Kenneth Clark was much better at opening people’s eyes to great art than Marxist John Berger

It is one of those interesting quirks of postwar cultural history that John Berger, who has died at the age of 90, could have presented Civilisation. Millions of viewers who saw that unsurpassed – unsurpassable – series when its 13 programmes were screened in 1969, or who have seen it in the years since, associate Civilisation with Kenneth Clark – Lord Clark of Civilisation, as he came to be known. But Berger might easily have got the nod.

It was Clark himself who suggested to Michael Gill, Civilisation‘s producer, that he might find a more congenial ally in Berger, who, of course, three years later presented Ways of Seeing as a counter-argument to Clark’s magisterial televisual essays. Who knows? Had Berger presented Civilisation perhaps Clark would then have responded with a Ways of Seeing of his own. It’s quite a thought.

Clark, every inch the patrician, has been chided, mocked even, by ‘progressive’ critics for his great-man interpretation of civilisation.