Читать книгу Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation - James Stourton, James Stourton - Страница 19

Stand close around ye artist set

Old masters sometimes will forget

With dear K to your shores conveyed

The pictures that they never made.

CYRIL CONNOLLY1

Kenneth Clark was the first director of the National Gallery to become a household name. Although his tenure there was marked by controversy, it nonetheless constituted eleven years of steady achievement in which the gallery moved from being a very inward-looking organisation towards a far greater engagement with the needs of the visiting public. Many of the previous directors had been artists who sought to improve the appreciation of painting in Britain, but Clark was an unlikely populist with a Ruskinian desire to open the nation’s eyes to works of art. Indeed, the predecessor with whom he most identified was Charles Holmes (director 1916–28), who like Clark was interested in contemporary art, held fund-raising concerts at the gallery, and wrote an accessible book on Rembrandt. Holmes brought the gallery into the twentieth century by acquiring modern French pictures (for the Tate with the Courtauld Fund), including three works by Van Gogh (Sunflowers among them). Clark once refused to alter an erroneous attribution, explaining: ‘My motive for not changing the label is simply that my predecessor, Sir Charles Holmes, has always behaved most generously towards me and would no doubt regard it as a personal insult if I were to do so.’2