Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance

Educated at Oxford, Sir Kenneth Clark worked with Bernard Berebson in Florence for two years, and became Director of the National Gallery London, 1935-1945. He was Slade professor of Fine Arts at Oxford university 1946-50 and 1961-62. He was chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain 1953-60 and chairman of the Independent Television Authority 1954-57. His books included Leonardo da Vinci(1939), Landscape into Art (1949), Piero della Francesca(1951), The Nude (1956) and Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance(1966). His television series and subsequent book Civilisation (1969) were extremely popular. He received a KCB in 1938, the CH in 1959, a peerage in 1969 and the OM in 1976. His son Alan Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (1928-) was a controversial military historian and diarist, Conservative MP 1974-93 and a junior minister. Clark's reputation as an art historian is mitigated somewhat by the necessary intrigues as a director of a major art museum. His insistence, for example, to hang minor Venetian School paintings in 1937 as autograph Giorgiones attracted harsh criticism and "a lingering mistrust of his integrity" according to the DNB. However, his adamancy against reappointment of the Lord Duveen as a trustee on the grounds of conflict of interest took much courage. Clark's patronage of such artists as Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland during their struggling years was a mark of both of his charity and understanding of art. He was a critic of most modern art (he expressed incomprehension at the work of Czanne, for example), and his televised series Civilisation ends immediately before the period of abstraction in art. His most appreciated book, The Nude, shows the influence of Aby Warburg (q.v.), though elsewhere in Clark's writing this broad psychological method is hard to see.