Another Part of the World, a self-portrait

by Kenneth M. Clark

The distinguished British art historian and critic recounts his Edwardian childhood, his aesthetic development and education, the early years of his marriage, and his pre-war relationships with a gallery of famous and influential people

Genres: Biography, Art, Art History, Memoir, History

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Kenneth Mackenzie Clark was a British art historian, museum director, and broadcaster. After running two important art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television, presenting a succession of programmes on the arts during the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the Civilisation series in 1969. The son of rich parents, Clark was introduced to the arts at an early age. Among his early influences were the writings of John Ruskin, which instilled in him the belief that everyone should have access to great art. After coming under the influence of the connoisseur and dealer Bernard Berenson, Clark was appointed director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford aged twenty-seven, and three years later he was put in charge of Britain's National Gallery. His twelve years there saw the gallery transformed to make it accessible and inviting to a wider public. During the Second World War, when the collection was moved from London for safe keeping, Clark made the building available for a series of daily concerts which proved a celebrated morale booster during the Blitz.

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

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

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a thoroughly enjoyable, hilarious, delightful, beautifully written memoir, a window onto a lost world, by a type of man long extinct. It contains not one dull word.

Kenneth Clark was born, in 1903, into "a section of society known as 'the idle rich', and although, in that golden age, many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler. [His parents] took no part in public affairs, did not read the newspapers, and were almost entirely without the old upper-class feeling of responsibility for their tenants." Clark's father was an heir to the Coats and Clark textile fortune (I just bought some of their wool the other day, actually); his mother was a wholly unemotional, unsentimental Quaker. They owned an enormous estate in Scotland, numerous houses around England, vacation homes on the continent. A servant ironed the newspapers (so that Clark Senior could do the child's crossword before his nap); pheasant shooting parties lasted three months. Depending on which house they were lodged in, the heavy-drinking Clark Sr. would spend most of his day playing bridge and billiards, fishing, sailing, or gambling in casinos. "After a successful evening at Monte Carlo my father had been persuaded to buy the golf course and to build a large hotel at the far end of it. After the war he was bored with it and gave the hotel to me. I loved it." Yet not being of the aristocracy could still have a certain sting; at public school, impertinent enough to speak to an upperclassman, Kenneth was commanded to "sport an arse": bend over and take a paddling. When young Kenneth was accepted at Oxford, his father was dismayed; he wanted him to be an artist rather than a scholar.

Clark was a young prodigy who, through a combination of well-placed acquaintances, intelligence, money, most likely charm, and simply being at the right place at the right time, ascended rapidly in the art world. Bernard Berenson took a shine to him at their first meeting and offered him a position editing one of his books. By this time he already knew most of the Bloomsbury set, as well as Oxford luminaries like Roger Fry, Maurice Bowra, and Cyril Connolly. Through Berenson he came to know Edith Wharton ("like all Victorians she felt a mysterious urge to go on picnics..."), who became godmother to one of his sons. He was offered the Directorship of the National Gallery at age 29. Names are dropped with abandon - Philip Sassoon, the Cunards, T.S. Eliot, Chester Dale, Dr. Barnes, Joseph Duveen, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill - but most of them are integral to Clark's storytelling. He is often self-deprecating, he is more of an aesthete than a snob, and somehow, when he claims that "I have retained from those years of reading [Ruskin and Tawney] a hatred of exploitation that has grown through the years. The sight of a lot of people dining in the Savoy makes me feel sick...somewhere at the back of my mind is a genuine hatred of Power, Display, Big Business, and all that goes with it" you almost believe him.

The first of his memoirs, this one ends at the beginning of World War II.

[Nicole Ning · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book, Kenneth Clark is an Edwardian comedian in disguise, he is comical and cheerful in spirit, the very antithesis of his professed stiffness and formality. If you look at his cover page self-portrait image, we would expect a Lord-like grand style, something came from hands of John Singer Sargent, instead, we see some chubby little boy who obviously dressed under the influence of grandmother. That is very reassuring to me, I can shamelessly read this book in my tramp pyjamas without reclining into a fancy Rocco armchair.

Imagine Clark as your noble quality tour guide with Sainsbury supermarket friendliness, you expect some highly cultivated art tour, indeed, no disappointment in this respect, but somehow he surprises you with extra free charge stand up comedy. While I was busy taking notes about all the interesting people and the reference revealed, Clark was dutifully busy buttering toasts for his mentor. ( Later Clark explained in details about his position towards his mentor Berenson's false authentication business, showed his conscientiousness and honesty which permeated through the whole book, endearing quality to have as a privileged child from a sheltered life).

I really adore his frankness and unassuming character with childlike optimism. The last part of his epic documentary civilisation really sums up his own true colour as a stick in the mud. " I believe that the 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, human sympathy is more important than ideology, ....I believe in courtesy, the ritual we agreed by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos, and I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole which the convenience we call nature all living things are our brothers and sisters...." How emphatically moving!

Clark is the ideal companionship through time and space. He will hold permanent membership on my bookshelf, If he was a renaissance painting, i would love to get a copy and learn to hang it on the wall.

[Oliver Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starting out in Edwardian Mayfair, and ending with the onset of WWII, Kenneth Clark’s A Self-Portrait charts the progress of a sensitive child who goes on to become the youngest director of the National Gallery, and the first person (probably in the world) to make art accessible via the television series Civilisation - incidentally, directed by the father of AA Gill, whose vain and well-dressed son could well have featured as one of the socialites in this book.

From the outset, Clark makes it clear this will be a of “characters” - those people who, despite all the obvious benefits of conformity, cannot help being themselves. Much as today, the pressure to conform falls on some people more harshly than others. We are entering here into a place where everything counts and nothing matters in that discreetly frivolous way which was the default mood of an age now more idealised than accurately remembered. It is a place where writers and gallery directors are still relevant enough to be placed at the same tables as politicians and ambassadors, where snobbish society ladies sort out the seating plan at parties with the same density of will as war-term ministers. The new establishment of movie stars and vulgar media types has not yet risen from the ranks to push all this lot aside, although we can always see it starting to elbow its way in via the dangerously decadent parties of Philip Sassoon, who seems to care less about pedigree than the ability to pour or hold a drink.

The pleasure of being led around this evaporated world is that the host never takes any of it too seriously. Clark knows this microcosmos of silver cruets, all-terrain picnics and nepotistic governance will soon fall apart, and he understands his place in it, as assured as it is, is due to luck. At the same time, he is able to credit humanity where he finds it; and he is not so snobbish towards a society of real elitists that he imagines there is no deeper meaning to be unearthed. For Clark’s real stroke of good luck is that he has a special quality of detachment - a quirk of temperament which allows him to see things impartially without falling into the trap of becoming remote. It is a disposition especially advantageous given that it belongs to someone who enjoys socialising as much as study. There is no point you feel at which Clark is going to become so involved as to become compromised. He is always at one remove - the perfect distance to survey the whole scene without losing sight of the details.

It is perhaps no surprise then that on leaving school Clark goes on to become something academic, though not so academic that he is cut from the kind of society he enjoys. In the first of a seemingly never ending ‘youngest to…’ he becomes the youngest keeper of the Queen’s pictures at Windsor castle, eventually arousing the attention of the art establishment at a time when you could fit all the people who knew anything about art in a medium church hall. It is important to remember that Britain was far behind the rest of the world in taking art seriously at this time, and that art history only became a bonafide university subject in the late 30s. As a logical if not unlikely progression of working at the Windsor collection. Clark eventually heads off for Italy to carry on his apprenticeship under Berenson. It is here that Clark starts his real education, handling some of the more faded and brittle personalities of art theory - lessons which will come in useful later on at the Ashmolean and National Gallery.

One of the first ‘characters’ he meets during his Italy period is Berenson. Now better known as a swindler and fabricator of documents, at this point he is still known primarily as a critic and plausible successor to Walter Pater. Clark sits and takes note as this stout polyglot holds forth at his rustic Italian villa, as various members of the art elite pass before him. The initial portrait is funny, slightly reminiscent of George Moore’s numerous portraits of similarly bogus and self-impressed men, but it all goes on perhaps a bit too long and could do with more introspection from the main character. The problem, as ever in memoirs, is a mismatch between significance and chronology - clearly these times with Berenson were formative years for the author. But Clark is still very much a young man here; certainly too young to answer back. He must rely instead on what is said but others, with most of the dialogs coming in third-hand - gathered through bannisters and half-open doors.

More telling that this portrait itself is how Clark treats him. In public he is depicted as just the buffoon we expect. But in private, he is allowed more of the completion and believable disunity we expect of great art. The only really damning mark on his reputation (the falsified letters of attribution) are handled in an equally artful way. In fact, the whole controversy is touched on so lightly it virtually dissolves into a mystic absolution. We are told that practically everyone was up to this sort of thing at the time. The only difference with Berenson is that he had the reputation to do so much more of it. But Clark also, we later learn, once knowingly misattributed a painting, so this charitable act may well belie a dash of self-interest.

It is a relief, after about 50 odd pages with Berenson to return to Clark’s family. Though fans of Downton will be unimpressed, perhaps even shocked to learn just how mindless and vulgar old Edwardian money really was, for those who know history it is jolly good fun and only slightly out of the ordinary. British discretion has a long and tastefully burnished history, but as we read about Clark’s boorish father yaught-shopping in Monte Carlo, golf tournaments which devolve into booze and window smashing, the hunting exploits carried out on the scale of applied eugenics, the love of knocking things down to replace them with things much worse, we realise that this lot had more in common with a non-dom Russian oligarch than any of the pursed and exquisitely gay figures of British drama fable. Clark’s skill in knocking down these ridiculous figures to size is only to reduce them back to their original proportions, rather than the more modern method of demolishing them to nil. He depicts them as deeply flawed, painfully ridiculous, but with sentimental weaknesses and inscrutable sympathies which raise them out of the dim confides of caricature. His father, in particular, is given particularly realistic treatment - not least of all in the depiction of his unlikely moral stances. Here is someone who, despite being a full paid up Mayfair elite, sees straight away that the Great War is a sham, and that the reposts from the frontline are mostly propaganda. As we come to learn, writing off this lot won't be easy.

But it is really in the passages on circle of friends where his cushioned scorn comes into its own. It’s Here, he acknowledges, a wealthy upbringing, did at least allow him to more above and he upper ranks of society with plausible ease. This is an autobiography which includes more dinner parties anecdotes than a life dedicated to art should probably feature, even if they are more interesting and instructive than you’d expect. Via a menacing cartel of hostesses (the social gatekeepers of the day, who all seem to love KC and his wife) Clark gets close to some very interesting and notable characters. There are numerous meetings with Chamberlain, Churchill, Lord Boothby, Tony Benn, not to mention the king. Evidentially. the title of director of National Gallery earner far more respect then than it does now. Some of the conversations are worth repeating: during the height of Nazi aggression, Clark and his wife read Mein Kampf for insights into just how dangerous this new socialist leader is. Clark mentions the book to Chamberlain. He’s never heard of it. Clark lends him his wife’s copy, but it seems like no one in the cabinet bothers to read it. Churchill is also described, in a rare moment of prophecy, envisioning a future after the war where the British Empire will collapse, and the US will be world police. Lastly, there is a scene so pleasingly English even the clubbable Waugh couldn’t have confected it: Clark witnesses the King storm out of a reception room due to a pianist playing Chopin, only for him to be roused back in when Noel Coward turns up to play ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’. You really couldn’t make it up: though Julian Fellows would probably get close.

It’s also worth saying something about the art, even if it doesn’t arise as often as it might. Though almost impossible to imagine now, when Clark starts writing in the 20s (his first book is on neo-gothicism) there are relatively few titles on art, acknowledged masters like Di Vinci are either roughly handled or treated as a curator's concern, and the masses are given virtually no help in understanding art at large. This then, is the perfect age to be a populariser of art, and Clark’s status as middleman between society and the individual in contemplation here comes into its own. Clark doesn’t spend much time talking about what he wrote, but he does give one of the best pieces of advice on writing you might come across: “I had learnt the art from Logan not to disdain an occasional burst of ‘fine writing’, and tried to master the technique of introducing it into my text in such a way that the unwary reader did not realise when the temperature had changed.”

Where art does appear as a topic of standalone concern, it in Clark’s capacity as a collector (not an educator or critic) that sees his real passion aroused: ownership, not scholarship, seems to be the sacred route in to heightened aesthetics. The enlightened sceptic of privilege perhaps gives away his background more than he likes to think. Nonetheless, Clark is firm in his insistence that he collects, not to speculate, for the primal purpose of accumulating wealth, but to enjoy close contact with the objects he admires; and it is a position pretty hard to argue with, particularly given how cheap many impressionist and renaissance works still were at this time. Should the reader get the opportunity to own some minor masterpieces of their own, the following charming piece of caution is offered: “One never knows what pictures are going to say to one another till they meet. Like two placid babies passing each other in their prams, they may either stretch out their arms in longing or scream with rage. People who hang galleries ‘on paper’, with measured squares representing the pictures, have never heard those cries of love or hate.”

As a fitting contrast, the book ends with the unhanging and boxing up of the National Gallery collection. With war having just been declared with Germany, what was put up must now be put away. Leaving the gallery to survey the almost empty streets around Piccadilly, Clark muses that it might be best that all the Victorian piles of Regent Street did end their lives as rubble, given they were all “founded on exploitation” and lies. But it is hard to take this sudden moment of indignation seriously, especially as we now know these “dull” office blocks would have been replaced by things far more dismal. Like so much of what Clark says, you get the feeling this is not so much the truth as a benign yet ruthless piece of charm - that what he really cares about is seducing and being liked, even this means being different things to different people, from aristocrat to anonymous face in the crowd. It is a revealing moment which recalls an earlier part of the book: “When I was moved by a work of art it never becomes occurred to me that someone else, with more mature judgement, might feel differently. This almost insane self-confidence lasted till a few years ago, and the odd thing is how many people have accepted my judgements. My whole life might be described as one long, harmless confidence trick.”

[Kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kenneth MacKenzie Clark war ein britischer Kunsthistoriker, Autor und der jüngste bis dahin jüngste Direktor der National Gallery in London. In Another Part of the wood erzählt er die Geschichte seines Lebens.

Anfangs klingt es wie der typische Werdegang eines Kindes aus einer wohlhabenden britischen Familie zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Kenneth Clark erzählt von liebvollen, aber distanzierten Eltern, die eher am Rand seiner Erinnerung stehen. Dafür lässt er seine Leserschaft an Ereignissen aus seiner Kindheit und Jugend teilnehmen. Um Konventionen zu folgen, sollte der Junge reiten lernen. Aber auch das vermeintlich artigste Pony schaffte es, ihn und seinen Reitlehrer so zur Verzweiflung zu treiben, dass er sich bald wieder dem widmen durfte, was er lieber tat als zu reiten.

Schon früh während Zeit am Trinity College in Oxford begann seine Liebe zur Kunst. So, wie Kenneth Clark über das Erwachen dieser Liebe spricht, gibt mir einen guten Eindruck davon, was sie für ihn bedeutet. Dass er sich nach seinem Abschluss beruflich in diese Richtung entwickeln würde, wurde früh deutlich. Das er den Weg eingeschlagen hat, den er letztendlich gegangen ist, war eine interessante Mischung aus zur rechten Zeit am rechten Ort zu sein, seiner Fachkenntnis, die schon früh bekannt war und auch der Tatsache, dass er seine Meinung zwar deutlich machen konnte, aber nie verletzend wurde.

Another Part of the Wood war weniger eine Lektüre als eine Unterhaltung mit dem Autor. Ich habe beim Lesen den Eindruck gewonnen, dass ihm vieles in seinem Leben fast schon zugefallen ist, ohne dass er sich sehr darum bemühen musste. Auf der anderen Seite kann ich in seiner Autobiografie kaum etwas Negatives lesen, deshalb denke ich, dass die Zeit die Erinnerungen ein wenig verklärt hat.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely wonderful memoir by Sir Kenneth. The book covers the period of his childhood through his education at Oxford and his apprenticeship with the great BB, Bernard Berenson. He had a gift for friendship. Among his close friends were Edith Wharton and Maurice Bowra. This first of two volumes takes us to the beginning of his tenure as Director of the National Gallery, London and coincidentally the beginning of World War II. A must read for anyone interested in twentieth century British History or Art History.

[Sam Gilbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unlike others, I didn’t find Clark’s autobiography funny. He is resolutely priggish, not in his view of himself and the world, but in his stiff, quite charmless writing. This was a disappointment, as I quite admire Clark’s scholarly writing. When he says, at the beginning, that there is but one reason he wrote the book, we can readily divine it. A shame.

Still, his portraits of family members, servants, teachers, and friends are welcome. Wish only he’d written much more on Bowra.

[Tamara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very gossipy, a bit dull at times, but fascinating at other times: he worked for Bernard Berenson, was a friend of Edith Wharton, and lived near, practically with Philip Sassoon. Worth the read.

[Mia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A privileged life, and you must be part of the British upper class to appreciate the many, many references. Still, I enjoyed it tremendously.

[Joe]

...during Edwardian times when servants pressed newspapers delivered to the household or estate with an iron...because the ink may have still been wet upon delivery...and provoked the custom that followed, pressing them unnecessarily...although the ink was dry...the act thereof pressing seems superfluous - nothing more than a higher class thing to do.