Like virtually everyone middle-aged and middle-class in this country, I am a beneficiary of the cult of Civilisation — Kenneth Clark’s ‘personal view’, stretching in 13 episodes from the Vikings to Van Gogh, which was broadcast on BBC2 in 1969 and on BBC1 two years later, as well as appearing as a sumptuously illustrated, best-selling book.
Like virtually everyone middle-aged and middle-class in this country, I am a beneficiary of the cult of Civilisation — Kenneth Clark’s ‘personal view’, stretching in 13 episodes from the Vikings to Van Gogh, which was broadcast on BBC2 in 1969 and on BBC1 two years later, as well as appearing as a sumptuously illustrated, best-selling book.
What was the source of the programme’s magic? Clark’s cool but kindly, faintly weary tone of patrician sweet reasonableness, his lightly worn but deeply experienced fund of knowledge, his ability to compare and contrast across a wide spectrum. As a little swot of a teenager, this was the sort of pedagogue at whose feet I longed to sit, imbibing the sort of broad, urbane culture that I aspired to. And Clark wasn’t a pretentious name-dropper: he didn’t just march briskly through a gallery of the obvious great names. Civilisation believed profoundly in the transforming powers of outstanding individuals, but it was what it told us about the medieval majesty of Vézelay and Chartres, the Renaissance humanism of Urbino, the rococo grace of Wies and Vierzehnheiligen, or the architectural poetry of iron bridges that was most illuminating. Everything had context, everything connected. He saw both the wood and the trees.
Jonathan Conlin’s succinct and elegant monograph describes the phenomenon in both width and depth (though oddly, he doesn’t delve into the publishing history of the book, which sold in its millions, both here and in the US, and which after 40 years still ranks in Amazon’s top 100,000). He defends Clark from the accusation of Whiggishness, pointing out that the series tells not one progressive story, but 13 different stories. Yes, a more accurate title might have been ‘Western European High Culture, as seen by an art historian from his liberal humanist perspective’, but one can’t see that cutting the mustard in the Radio Times, and Clark acknowledged cleanly that he didn’t have the space or time to look at the civilisations of other continents — civilisations whose worth he fully appreciated. The most significant omission, which he regretted, was Spain.
Conlin gives a fascinating account of the series’ intellectual background, relating Clark’s ideology to Pater and Clive Bell at one end and the leftism of John Berger (who described Clark, not unfairly, as ‘one of the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline’) at the other. Civilisation was written in the white heat of the émeutes of the Sixties, against which Clark asserts a feebly banal belief that ‘order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction’. But it is surely to his credit that his attitude to the future remained sceptical and pessimistic rather than apocalyptic or Messianic.
Conlin provides an amusing account of Civilisation’s wild success in America, bringing Clark a degree of celebrity that he genuinely disliked (he even described being nosily acclaimed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington as ‘the most terrible experience of my life’). What is most fascinating, however, is Conlin’s treatment of the series as a watershed in television coverage of the arts. By charting its precursors — Clark’s 50-odd half-hour late-night lectures on ITV, Monitor, Compton Mackenzie’s discourses on Ancient Greece and Rome — he emphasises how original Civilisation was.
Commissioned by David Attenborough, it was intended to show off the new 625 colour signal. It used another new toy, the autocue, and cameras with low-light sensitivity which allowed shooting in dark interiors. It was also unprecedented in its extensive use of locations rather than the studio — 80,000 miles were traversed in the filming. The format was very expensive in terms of production, and viewing figures were not initially huge, but the format stuck. Alistair Cooke’s America and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man followed: like Civilisation, they were ultimately huge money-spinners worldwide, offering the BBC object lessons in responsible investment of the licence fee.
Conlin concludes by reflecting on the subsequent presentation of the history of art on television. He focuses on series which follow Civilisation’s model, inasmuch as they show an auteur leading the viewer on a personal journey, in the course of which works of art and architecture are used to exemplify something about human society and aesthetic achievement. None of them has had Civilisation’s scope, and four or six episodes has become the norm, with all the constraints that implies. Conlin finds John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New clever but reductive. He dislikes Nigel Spivey’s How Art Made the World because its urge to use science to explain the artistic impulse is so strong that ‘individual expression, agency or choice almost threatens to disappear’. He dislikes even more the flashy demystifying psychologising peddled by Simon Schama’s Power of Art. It is Neil MacGregor, Sister Wendy Beckett and Matthew Collings who, for Conlin, have struck something closer to Clark’s note, with its confidence that beautiful works of great art, produced by individuals of rare genius, can be a source of hope and enlightenment.