75 Facts About Kenneth Clark

Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron Clark was a British art historian, museum director and broadcaster.

Kenneth Clark's expertise covered a wide range of artists and periods, but he is particularly associated with Italian Renaissance art, most of all that of Leonardo da Vinci.

The son of rich parents, Clark was introduced to the arts at an early age.

Three decades after his death, Kenneth 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.

Kenneth Clark's great-great-grandfather invented the cotton spool, and the Kenneth Clark Thread Company of Paisley had grown into a substantial business.

Kenneth Clark senior worked briefly as a director of the firm and retired in his mid-twenties as a member of the "idle rich", as Clark junior later put it: although "many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler".

Kenneth Clark senior was a sportsman, a gambler, an eccentric and a heavy drinker.

Kenneth Clark had little in common with his father, though he always remained fond of him.

Alice Kenneth Clark was shy and distant, but her son received affection from a devoted nanny.

Kenneth Clark later recalled that he used to take long walks, talking to himself, a habit he believed stood him in good stead as a broadcaster: "Television is a form of soliloquy".

Kenneth Clark developed a competent talent for drawing, for which he later won several prizes as a schoolboy.

Kenneth Clark was educated at Wixenford School and, from 1917 to 1922, Winchester College.

The school library contained the collected writings of John Ruskin, which Kenneth Clark read avidly, and which influenced him for the rest of his life, not only in their artistic judgments but in their progressive political and social beliefs.

From Winchester, Kenneth Clark won a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied modern history.

Kenneth Clark graduated in 1925 with a second-class honours degree.

Bell became a mentor to him and suggested that for his B Litt thesis Kenneth Clark should write about the Gothic revival in architecture.

Kenneth Clark did not complete the thesis, but later turned his researches into his first full-length book, The Gothic Revival.

In 1929, as a result of his work with Berenson, Kenneth Clark was asked to catalogue the extensive collection of Leonardo da Vinci drawings at Windsor Castle.

Kenneth Clark was not convinced that his future lay in administration; he enjoyed writing, and would have preferred to be a scholar rather than a museum director.

Nonetheless, when Bell retired in 1931 Kenneth Clark agreed to succeed him as Keeper of the Fine Art Department at the Ashmolean.

Victorian art and architecture were out of fashion in the 1930s, "generally despised and derided", according to the art historian Matthew Winterbottom, but Kenneth Clark believed that they should be represented in the collection, although the bookcase was not put on display until 2016.

When he received MacDonald's offer of the post, Kenneth Clark was not enthusiastic.

Kenneth Clark thought himself too young, aged 30, and felt torn between a scholarly and an administrative career.

Kenneth Clark accepted the directorship in January 1934, although, as he wrote to Berenson, "in between being the manager of a large department store I shall have to be a professional entertainer to the landed and official classes".

Kenneth Clark felt that he could not do justice to the post in tandem with his new duties at the gallery.

The appointment was announced in The London Gazette in July 1934; Kenneth Clark held the post for the next ten years.

Kenneth Clark believed in making fine art accessible to everyone, and while at the National Gallery he devised many initiatives with this aim in mind.

Kenneth Clark had rooms re-hung and frames improved; by 1935 he had achieved the installation of a laboratory and introduced electric lighting, which made evening opening possible for the first time.

Kenneth Clark maintained that good art must be accessible to everyone and must be rooted in the observable world.

Kenneth Clark saw them in 1937 in the possession of a dealer in Vienna, and against the united advice of his professional staff he persuaded the trustees to buy them.

Kenneth Clark believed them to be by Giorgione, whose work he considered inadequately represented in the gallery at the time.

Kenneth Clark's staff did not accept the attribution to Giorgione, and within a year scholarly research established the paintings as the work of Andrea Previtali, one of Giorgione's minor contemporaries.

The British press protested at the waste of taxpayers' money, Kenneth Clark's reputation suffered a considerable blow, and his relations with his professional team, already uneasy, were further strained.

Kenneth Clark set up the War Artists' Advisory Committee, and persuaded the government to employ official war artists in considerable numbers.

Kenneth Clark instituted an additional public attraction of a monthly featured picture brought from storage and exhibited along with explanatory material.

In 1945, after overseeing the return of the collections to the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark resigned as director, intending to devote himself to writing.

In July 1946 Kenneth Clark was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford for a three-year term.

The first holder of the professorship had been Ruskin; Kenneth Clark took as his first subject Ruskin's tenure of the post.

James Stourton, Kenneth Clark's authorised biographer, judges the appointment to be the most rewarding his subject ever held, and notes how, during this period, Kenneth Clark established himself as Britain's most sought-after lecturer, and wrote two of his finest books, Landscape into Art and Piero della Francesca.

Kenneth Clark served on numerous official committees during this period, and helped to stage a ground-breaking exhibition in Paris of works by his friend and protege Henry Moore.

Kenneth Clark was more in sympathy with modern painting and sculpture than with much of modern architecture.

Kenneth Clark admired Giles Gilbert Scott, Maxwell Fry, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto and others, but found many contemporary buildings mediocre.

Kenneth Clark had been among the first to conclude that private patronage could no longer support the arts; during the war he had been a prominent member of the state-funded Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts.

Kenneth Clark held the post until 1960, but it was a frustrating experience for him; he found himself chiefly a figurehead.

Many of those opposed to the new broadcaster feared vulgarisation on the lines of American television, and although Kenneth Clark's appointment reassured some, others thought his acceptance of the post a betrayal of artistic and intellectual standards.

Kenneth Clark had appeared on air frequently from 1936, when he gave a radio talk on an exhibition of Chinese Art at Burlington House; the following year he made his television debut, presenting Florentine paintings from the National Gallery.

Lew Grade, who as chairman of Associated Television held one of the ITV franchises, felt strongly that Kenneth Clark should make arts programmes of his own, and as soon as Kenneth Clark stood down as chairman in 1957, he accepted Grade's invitation.

Kenneth Clark conceived the idea of a series about great paintings as the standard-bearer for colour television, and had no doubt that Clark would be much the best presenter for it.

Kenneth Clark was attracted by the suggestion, but at first declined to commit himself.

Kenneth Clark later recalled that what convinced him that he should take part was Attenborough's use of the word "civilisation" to sum up what the series would be about.

The series consisted of thirteen programmes, each fifty minutes long, written and presented by Kenneth Clark, covering western European civilisation from the end of the Dark Ages to the early twentieth century.

Kenneth Clark commented that his outlook was "nothing striking, nothing original, nothing that could not have been written by an ordinary harmless bourgeois of the later nineteenth century":.

Kenneth Clark's accompanying book has never been out of print, and the BBC continued to sell thousands of copies of the DVD set of Civilisation every year.

In 1976 Kenneth Clark returned to the BBC, presenting five programmes about Rembrandt.

The series, directed by Colin Kenneth Clark, considered various aspects of the painter's work, from his self-portraits to his biblical scenes.

Kenneth Clark was chancellor of the University of York from 1967 to 1978 and a trustee of the British Museum.

Kenneth Clark died on 21 May 1983 at the age of seventy-nine, in a nursing home in Hythe, Kent, after a fall.

In 1927 Kenneth Clark married a fellow student, Elizabeth Winifred Martin, known as "Jane", the daughter of Robert Macgregor Martin, a Dublin businessman, and his wife, Emily Winifred Dickson.

Away from his official duties, Kenneth Clark enjoyed what he described as "the Great Kenneth Clark Boom" in the 1930s.

Kenneth Clark was a womaniser, and although Jane had love affairs, notably with the composer William Walton, she took some of her husband's extramarital relationships badly.

Kenneth Clark suffered severe mood swings and later alcoholism and a stroke.

Kenneth Clark remained firmly supportive of his wife during her decline.

Kenneth Clark was regarded by his father as a fascist by conviction though as the ablest member of the Clark family "parents included"; he became a Conservative member of parliament and junior minister, and a celebrated diarist.

The family felt that Kenneth Clark was acting precipitately in marrying someone he had not known well for very long, but the wedding took place in November 1977.

Kenneth Clark's parents were Liberal in outlook, and Ruskin's social and political views influenced the young Kenneth Clark.

Mary Beard wrote in a Guardian article that Kenneth Clark was a lifelong Labour voter.

State and other honours received by Kenneth Clark included Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1938; Fellow of the British Academy, 1949; Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour, 1959; life peer, 1969; Companion of Literature, 1974; and Member of the Order of Merit, 1976.

Kenneth Clark was elected a member or honorary member of the Conseil Artistique des Musees Nationaux of France; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the American Institute of Architects.

Kenneth Clark was awarded honorary degrees by the universities of Bath, Cambridge, Glasgow, Liverpool, London, Oxford, Sheffield, Warwick, York, and in the US Columbia and Brown universities.

Kenneth Clark was an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Royal College of Art.

The winner of the competition is awarded a golden Lord Kenneth Clark Medal sculpted by a fellow Old Wykehamist, Anthony Smith.

In 2014 the Tate held the "Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation" exhibition, highlighting Clark's impact "as one of the most influential figures in British art of the twentieth century".

The art historian Ayla Lepine writes that Kenneth Clark's writing and his "perennial commitment to John Ruskin's output and significance" made an important contribution to the re-evaluation of Victorian art and architecture.

Kenneth Clark knew that his broadly traditional view of art would be anathema to the Marxist element in the artistic world, and was unsurprised when he was attacked by younger critics, notably John Berger, in the 1970s.

The critic Jackie Wullschlager wrote in 2014 that it was as a writer rather than a collector that Kenneth Clark excelled: "unrivalled since Ruskin for lucidity, erudition, moral conviction".