘Botticelli in the service of Fascism’.2 With enthusiastic support from Il Duce, the loaned works of art were of a quality and importance inconceivable outside a fascist state. They included virtually every major painting that was judged safe to make the journey from Italy to London: Masaccio’s Crucifixion, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Giorgione’s Tempesta, Titian’s Portrait of an Englishman, and the pair of portraits that had brought Clark to his knees in the Uffizi, Piero della Francesca’s Duke and Duchess of Urbino. The irresponsibility of consigning so many of the world’s art treasures to such risks was widely condemned at the time. ‘Naturally,’ wrote Clark, ‘all right thinking lovers of art were horrified by this piece of vandalism – none more so than Mr Berenson.’3 So why did Clark become one of the principal organisers of the exhibition? It was an irresistible opportunity to catalogue some of the greatest paintings in the world that no ambitious young man could forgo.

The idea of the exhibition had in fact been born in Britain. During the previous decade a series of successful London exhibitions, each with a different national theme, had been held at the Royal Academy: Spanish paintings, Flemish art, and Dutch art. The last two were not actually organised by the Academy, which levied a rental fee for the use of its galleries. These promising precedents gave Lady Chamberlain, the formidable wife of the Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, the idea for an even more ambitious exhibition of Italian art. She and her husband were enthusiastic Italophiles, and it was her vision, energy and connections that brought the exhibition into being. It came, however, at a shocking cost in strained relationships between the two countries.

All started reasonably well. Lady Chamberlain and the collector Sir Robert Witt4 put together a committee in the second half of 1927, which elected her as chair. The historical range of the exhibition was agreed to be 1300–1900, mostly paintings, but also drawings, sculpture, manuscripts and ceramics. Loans – all chosen by a London selection committee – were sought from museums and private collections across Europe, but well over half would come from Italy. At the Italian end, Ettore Modigliani was appointed to organise the exhibition. His qualifications were excellent: director of the Brera Museum for twenty years, and Soprintendente delle Belle Arti of Lombardy – but his distinction was lost on Clark, whose aversion to bores got the better of him. He described Modigliani as ‘a ridiculous figure by any standards and must have risen to high office by sheer volubility. He never stopped talking for a second, and hard-pressed officials must have given him anything he wanted just to get rid of him.’5 Haskell, from an examination of Modigliani’s life, thought this was an unfair caricature.

The support of Mussolini was crucial to realising the high ambitions of the organisers, which, Modigliani hoped, would épater the English and show that despite recent history, Italy was still a great lady.6 Mussolini wanted to impress Austen Chamberlain, and brought enormous pressure to bear on reluctant Italian lenders, whether public or private, to accede to British requests. He personally intervened with the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan for the loan of Pollaiuolo’s Portrait of a Lady, which in the event became the exhibition poster. But the Italian leader finally lost his patience when Lady Chamberlain refused to take no for an answer over Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love in the Villa Borghese. The British Ambassador in Rome informed her: ‘It appears that Mussolini is thoroughly fed up with the question of the pictures and can’t bear any mention of them.’7 Any good the exhibition might have done for Anglo–Italian relations was soon wiped out by the Abyssinia crisis.

The main problems for Lady Chamberlain and her committee, however, were domestic: the London art world was a political minefield. Roger Fry, one of the moving spirits of the exhibition, had for years been in a feud with Berenson (mostly over the Burlington Magazine, which Fry had edited), who was against it. Key figures on the committee, Robert Witt and Lord Lee of Fareham,8 were regarded with contempt and dislike by their colleagues. Nor was Berenson alone in resisting the exhibition: Clark’s other mentor, C.F. Bell, was fiercely against it. Not only did he think it irresponsible, but he had no wish to denude his newly arranged museum. Lady Chamberlain appealed unsuccessfully over his head to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, and eventually a Tiepolo oil sketch was coaxed out of the Ashmolean. The Royal Academy, however, turned out to be by far the greatest obstacle. The organising committee was outraged when it demanded 50 per cent of all profits as well as a gallery hire fee. This turned into a long and bitter row. Then, to add to the committee’s woes, the National Gallery refused to lend any of its paintings; but at least it provided what Clark referred to – de haut en bas – as ‘an industrious official’ named W.G. Constable to arrange the exhibition. The various hostilities gathered pace, so that by the time Clark was appointed to assist with the catalogue he described the situation as ‘like a battlefield at nightfall. The principal combatants were exhausted and had retired to their own quarters, surrounded by their attendants; but their enmities continued unabated.’9

Clark’s appointment by the committee to assist Constable was a sensible choice. He had the practical experience and prestige of having worked with Berenson, he had just enough knowledge of Italian collections, and, perhaps most important of all, was ‘a new member of their circle who was not influenced by their old feuds’. The young man had a novelty value, and all the competing parties thought he was on their side. Clark had a chameleon aspect to his character which always enabled him to play with opposing factions, and this becomes very evident later in his career with his dealings with politicians from all sides. In practical terms his appointment to the Italian exhibition meant three things: he would sit on the selection committee, he would catalogue the pictures that came from outside Italy,10 and finally he would be allowed to hang the exhibition. Very little is known about which members of the committee selected the paintings, or indeed what the exhibition looked like. Constable, with whom Clark got on well, gave him a free hand. Clark wrote to Umberto Morra: ‘As you may have heard I was inveigled onto the Italian Exhibition committee and I bitterly regret it. Besides annoying BB and causing some resentment among those of my elders and betters who are not on, it has meant a lot of co-operative work. It has however had an excellent result. It has pleased my parents who find it a recognizable form of success, and will acquiesce more quietly in my future inactivity.’11

Contrary to the impression he gave Morra, Clark was enjoying himself very much. Hanging paintings was his favourite activity, and to be given the opportunity to hang six hundred of the finest Italian pictures in the world was all he could ever hope for. He deliberately left Botticelli’s Birth of Venus until last, and – having gathered everybody to watch – had the painting hauled up from the basement, enjoying the coup de théâtre as she slowly rose into the gallery. His main responsibility, the catalogue, he described as ‘by a long chalk, the worst catalogue of a great exhibition ever printed’.12 He blamed himself: ‘I simply did not know enough.’ He was momentarily overlooking the fact that at least five people had a hand in the catalogue entries. Haskell thought that retrospective guilt at his involvement in a piece of fascist propaganda so coloured Clark’s judgement that he was misleadingly dismissive about his own capabilities, as well as those of his colleagues. Two of these colleagues were to become friends, one of them lifelong.

Clark always maintained that for him the best thing to come out of the Italian exhibition was his friendship with David, then Lord Balniel, later the Earl of Crawford. Balniel came from an ancient Scots family that had produced generations of cultivated art collectors and bibliophiles. The family art collection contained Renaissance paintings and works of art assembled by Ruskin’s mentor, Lord Lindsay. Clark shared with his father a slight horror of aristocracy, but made an exception for David Balniel, who devoted much of his life to pro bono public service in the arts. Their paths were to remain entwined. At the time of the Italian exhibition, Clark thought that Balniel knew far more about the subject than he did.

The other friendship Clark gained through the exhibition was with ‘that fascinating character, Charles Ricketts’.13 Ricketts, the quintessence of the 1890s, was an apostle of beauty, an all-round artist, stage designer, illustrator and art collector. When visitors later compared the Saltwood Castle art collection to I Tatti, they might just as accurately have referred to the eclectic splendour of that assembled by Charles Ricketts and his friend Charles Shannon. It was a marriage of love and taste – Japanese prints, early antiquities, drawings and paintings. ‘Can one ever be too precious?’ Ricketts once asked Clark, whose response was, ‘Quite right.’ Clark was always to have a soft spot for art collectors, and would put up with their eccentricities and egoism if they genuinely loved art. He was to write warmly of characters such as ‘Bogey’ Harris and Herbert Horne in his memoirs.14

The Italian exhibition was a fabulous success with the public. There were 540,000 visitors, and the press was enthusiastic. As a result Clark enjoyed his first taste of social cachet with London hostesses who were hoping for an invitation to a Sunday-morning private view. This also marked the beginning of his lecturing career – he gave his first talk, on Botticelli, at the Chelsea home of St John Hornby.15 With his childhood love of acting and his teenage habit of soliloquy, lecturing came very naturally to Clark. But he was painfully aware that it encouraged ‘all the evasions and half-truths that I had learnt to practise in my weekly essays at Oxford’. He often wondered if it would have been better had he never taken this direction – in which he would be so spectacularly successful – reflecting that ‘the practice of lecturing not only ended my ambition to be a scholar (this might never have succeeded as I am too easily bored) but prevented me from examining problems of style and history with sufficient care’.16 Paradoxically, he was soon to start work on his greatest scholarly achievement.

While organising the Italian exhibition, Clark heard a lecture in Rome that was to have a profound influence on his life and work. Given by a man he described as ‘without doubt the most original thinker on art-history of our time’, Aby Warburg,17 it was delivered in German at the Bibliotheca Hertziana. Warburg liked to address one person when lecturing, and Clark was flattered that he ‘directed the whole lecture at me’. It lasted two hours, and by the end of it Clark had glimpsed an entirely new approach to looking at works of art. In his words, ‘instead of thinking of works of art as life-enhancing representations he [Warburg] thought of them as symbols, and he believed that the art historian should concern himself with the origin, meaning and transmission of symbolic images’.18 This was very far from the formalism of Roger Fry and the connoisseurship of BB. Clark later said: ‘His whole approach was entirely new to me, my knowledge of the German language was incomplete, and at the end of three hours I felt I had been riding in an intellectual Grand National. But it changed my life and I am eternally grateful.’19

Clark was deeply impressed by the possibilities this iconographical approach offered. It was particularly relevant for the interpretation of Renaissance art, with its dual freight of Christian and Classical symbolism. He began to ask very different questions in front of works of art. Until this point he had been preoccupied with the Berensonian questions of connoisseurship: when and where was this picture painted, and by whom? He now started to think more about the function of a work of art: why was it painted, what does it represent, in what circumstances was it painted, and above all, what does it mean? He later claimed that the chapter on ‘Pathos’ in his most admired book, The Nude, is ‘entirely Warburgian’. But in the end aesthetics were too important for Clark ever to be an ardent student of iconography, and the elucidation of detailed symbolism came to bore him.

Clark’s approach to art history was a synthetic and evolutionary affair, containing many elements, beginning with the poetic and descriptive literary inheritance of Hazlitt, Pater and Ruskin. He could already see the limitations of Roger Fry’s analysis of design (or formalism), but we can still detect this influence when he came to write his book on Piero della Francesca. The residual artist in Clark was focused – in a rather French way – on the creative process, and why artists did things in a particular way. Years later he was to tell one correspondent: ‘If my work has any value this is because I write from the point of view of an artist, and not as an academic.’20 He did not give up connoisseurship, and went on playing what he called ‘the attributions game’ – this was to cause him much trouble in future at the National Gallery. He was never to spend much time in archives, and once claimed that in the field of Renaissance art ‘the study of archives has made relatively little progress since the 1870s … and if these heroes of the first age of accumulation are seldom remembered today, except by the writers of footnotes, it is because posterity draws a distinction … between architecture and a ton of bricks’.21 This attitude would raise eyebrows within the profession.

The most unexpected element of Clark’s art history came from books he read in German – what he described as the historical interpretation of form and composition by Wölfflin, and Riegl’s study of the art-will.22 They brought a rigour and an analytical approach to Clark’s work that is seen to best advantage in The Nude. German art history freed Clark from the world of Edwardian connoisseurs and Bloomsbury. Finally, there was his new-found Warburgian interest in symbols and subject-matter; but he was sometimes critical of this approach if taken to extremes, where the crudest woodcut might be as valuable to study as a Raphael painting. He distrusted philosophical and metaphysical approaches to art history, and always steered clear of dogma, quoting Giovanni Morelli, who ‘loved to tease the professors who, “preferring abstract theories to practical examination are wont to look at a picture as if it were a mirror in which they see nothing but the reflection of their own minds”’.23 Clark told a teenagers’ radio programme that the qualities of a good art historian are ‘imagination, sympathy, responding to works of art, knowing how to use documents and telling the truth’.24

While in Rome, Clark had one other unforgettable experience: a sight of the strange, rarely seen, very late Michelangelo frescoes in the Cappella Paolina in the Vatican. These represent the Martyrdom of St Peter and the Conversion of St Paul, and reduced Clark to an uncomprehending loss of words. Jane broke the silence: ‘They are tragic.’ The sight of these frescoes haunted Clark for the rest of his life, and they became the centrepiece for his 1970 Rede Lecture, ‘The Artist Grows Old’.

Clark was starting to spread his wings across the art world even before the Italian exhibition. When a group of art historians that included Herbert Read, W.G. Constable and Roger Hinks suggested a History of Art Society to publish original books on the subject in English, Clark was proposed as the secretary. But, as he wrote to his mother, they all had different aims: ‘Constable is for scholarship, Read for philosophy, I for history,’ adding, ‘Personally I see no public that will swallow any chaff of German scholarship … I had a taste of pure scholarship last night, when I attended a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries, and it will do me for years. I would rather go to church.’25 In fact, Clark himself was about to face the limitations of British interest in intellectual German art history when he gave two lectures at London University on his heroes, Riegl and Wölfflin. It was a chastening experience, as he told BB: ‘They cost me infinite pains & were complete failures: only twenty people in a vast hall & of the twenty 15 were elderly ladies recruited by Jane. They neither heard nor understood a word, & my chairman greeted me at the end with the words “You don’t really think Riegl a serious writer, do you.” So ended the first effort to spread the gospel in Great Britain.’26

With the Italian exhibition behind him and the abandonment of Florentine Drawings, Clark needed a new project. ‘I was prevented from dispersing my faculties,’ he wrote, ‘by [an] offer from the newly appointed librarian at Windsor Castle.’27 Owen Morshead was an unusual courtier – scholarly, funny and affectionate, he was much admired by George V because he had won both a DSO and an MC in the war. He had been impressed by Clark on his visits to the library to inspect the drawings (‘he has an austere quality of mind’, he told a friend28), and took an avuncular interest in his career. He had proposed the librarianship of the House of Lords to Clark, suggesting, ‘I think your wings must have to be clipped a bit.’29 Now Morshead offered Clark the chance to catalogue the extraordinary collection of Leonardo drawings in the Royal Collection. As Clark wrote: ‘This was one of the most important assignments that could be given to a scholar, and it is almost incredible that it should be handed to an unknown amateur of 25 with no standing. Owen Morshead took a big risk.’ ‘But,’ he added, ‘I think it came off.’30

Clark published his first article on Leonardo, an essay in Life and Letters, in 1929.31 This has two characteristics of all his later writings on the subject: the importance of understanding the wider intellectual interests of the man, and the necessity to demythologise him. He started work at Windsor the following year, and his catalogue took three years to complete. The mammoth task of researching and cataloguing six hundred drawings by the most diverse of all Renaissance artists should not be underestimated. There was virtually nothing to help him except a few unfinished nineteenth-century notes. It has never been established how the Leonardo drawings came to be at Windsor, but they were in the collection of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, in the early seventeenth century, and by the end of that century are recorded in the Royal Collection.

Clark’s catalogue was eventually published in 1935 by the Cambridge University Press, in a lavish edition for which Clark was paid fifty guineas. The Leonardo catalogue has always been his most admired work amongst the scholarly community. For the Leonardo specialist Martin Kemp, it set ‘the British standard for such publications’, within an attributional framework that has ‘stood up to sustained examination incredibly well’.32 Whenever critics have wanted to question Clark’s standing as a serious art historian, his defenders have always pointed to the Windsor catalogue as evidence of his ability to produce impressive scholarship on one of the most complex and difficult assault courses the discipline can offer. Clark himself modestly called it ‘my only claim to be considered a scholar’.

Meanwhile, the Clarks were so miserable in their Westminster house that they travelled as much as possible. They visited the hotel at Sospel, which was failing as a business but was still a source of pleasure to share with their friends Maurice Bowra and John Sparrow. They even began house-hunting around Sudbourne, but Clark’s parents made it clear that they would only buy them a house near London. A solution presented itself when the Clarks were invited for lunch by the British Museum drawings scholar A.E. Popham at Twickenham, beside the river. The house was ‘full of reflected light and children’, and its charms persuaded them to look along the Thames in West London – which was also convenient for Windsor Castle. They found a beautiful Georgian house called Old Palace Place, on the site of the Tudor palace of Sheen, on Richmond Green. Clark wrote to his father, ‘I think I might get it and all the fixtures and a few optional oddments for £12,000 … I am so glad you liked the look of the house and I must tell you that I am truly grateful for your offering to give it to me. I know you say it is only reasonable to give me the money now rather than later, but not all fathers are reasonable with their son especially when their sons have done so little to deserve it. We should be very proud indeed to live in such a fine house.’33

For the first time the Clarks possessed a house where they could proudly receive visitors and entertain. They knocked through two first-floor rooms to create a long drawing room, with seven tall windows, in which they could display their growing art collection. They hung the walls with old red silk, and at one end placed the lion of their collection, ‘a large heavy portrait by Tintoretto’. With the passage of time Clark came to feel this grand purchase was a mistake, and that the picture really belonged in a gallery. In future he was always to make a distinction between a ‘gallery’ picture and a ‘private’ one, and he eventually sold his Tintoretto.34 He had already formed a group of drawings, many of them acquired from the Fairfax Murray estate in Florence, and these were placed in the downstairs sitting room, where French windows opened onto the garden. Many of these drawings were to remain with Clark all his life, and were on his walls when he died. His favourite was Samuel Palmer’s Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star, bought from the sale of the artist’s son at Christie’s in 1928, which was later credited with influencing Graham Sutherland.

The Clarks were delighted with their new house. Jane wrote to Bowra, ‘your room is ready’, and Clark told his mother, ‘Even in the foggy weather Richmond is delightful … Lam stayed with us and took Alan for long walks.’35 They started giving ambitious dinner parties. Clark described one of them to his mother: ‘Our grand party was pretty good fun – less for me than for Jane who sat next to the PM [Ramsay MacDonald36] and got a lot out of him. I think you would like him, especially if you talked to him about France … about France he rivals my Father.’37 It was not only the great that they received. The young John Pope-Hennessy, then a schoolboy at Downside, has left an account of a visit: ‘When I rang the bell at the Old Palace, the door was opened by a young man of extraordinary charm, confidence and suavity … he showed me his drawings. Would I like him to tell me who did them, he asked, or would I prefer to form my own impressions? I said I had rather be told … I felt then (and for some years afterwards) that he was everything that I aspired to be.’38

Clark was enjoying his work, and a routine soon established itself. Each day he would catch a train from Richmond station to Windsor, where he worked in the library till lunchtime. He would have a snack in a teashop and then take the train home, ‘my pockets stuffed with notes’.39 He expected this peaceful and happy existence to last for many years, until one day ‘I received a telephone call from a character named Brigadier Sir Harold Hartley asking if he could call on me. It boded no good, and sure enough he came to invite me to become Keeper of the department of Fine Art in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.’40