Kenneth Clark: Life, Art, and Civilisation by James Stourton

Author:James Stourton [Stourton, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: biography
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

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*1 By 1948 the firm needed the office space, and Clark felt he had not done enough for them, so he repaid £300 for two years of back rent.

*2 Clark enjoyed talking about photography, and gave the Centenary Lecture to the Royal Photographic Society, entitled ‘The Relations of Photography and Painting’, in which he posed the question, ‘Is photography an art?’ His answer was: ‘Yes but an incomplete one. It is to a large extent a purveyor of raw material.’

*3 Later published in an elegant limited edition by John Murray (1973), with wood engravings by Reynolds Stone and printed in his typeface ‘Janet’. The title is taken from Thomas Hardy.

*4 Cambridge was not neglected: in 1949 Clark delivered the Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture there, ‘The Limits of Classicism’, examining the tension of Classical and sensuous creativity. This talk contained a Clarkian gem: ‘The classicists of the eighteenth century made their sums come out by looking up their answers at the end. Seurat and Matisse have made them come out by sheer hard work and a true intellectual process.’ (Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture, 7 May 1949, reprinted in Cambridge Review.)

*5 See letter to John Killick, 7 April 1943 (Tate 8812/1/1/24). But two days later Clark wrote to Miss M.E. Lloyd: ‘Unfortunately, I disagree with almost all your views. I detest straight lines and right-angles as much as did Baudelaire and Blake. I believe that abstractions are cruel and wicked things which imprison the spirit of man; and as for Corbusier with his homage to Louis XIV – words fail me. However, I find it stimulating to read anything with which I am so violently in disagreement’ (9 April 1943, Tate 8812/1/1/27).

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