Word: clark
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Kenneth Clark known to millions of television viewers (Civilisation; The Romantic Rebellion) is the very portrait of composure. His U voice and elegant gaze-aimed levelly at the masterpieces and just slightly down upon his culture-hungry audience-seem capable of expressing anything but doubt. Who could guess that behind this aplomb a second Kenneth Clark lurks, irreverent, funny and tortuously complex? Another Part of the Wood, in effect, is an autobiographical ambush brilliantly staged by this Clark against his camera...
Born in 1903, the only child of idle-rich Edwardians ("many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler"), young Clark basked off the Riviera on the new yacht his father bought more or less annually. The Clarks had the sort of wealth to maintain on their estate a nine-hole golf course complete with pro, even though neither parent played the game. The boy's only sport was walking about the family bogs soliloquizing, a practice he claimed prepared him for television...
After Oxford, Clark became a protege of the art collector and critic Bernard Berenson. (His devastating vignette of B.B. in these pages is a small classic by itself.) Before he was 30 he had been appointed director of the National Gallery, and was on his way to becoming Lord Clark of Saltwood, the most influential tastemaker in the London art world...
...almost any standards, here is a story of privilege and deserved success. But there are more than cracks in Clark's golden bowl-the usual hint of sublime dissatisfaction successful men feel obliged to point out. A vein of self-contempt-sometimes but not always playful-runs throughout the book. Clark speaks of "the evasions and half-truths" encouraged by the lecture form. Reviewing his decision to become a museum director, he concludes: "I took the wrong turning." The London art world he compares to "a battlefield at nightfall," and seems to despise himself for surviving it: "I learnt...
...Great Clark Boom," he calls his pre-World War II years of making...