A Charming Guru Remembered
Sir Kenneth Clark 1903 - 1983

Most readers who recognize the name “met” him as television broadcaster of a series on Western civilisation originally broadcast on BBC and re-broadcast on CBC in Canada, Public Television and other stations in the United States. What was unusual about Sir Kenneth was his total lack of pomposity and self-importance. He was a professor par excellence: depth of knowledge, ability to convey his ideas, and obvious delight with his subject. In spite of these characteristics he was an Establishment figure in the field of Fine Arts. The knighthood conferred on him in 1969 contributed only in a small way to how he was regarded. Early in his career he worked for two years with Bernard Berenson in Florence at a time when Berenson was considered the most important living expert on Italian art. He later graduated from Oxford University and was named curator of the University’s Ashmolian Museum which contains significant and priceless paintings. He was named Slade Professor of Fine Arts also at Oxford and became Director of Britain’s National Gallery from 1934 to 1945. For a time, he was also Chancellor of York University.

The other day I came across a paperback published by Beacon Press in Boston in 1969 which was a re-print of a series of lectures delivered by Clark when he was Slade Professor in 1949. The title Landscape into Art intrigued me and turned out to be a revelation. The book has only 143 pages of text but about 100 pages of black and white illustrations. Within these limits there is a brilliant history of European landscape painting - a voyage through seven centuries. In his introduction, he says that the uninitiated believe that the “appreciation of natural beauty and the painting of landscape is a normal part of our spiritual activity. But the truth is that in times when the human spirit seems to have burned most brightly the painting of landscape for its own sake did not exist and was unthinkable.” He might have said that there are delightful Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings produced centuries before the European painters and society considered this to be a legitimate art form. As a “museum rat,” I have noticed - as have thousands of other museum visitors - that late medieval paintings which show human beings (particularly saints and the Holy Family) beautifully, use backgrounds which lack charm and verisimilitude.

Clark tells us that the reason for mountains being just twisted rocks did not indicate a lack of skill but a lack of interest. Another factor according to him was the view that “nature” was a hostile and dangerous place. Thus the strange bits of landscape of that time were symbolic only. He then takes the reader into the appearance of gardens in which Mary, particularly, was placed - the most famous of which with an adoring unicorn. A tapestry of Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1497) of the Journey of the Magi still has an exuberance of symbolic landscape, particularly with its mountains. But hunting scenes of the nobility appeared which contained nearly realistic forests and animals Paolo Uccello (1397-1475). The Winter scene by Pieter Brueghel the elder (1525 -1569) as well as his “Harvesters” skillfully makes the landscapes an integral part of the paintings. By stages we arrive at art which is unabashedly a portrait of nature. This is certainly true of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) whose watercolour of Innsbruck is mentioned by Clark and whose portrait of a hare and of a piece of meadow are familiar to many of us. While there were landscape painters such as John Constable (1776-1837) in England, Salomon van Ruysdael (1602-1670) in Holland and J.B.Camille Corot (1796-1875) who made a living with their art, the view of nature had also drastically changed. Speaking of Constable and the poet Wordsworth, Clark says “both believed that there was something in trees, flowers, meadows and mountains which was so full of the divine that if it were contemplated with sufficient devotion it would reveal a moral and spiritual quality of its own.” The struggle for landscape as a recognized art form having been won, the way was open for artists to express their very own appreciation of landscapes. This was done brilliantly by Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat and the Impressionists. Clark was fond of them all.

The book’s epilogue expresses a concern that with ascendant Abstract Expressionism, colour photography, and microphotography which opened a heretofore invisible world of tiny creatures and structures, landscape painting might not have a happy future. In 1949 Clark could not have foreseen that more than a half century later landscape painting would be alive and well in most parts of the world. In addition the older landscapes of the Hudson River School and those of painter/discoverers such as Bierstadt would be highly prized in America as are the “Group of Seven” landscapes in Canada.

July 2005