Why the BBC will never match Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation

One afternoon in 1942, Kenneth Clark and his wife Jane called on two young painters for tea. The artists were John Craxton and Lucian Freud, then both around 20 and sharing a house in St John’s Wood. The visit was a success, as Craxton told me many years later, but not without its awkward moments. Jane Clark had to be headed off from helping in the kitchen, since the oven contained dead monkeys that were currently serving as models, placed there to restrict the smell.

After consuming a flan cooked by Lucian’s mother and viewing the artists’ work, the Clarks decided to return to what Craxton described as ‘the Olympian heights of Upper Terrace House, Hampstead’, where they lived. On leaving the artists’ bohemian dwelling Clark looked at ‘the very prosperous block of flats opposite’, gave a huge sigh, and said, ‘Strange lives!’ Craxton and Freud collapsed with laughter. ‘We couldn’t stand up.’

Kenneth Clark (1903–83) often gave the impression that he had descended from Olympus, which gave him a slightly comic air of patrician remoteness. Private Eye persisted in dubbing him ‘Lord Clark of Civilisation’, and the name somehow seemed much more appropriate than the title he actually selected (‘Baron Clark of Saltwood in the County of Kent’). His series Civilisation — still after 45 years the most renowned of such cultural blockbusters — sometimes suggested he happened to own western European culture, and was kindly showing it to the viewers. He was perhaps the only living individual, even almost half a century ago, who could look entirely at ease alone in the Sistine Chapel. Next week an exhibition opens at Tate Britain devoted to exploring his activities as art historian — the youngest ever director of the National Gallery — patron of contemporary artists, author and broadcaster.