10 years ago I wrote a post in this blog denouncing Kenneth Clark and his book and TV series which are both called "Civilisation." I denounced Clark as a quite horrible snob.
The problem is that I had not seen his TV series, and had only read the first half-page or so of his book and then very hastily paged through the rest. And in what I wrote I got Clark all wrong. I assumed that he was an upper-class, royalist Torie elitist, which made me wrong three out of four times: Clark's family did come from the upper part of the upper crust, but he was a lifelong supporter of Labour. And although he worked for the royal family and knew them well, he annoyed them quite a bit in a television series he made shortly before "Civilisation," which let television cameras into parts of the royal palaces where they had never been before, and in which Clark was altogether too frank and cheeky about what he saw as the foibles and failings of past rulers of Britain. As for elitism: when he was appointed director of the National Gallery in 1933 at age 30, he set about to make the museum more accessible and friendly to the general public. Later in his life he made his now-famous television shows about art because he wanted art to belong to everyone. Although he's most often associated with pre-Modern art, he was quite enthusiastic about some Moderns, such as the sculptor Henry Moore, perhaps his best friend. He opposed other members of the avant-garde of his time because he found them to be too elitist.
It's true, as he says in the beginning of the book which angered me so 10 years ago, that he largely equates civilisation with Western civilisation. I wish I had been the director of the TV series, and had been able to convince Clark to change the name of the series to "Western Civilisation," and to drop his comparisons of Western civilisation to other civilisations. I wish he hadn't said that one of the works of Western art he was showing in the series -- I don't remember which work it was, and I don't think it matters -- was "better than anything Islam had ever produced." What does such a statement accomplish, other than to lend aide and comfort to bigots, which Clark was not, and to give to more thoughtful viewers the strong suspicion that Clark's knowledge of Islamic art was far from comprehensive?
Clark was not bigoted, he was old-fashioned. He was born in 1903, and in 1969, when "Civilisation" first aired on the BBC, he had not acquired the outlook of cultural relativism which had begun to spread through the Left, and which by now is deeply ingrained in Leftists such as myself, and which caused me too so over-hastily mis-judge a fellow Leftist like Clark.
Another objection which has been made to Clark is his championing of geniuses. I do not share this objection, because I can't imagine any more than Clark could how we would get great art without geniuses.
I would urge you to see the television series, and to try to overlook Clark's occasional attempts to make art about one civilisation vs another. Although he does this right at the very start of the first show, he doesn't repeat such unpleasantness very often. Instead, the show is all about the love of a connoisseur for things of great beauty, things which happen to have been made in the Western world between the 9th century and the 20th, a connoisseur who wants to share his joy in such things with the whole world. And there's nothing at all wrong with that. On the contrary, the series is beautiful.
And K -- as everyone called him, it seems -- is quite simply loveable.
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