As will be clear from the Comments section of the blog and previous entries, I have got interested in where Kenneth Clark got his ideas about Civilisation since so few are declared in the text.

He was certainly influenced by Burckhardt, whose The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy he read at Oxford as a counterpoint to Ruskin, who was a bigger influence on his prose style.

He was much influenced by Roger Fry, who he met in his twenties, became a friend, and whose Last Lectures he edited; but he was surely more influenced by Fry’s formalism than his attitude (never well developed) towards history.

He was definitely admiring of Aby Warburg, attended one of his lectures in Florence (but misrecorded its date), helped acquire his library for London, and who deeply influenced Clark’s writing of The Nude.

He acknowledges the influence of H.G. Wells.

I have no evidence that he had read Norbert Elias’s Über den Process der Zivilisation which was first published in 1939 and republished in 1969, but Clark was no fool and he would have consulted friends in Oxford in the writing of Civilisation who would have been familiar with Elias’s ideas, if only second hand.

In his opposition between ‘heroic will’ and what he regarded as the more effeminate aspects of Civilisation, I wonder if he was also influenced, if only subliminally, by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, which, like H.G. Wells’s Outline of History was so fashionable in the 1920s, even if Clark, like Gombrich rejected any form of intellectual determinism.

I will rely on Edward Chaney to correct me.

The final stages of a big capital project are exciting, if a bit nerve-racking.   Today, the first work of art has been hung in the basement vaults which turn out to be unexpectedly magnificent spaces, since we dug down in order to improve disabled access;  the trees have been planted in the courtyard between the two buildings and the cobbles are about to be laid;  the sun is shining in the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler galleries at the back of the building;  the Clore Learning Studio is nearly ready for action;  the gold lettering is being applied in the Dorfman Senate Room.    There is only six weeks to go to practical completion and maybe another two to the public opening.

One of the oddities of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation is that almost the only modern writer he mentions is – not Burkhardt, not Norbert Elias (both of whom may have influenced his views) – but H.G.Wells, who is referred to for a distinction between ‘communities of obedience and communities of will’: ‘he thought that the first produced the stable societies like Egypt and Mesopotamia, the original homes of civilisation, and the second produced the restless nomads of the north’ (p.127). The second reference is to the fact that the ‘aggressive, nomadic societies – what he called communities of will – Israel, Islam, the Protestant North, conceived their gods as male’ (p.143). The third time he reveals that he knew him: ‘I remember H.G. Wells, who was a kind of twentieth-century Voltaire, saying that he daren’t drive a car in France, because the temptation to drive over a priest would be too strong for him’ (p.209). He met Wells at Sybille Colefax’s in the early 1930s, but the reference is presumably to The Outline of History, which was published in 1920, when Clark would have been seventeen, intellectually impressionable and sitting his scholarship exams for Oxford, when Wells’ intellectual theorising presumbly left its imprint.

In reading Civilisation, I kept a mental checklist of the characteristics which Clark regards as necessary to a civilisation (references are to the recent paperback edition):-

1. Solidity

He’s keen on built form being one of its basic characteristics, building for eternity, as in baroque Rome, and contemptuous of what he describes as the wigwams of the Vikings (or what he quaintly describes as their ‘prefabs’). ‘If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings’ (p.9).

2. Confidence

‘Of course, civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity – enough to provide a little material prosperity. But, far more, it requires confidence – confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers’ (p.12).

3. Internationalism

‘Where some way of thought or human activity is really vital to us, internationalism is accepted unhesitatingly’ (p.35). The book is regarded as being very Eurocentric, but in his frame of reference Clark reveals his internationalism.

4. The capacity to change

‘The great, indeed the unique, merit of European civilisation has been that it has never ceased to develop and change’ (p.65).

5. Heroic will

In his two chapters on the Renaissance, Clark introduces a dialctic between ‘humanist virtues of intelligence’ and ‘the quality of heroic will’. He constantly cautions against thinking that civilisation is a matter of courtesy or civilitas (‘the civilised smile of eighteenth-century France may be one of the things that have brought the whole concept of civilisation into disrepute’ (p.197). He is much more on the side of heroic individualism, the spirit of Michelangelo, rather than Raphael. ‘I suppose that this quality, which I may call heroic, is not part of most people’s idea of civilisation’ (p.103). But it was of Clark’s: ‘it involves a contempt of convenience and a sacrifice of all those pleasures that contribute to what we call civilised life…in the end, civilisation depends on man extending his powers of mind and spirit to the utmost’.

This may not be a particularly profound apparatus for analysing civilisation, but then Clark always felt that he lacked a good capacity for intellectual generalisation; and what he may lack in intellectual theorising, he makes up in intelligent, wide-ranging and occasionally ironic urbanity.

Confined to my bed for a day with a stinking cold, I thought I would console myself by reading the original text of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, which has been the subject of so much discussion and debate in recent weeks and which, although it was kept in my parent’s glass-fronted bookcase along with other family treasures, I’m not absolutely convinced I ever actually read, although I watched the original series, and have watched some episodes since. What struck me immediately is not the confidence and intellectual arrogance which some found so off-putting in Clark as the extreme sense of anxiety and pessimism about the fragility of what he finds it hard to describe as ‘Civilisation’. He describes his enterprise in an ironic, eighteenth-entury way as Speculations on the Nature of Civilisation as illustrated by the Changing Phases of Civilised life in Western Europe from the Dark Ages to the Present Day. He belonged to a generation who felt, rightly or wrongly, that the values of civilisation as they had been brought up to believe in had been at risk of being swept away during the second world war and were still at risk, so worth trying, however inadequately, to define. I think it’s this which gives the book, and presumably the programmes, their moral urgency, which the current programmes, with their much greater generosity of spirit to other cultures, maybe lack.

We went to our Charles I exhibition again yesterday afternoon in order to enjoy it as much as possible before it closes in less than three week’s time and is dispersed for another 350 years. Two things struck me. The first is that Charles I is wearing a pearl earring in the Triple Portrait (and, also, in the National Gallery’s equestrian portait and the Louvre portrait, too). He is apparently first shown wearing it (always the same pearl earring, always in his left ear) in a portrait by Isaac Oliver, painted when he was fifteen; and he was apparently still wearing it at his execution. I had totally forgotten, also, that the earring survives, inherited by the Dukes of Portland from the first Earl who received it as a gift from Queen Mary and that it’s on display in the Harley Gallery at Welbeck (strongly recommended). The other thing that struck me was the amazing quality of the painting of the clothes in Jacopo Bassano’s Journey of Jacob (Royal Collection). But then there is always something new to see and appreciate.

I thought that Hambleden was in Oxfordshire, but it turns out to be in the tail end of Buckinghamshire where it runs along the Thames:  a village of unexpected picturesqueness, in a valley on its own, with a monument in the churchyard to the Kenricks, the local landowners, which was apparently sketched by Horace Walpole when he visited it in 1764:-

I had a conversation during the week about Bill Brandt, who is to be the subject of an exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art.   I had thought, quite wrongly, that he had contributed photographs to Robert Byron’s Shell Guide to Wiltshire, with its surreal collage cover done by Lord Berners.   What he did do was provide photographs for the National Buildings Record, established by Walter Godfrey in 1940 ‘to meet the dangers of war then threatening many buildings of national importance’ and with John Summerson, who had a good eye for architectural photography, as its Deputy Director.   Brandt (his voice ‘as loud as a moth’) took unexpectedly straight documentary photographs for the NBR of the tombs in Canterbury Cathedral, as well as buildings, streets and churches in Chichester, Canterbury and Rochester.   At the same time, he took much more atmospheric photographs of ancient monuments towards the end of the war, including Stonehenge and Avebury, published first in Lilliput and in 1951 in his book on Literary Britain.

In discussing Somerset House yesterday, I remembered that we have a chimneypiece by Joseph Wilton which came from the original Council Room in Somerset House and was moved to the new Council Room in Burlington House, after the Royal Academy had moved in 1868.   But they had left Somerset House in 1837, so it was quite a feat to have transferred the (very elaborate) chimneypiece, presumably with the permission of the new occupants of the rooms in Somerset House:-

Wilton was an intriguing figure – well known and successful as a sculptor, trained in Flanders and Paris, knowledgeable about antiquities, and one of the four key figures in the foundation of the Royal Academy, but, at the same time, running a successful yard, selling chimneypieces from Queen Anne Street East, opposite Marylebone Fields, sellings casts, urns and vases by the yard.

While at it, I tried to identify the layout of the rooms occupied by the Royal Academy.

First, the staircase:-

The first room on the first floor opening out onto the staircase was the Ante Room and Library, with surprisingly elegant plasterwork decoration and Theory by Reynolds in the middle of the ceiling:-

The room next door over the arch was the meeting room, described as for the Royal Society, with chimneypieces by Joseph Wilton:-

To the left was a room for casts with the original insignia of the RA in the plasterwork decoration:-

Beyond, in the centre of the Strand façade, the original Council and General Assembly Room, a good space, again with chimneypieces by Wilton:-

The rooms of the Royal Academy interleaved with those of the Royal Society.

On the floor above was the Great Room, due to be restored as part of the plans by Witherford Watson Mann.