Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation. James Stourton
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’.