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Kenneth Clark: A Biography
Secrest, Meryle, Kenneth A Biography
310 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1984
31 people want to read
About the author
Meryle Secrest
29 books33 followersMeryle Secrest was born and educated in Bath, England, and lives in Washington, DC. She is the author of twelve biographies and was awarded the 2006 Presidential National Humanities Medal.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 17, 2008
The best bits are from the 30s, when Clark was director of the National Portrait Gallery and Surveyor of the King's Pictures. He would often lunch with the Queen after a morning spent rehanging the paintings in Buckingham Palace. Lady Clark, bug-eyed with cocaine, would spend her days being chauffeured around London, first to the chocolatier and then to the couturier, where she would get hammered with friends while being fitted for gowns.
Wonderfully cinematic, this:
'When the Clarks began looking for a country house in 1936, Sassoon offered them Bellevue on his Port Lympne estate. He thought it an ideal house and they agreed. Alan in particular came to prefer 'Bellers' to London, especially since Sassoon, a passionate advocate of British air power, and Under-Secretary of State for Air, took the children up on flights and would buzz their outraged and horrified parents as they played golf.'
Wonderfully cinematic, this:
'When the Clarks began looking for a country house in 1936, Sassoon offered them Bellevue on his Port Lympne estate. He thought it an ideal house and they agreed. Alan in particular came to prefer 'Bellers' to London, especially since Sassoon, a passionate advocate of British air power, and Under-Secretary of State for Air, took the children up on flights and would buzz their outraged and horrified parents as they played golf.'
August 14, 2024
Fantastically readable, well written.
March 19, 2014
Though Meryle Secrest insisted this was not an "authorized biography," since she had not been given Lord Clark's permission to quote from his diaries, letters, and private papers, she nevertheless had the full co-operation of Clark and those of his family, friends, and colleagues who were still alive at the time she was doing her research. I've seen no indication that the Clark family has any plans to release any of those papers (and at any rate, the reading public seems much more interested in Lord Clark's rascally, sharp-tongued eldest son, Alan), so I think this book is the closest we will ever get or need to an authorized biography of Kenneth Clark. It's a fine, solid piece of work.
For those too young to remember when Kenneth Clark was a household name (depending on the household), he was one of the foremost art experts of the Twentieth-century. Born into wealth, he showed a precocious interest in art and aesthetics. As a protege of the legendary Bernard Berenson, his rise was rapid, and he became Director of London's National Gallery at the age of thirty. There he became known as an innovator, a popularizer, a patron and advocate of the arts, and an exciting lecturer. On the eve of World War II, he supervised the effort to remove the National Gallery's collection to safekeeping from the Nazis.
After the war, he wore a variety of hats, wrote several superb art books that are still considered the last word on their subject, and was a pioneer in educational television. He is best-known, however, for his magisterial thirteen-part television documentary on the art and culture of the Western world, "Civilisation," which, though almost half-a-century old now, is still considered one of the greatest achievements of the medium of television.
Though Lord Clark's career progressed from strength to strength with hardly a misstep, his private life was not without its troubles. The son of a jolly, ebullient, wealthy, alcoholic father and a cold, distant, unemotional mother, Clark spent much of his life emulating the latter. Those who didn't know him well thought him an arrogant snob.
His first wife worshiped him to the exclusion of all else and all others, including their children. She saw it her role in life to support, protect, and promote her husband in every way possible, and to be the very model of the Great Man's perfect wife, the ideal society hostess. Unfortunately, she tried a little too hard, and her efforts sometimes came across as phony and pretentious. She cracked under the strain, and descended into drug and alcohol abuse, and, the reader cannot help but infer, mental illness.
Kenneth Clark then took up with a bewildering succession of mistresses, and Secrest makes no attempt to assess whether Jane Clark's frequent breakdowns were the result of her husband's infidelities, or if he took up with other women in order to escape from Jane's increasingly unpleasant behavior and demands, and to gain the love and emotional fulfillment he had been denied in life up to that point. I suspect the truth was somewhere in the middle.
After Jane's death, Clark enjoyed a second marriage with a much younger woman, wherein he was, by all accounts, able to let his hair down a little, but it never seems that he was ever able to experience with humans the utter joy, rapture, order, peace, and transcendence that he did with art.
For those too young to remember when Kenneth Clark was a household name (depending on the household), he was one of the foremost art experts of the Twentieth-century. Born into wealth, he showed a precocious interest in art and aesthetics. As a protege of the legendary Bernard Berenson, his rise was rapid, and he became Director of London's National Gallery at the age of thirty. There he became known as an innovator, a popularizer, a patron and advocate of the arts, and an exciting lecturer. On the eve of World War II, he supervised the effort to remove the National Gallery's collection to safekeeping from the Nazis.
After the war, he wore a variety of hats, wrote several superb art books that are still considered the last word on their subject, and was a pioneer in educational television. He is best-known, however, for his magisterial thirteen-part television documentary on the art and culture of the Western world, "Civilisation," which, though almost half-a-century old now, is still considered one of the greatest achievements of the medium of television.
Though Lord Clark's career progressed from strength to strength with hardly a misstep, his private life was not without its troubles. The son of a jolly, ebullient, wealthy, alcoholic father and a cold, distant, unemotional mother, Clark spent much of his life emulating the latter. Those who didn't know him well thought him an arrogant snob.
His first wife worshiped him to the exclusion of all else and all others, including their children. She saw it her role in life to support, protect, and promote her husband in every way possible, and to be the very model of the Great Man's perfect wife, the ideal society hostess. Unfortunately, she tried a little too hard, and her efforts sometimes came across as phony and pretentious. She cracked under the strain, and descended into drug and alcohol abuse, and, the reader cannot help but infer, mental illness.
Kenneth Clark then took up with a bewildering succession of mistresses, and Secrest makes no attempt to assess whether Jane Clark's frequent breakdowns were the result of her husband's infidelities, or if he took up with other women in order to escape from Jane's increasingly unpleasant behavior and demands, and to gain the love and emotional fulfillment he had been denied in life up to that point. I suspect the truth was somewhere in the middle.
After Jane's death, Clark enjoyed a second marriage with a much younger woman, wherein he was, by all accounts, able to let his hair down a little, but it never seems that he was ever able to experience with humans the utter joy, rapture, order, peace, and transcendence that he did with art.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews