Kenneth Clark and the Exodus of the Modernists

Did Kenneth Clark fix English art?

Was Kenneth Clark an enlightened tastemaker who backed modern English painting and sculpture? Posterity has judged the art historian favourably. Clark is revered as the advocate who opened institutional doors to major innovators including Henry Moore, Paul Nash, John Piper, Barbara Hepworth, Graham Sutherland and Ben Nicholson. Still, three decades after his death, as English modernist art is relegated to the chronicle of history, popular perceptions need to be tested. Did he support genuine talent?

Kenneth McKenzie Clark had landed the directorship of Britain’s National Gallery in 1934 at the exceptionally young age of twenty-nine. Descended from textile manufacturers—a forebear invented the cotton spool[1]—he enjoyed a private income and did not need to work. Clark himself described his family as “the idle rich”.[2] At the time of his birth his parents owned a Suffolk manor and rural estate, a mansion and a yacht in Perthshire, had another sizeable yacht moored at Monaco, and they leased an ample “flat” in Grosvenor Square for use in London. They were also soon to build a villa at Cap Martin on the Riviera funded by roulette winnings: Clark senior broke the bank at Monte Carlo several times.[3]

Young Kenneth was an only child, and he was indulged. When he expressed interest in art, he was given lavish books on art history and allowed to play curator. He collected reproductions, then scaled up to original oils.[4] By his late teens he had purchased for his room at home a Tintoretto, a small Raphael and a Bellini.

The boy was sent to Rugby, followed by Winchester, then he went up to Oxford to read history. There followed travels on the continent to bone up on art history, see great museums and palaces, and meet the right people. In Italy, Clark came to the attention of the distinguished connoisseur Bernard Berenson, who invited the aspiring scholar to work as a research assistant. It was a formative experience, and besides gaining entrée into exclusive circles, he was drilled in the intricacies of Renaissance fine and decorative arts.

After several stimulating years, Clark admitted to his mentor that he wished to return to England. Not the best time to find a position—Britain had collapsed into the Great Depression—although strings were pulled. Clark was asked if he would like to be Keeper of Fine Art at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. The unsuspecting incumbent was dismissed without delay and the privileged novice shifted in.[5] Three years later, in 1934, Clark was approached to take on the National Gallery directorship, which he did. Within months he was also appointed Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. A knighthood followed in due course.[6]

Clark needed a suitable home. He purchased a large house in busy Portland Place, Marylebone, only doors from the BBC’s Broadcasting House, where he lived with his young wife Jane on an imposing scale: “We were asked everywhere, and almost everyone of note came to lunch or dine with us,” he recalled.[7] The influential and the useful, who took to calling him “K”, were at their dinner table—Churchill and Chamberlain were invited on alternate nights. There were as well invitations to Buckingham Palace; the Duke and Duchess of Kent, and Queen Mary, lunched at Portland Place to talk culture; the Clarks were guests in the Royal Box at the Opera.[8]

Clark had splurged in Paris on suitable pictures for his domestic walls: fifty Cézanne watercolours and drawings, and four of his oils, another two canvases by Seurat, a Renoir, a Maillol sculpture, an early Matisse.[9] And that was over a few days. There would be other forays into galleries, other purchases worthy of a museum director. Some iconic Palmers, for instance, and a tasty Bonnard.[10] Besides, it was the moment for a man of means to quarry the depressed art market. He long boasted of seeing a Michelangelo drawing of the Madonna and Child attracting no bids in a sale. The auctioneer tried to open bidding at 500 guineas, a ridiculous bargain. Clark audaciously offered 100 guineas, and got it.[11]

It was a charmed career, a game of golden ladders and no snakes, and Sir Kenneth—as he was now titled—complained in private in the lead-up to his thirty-fifth birthday that he was bored. Yes, there were frictions with the civil service and some of the gallery’s trustees; the National Gallery had less to spend on art than he did himself; and there were times when the entertaining, the managerial duties and work on further books exhausted him. Life presented no challenges.[12]

British artists were having an abysmal time in the thirties. Livelihoods in the creative arts are the first to evaporate in economic depressions. Artists were clambering to earn paltry sums, letting pictures go for knockdown prices, and doing odd jobs to make a pound or two.[13] They were vulnerable, and felt it. “I remember Ben Nicholson getting down to his last shilling,” Myfawny Piper wrote, “and telephoning in triumph to say that he had managed to persuade one of his few faithful collectors to buy a picture … It was enough to see him and Barbara through the next two to three months.”[14]

To compound stresses, modern art in Britain was at a crossroads. Progressive painters and sculptors were sorting out their next step. It wasn’t sufficient to fall in line with the latest work from across the Channel, a quandary summarised by the painter Paul Nash:

Whether it is possible to “go modern” and still “be British” is a question vexing quite a few people today … The battle lines have been drawn up: internationalism versus an indigenous culture; renovation versus conservatism; the industrial versus the pastoral; the functional versus the futile.[15]

Artists had to exercise caution in how they adapted to modernity, for there was a risk their work might become insular and parochial. How to blend modern art with Britishness?

An answer emerged from an unexpected front. Prompted by modernism’s revaluation of the “primitive”, and its broad reaction against traditionalism, there was mounting zeal for pre-Renaissance art. Painters and sculptors roamed country villages in a hunt for accomplished work from the distant past. It was constant discovery, constant delight, particularly in rural churches. One might savour the leering gargoyles, enthuse over an intricately patterned Saxon font, find a “green man” chiselled on a corbel. Besides, this grass-roots investigation could translate into income as assorted artists landed work illustrating antiquarian subjects or scenes for advertising material. The painters Paul Nash, John Nash and John Piper were commissioned to devise Shell Guide county tourism booklets, supplying photographs, illustrations and writing the texts.[16]

As for advanced artists, they were being pulled towards either surrealism or geometric abstraction in the 1930s, movements which saw rich sources in pagan art.[17] The surrealists viewed work by pre-modern man as a way of connecting with primitive impulses, latent psychological drives and irrational states. Meanwhile geometric abstractionists perceived compositional possibilities in those shapes and visual ratios used by artisans in medieval ages and earlier, especially in ancient relics. By mid-decade modernists were investigating Britons’ pagan past, with a steady drift of painters and sculptors making pilgrimages to sites of creative veneration: to the Avebury circle, Stonehenge, Silbury Hill and West Kennet long barrow in Wiltshire; to the Wittenham Clumps and the Uffington White Horse in the Cotswolds; and to the Lanyon Quoit, the Mên-an-Tol, Zennor Quoit and the Merry Maidens in West Penwith, Cornwall.

The avant-garde publication Circle, its title declaring the authority of geometric form, pressed the case, reproducing up-to-the-minute abstractions with photographs of megaliths. Cubism was already in the English landscape, the argument ran, as evidenced by a repertoire of blocky economical forms used in menhirs and stone circles. Sure enough, figurative artists including Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious featured earthworks in their watercolours and oil paintings, while the vanguardists Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson used the blunt shapes of megaliths to compose abstract sculptures and canvases. Would this sway the sceptics?

If one has to nominate a date for Kenneth Clark’s eye being seriously fixed upon modern art, it was probably when he was invited onto the committee of London’s Contemporary Art Society (CAS) in 1937. This organisation had been founded in 1910 by Lady Ottoline Morrell, Roger Fry and several liberal-minded art enthusiasts to counteract institutional philistinism by supporting talent, organising exhibitions, and steering quality work into public collections.[18] Scholars fixated on the distant past were locked out of the CAS’s committee in its original formulation: antiquarians and experts on medieval, Renaissance or baroque art had no place there. Twenty years later most of the founders were dead. That was how Kenneth Clark, who knew little of recent art, got on board.

The CAS was now effectively an official body, the gate through which modern art entered institutional collections. It handled some modern acquisitions for the Tate Gallery, and county galleries paid annual subscriptions, receiving work in return. Purchasing decisions were held by one or two independent members—mostly keen collectors—then Maynard Keynes, the main purchaser, withdrew due to ill health. In 1938 Kenneth Clark moved into the vacancy.[19]

Academic art history venerates Kenneth Clark. He is a figure above reproach. But in the London art scene in the late 1930s he was scarcely an ally of progressive art—modernist painters and art dealers saw him as an opinionated pest, because Clark disparaged the modern movement. Writing for the Listener, he scorned geometric and abstract trends since the Great War as “sterile”, lacking “life-enhancing vitality” and being “essentially German”. Modern artists may have toiled to instil ancient English forms in their works, yet Clark grumbled, “We paid, as usual, the price for having conquered Germany materially by being in turn conquered by German culture”, describing English modernists as having contracted “spiritual beri-beri”. The only way forward, for him, was in figuration.[20]

There was the inevitable letters-page stoush with heated responses from supporters and agitated opponents, and follow-up articles by more knowledgeable critics in the same newspaper and the Guardian. Clark rode over all—modernism was “of little interest to anyone except a very small and usually unimportant group of people”—adopting a tone that annoyed even friends.[21] He deserved a “kick in the pants”, they said.[22]

So some on the art scene were displeased by Clark’s rise within the CAS. It was not that the National Gallery director’s eye was out of date. He wanted art to tell a story, and he was such a sucker for work that was illustrative, cheerful and quaint. Clark went into raptures over a mindless watercolour as if here lay merit. And this disturbed even arch-reactionaries at the Royal Academy. That he steered the CAS into collecting oils by the parochial Euston Road group, which supported the sober transcription of still-life, nude or landscape, confirmed fears. Little did a growing circle of worried painters and art lovers realise the situation would worsen.

Across Europe those were hazardous days for modernists. Galleries refused to exhibit works, magazines rejected favourable articles, reviews slammed progressive artists. The budding police states even legislated against the new form.

In Russia, modern art was declared contrary to the Communist Party’s ideology, and an effective inquisition was set up to prosecute creative misdemeanours. The full extent of its activities remains unclear. But we do know the plight of major painters, like Kasimir Malevich, who is now esteemed as a Modern Master. In 1930 his department at the Kiev Institute of Art was closed by the Communist Party. He and his fellow staff members were dismissed, and banned from teaching. Malevich was detained for questioning. As a precaution, friends burned his writings and notes on art, thereby eliminating incriminating evidence when police searched his studio. After eleven weeks in prison, Malevich was released upon agreeing to cease painting abstractions. The government revoked his permission to have a studio, and he had to seek work as a labourer. A broken man, Malevich died four years later.

Fedor Kumpan, a gallery director, was arrested shortly after the painter. He likewise was grilled by the authorities, who sent him to trial. His chief offence was to have exhibited “bourgeois” abstractions by Malevich at his Kiev gallery. It was an open and shut case. Kumpan was punished with a long prison sentence.

Many Russian artists fled to the West, especially Germany, although by the middle of the decade things were hardly better there. Even as zealous young übergang-sters set about book burning in German towns, exhibits denouncing modern art were appearing in regional galleries. Progressive teachers in art schools were dismissed, liberal-minded museum staff were replaced, and the Nazis proclaimed a “cleansing war” against modernity. Public museums were purged of 5000 paintings and 12,000 prints and drawings. Work by certain French and English modernists, such as Henry Moore, was seized. A selection of these pieces was assembled for the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition which toured German museums from 1937, and the government later consigned to auction in Switzerland 125 of the blue-chip modern works removed from institutions.[23]

As in Russia, certain artists were prohibited from practising, although in Germany their output was condemned as representing “art bolshevism”. Some painters were sent to labour camps, but compliance was mostly ensured by restricting the sale of materials, and requiring authorisation for exhibitions. Modern art had to be made almost in secret, because any neighbourhood busybody could spark strife. Harassment was routine. Thuggish brownshirts visited the studios of known modernists and the homes of collectors where they vandalised belongings, damaged offending art, and threatened those who objected.

What Kenneth Clark made of the mounting repression in Europe is baffling. The most one gets are his comments there was no chance the “Proletarians” or “Fascists” would ever impose modern art as an official style.[24]

As a prominent civil servant—with Neville Chamberlain in Downing Street—Clark had to be cautious. For example, led by the critic Herbert Read, in 1938 London artists and dealers arranged an exhibition Banned German Art in protest against events in the Reich. It was a major show at the esteemed New Burlington Galleries. So as not to initiate reprisals against the artists, pictures were mostly borrowed from private collections. But a canvas sent by Oskar Kokoschka had been slashed into four ragged strips by Austrian customs—it was displayed in fragments as it had arrived.[25] Then, at the eleventh hour, the Foreign Office swooped, insisting protests be toned down and forcing a change in the show’s title to Twentieth Century German Art. Word went out that British museums were not to display solidarity with German modernists. When the organisers asked the BBC to broadcast a debate on the exhibition, Guy Burgess, who supervised talks on art, vetoed the suggestion.[26]

Hitler was annoyed that the London show went ahead.[27] Three months later Picasso’s mighty new anti-fascist painting, Guernica, along with sixty-seven preparatory studies, was displayed at the same venue. Whitehall was rattled again; Chamberlain had signed the Munich Agreement only a fortnight earlier.

By now the London scene was experiencing a strong influx of artists and intellectuals from Russia, Germany and Central Europe. It was not only that the situation was unbearable in the police states. The air was bristling with war, and it seemed time to quit Continental Europe.

Kenneth Clark intended to withdraw from art as the Second World War loomed. He had heroic dreams: he would take a naval commission and serve at sea. He was hopeful of commanding a minesweeper, he later told his biographer.[28] The Munich Crisis had set Clark and his staff devising a system to convey the National Gallery’s collection to hidden safety in Wales. They even held a secret rehearsal, packing some works and sending them off in vans.

Spring and summer of 1939 saw him preparing for hostilities. He put his Marylebone home up for sale, leasing for his family a Georgian house in distant Gloucestershire, and renting a flat for himself overlooking the park at Gray’s Inn. Warned by Home Office chums in August that a declaration was imminent, he sent his wife and children with two domestic servants to Gloucestershire a week before war was declared, gave the go-ahead to ship the gallery’s collection, and prepared to enlist. Then his martial aspirations were dashed: the Admiralty did not see the art historian as warrior material. Sir Kenneth would not be donning a braided blue uniform.

Nonetheless, Britain’s entry into the Second World War elevated the National Gallery’s director into an unprecedented position of power. His biographer, Meryl Secrest explains:

If there was a radio discussion on art he was sure to be invited. When the government formed a committee he was on it. As organiser of exhibitions he was first to be asked. “Opening Remarks” became a distinct speciality. When there were refugee artists who had made their escape from Germany and elsewhere, their logical mentor was Kenneth Clark.[29]

Besides existing commitments, he was soon directing artists through three newly formed bodies.

Clark had the ear of the King, and he made the most of it. He was the prime-mover and chairman of a War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC). This gave him a direct say on who received official commissions for war-related pictures.[30] The centrally organised WAAC was the answer to artists’ prayers. After all, it was hardly possible to exhibit and sell pieces, let alone to obtain materials, and art employment was lean; galleries were closing, design work was vanishing, teaching was in crisis (enrolments at the Royal College of Art fell from 334 to 92 students).[31] Eventually over 400 artists worked for the war artist scheme, many on projects envisaged by Kenneth Clark.

As well he advised on “Recording Britain”, a Domesday-like topographical project using dozens of illustrators to record British village buildings and countryside from 1941 to 1943. And he acted as art adviser to the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) which organised travelling exhibitions during the war, purchasing some work to include in these shows.

Not everything went Clark’s way. When he was also made head of a film unit at the Ministry of Information, the British film industry erupted. What did this outsider, this amateur, know of their trade? Clark took on the simultaneous production of twenty-five documentaries and three instructional films as staff and film professionals spotlighted every slip-up or blemish. Tongues wagged when he had himself featured, sitting next to the Queen, in the documentary film Listen to Britain. It was a dismal time. His newly decorated flat at Gray’s Inn was blitzed. Eventually Sir John Reith, the Minister for Information, shifted Clark sideways in a move disguised as promotion. Out of his depth and unable to cope with internecine feuding within the ministry—there was discontent over his use of a ministry air raid shelter to store his art collection—Clark later resigned.[32]

Nevertheless, Clark firmly held on to the visual arts. He ran the National Gallery, and the crucial WAAC, controlled art decisions for the CEMA, had a say on artists picked for “Recording Britain”, sat on the committee of the CAS, and advised all official bodies on art matters, including the Royal Mail on postage stamp design. (He soon sorted out his living arrangements, taking a suite at Claridge’s for the duration.[33])

For many on the art scene this was too much power. It reflects wartime conditions where, as many people moved into the services, certain social identities installed themselves as a governing elite. Clark was among a set of self-appointed cultural arbiters who shaped British wartime taste, figures including Cyril Connolly, John Betjeman, Cecil Beaton, Peter Watson, John Lehmann and Geoffrey Grigson.[34] And, as the Canadian scholar Brian Foss has shown, these men revered a “county culture” steeped in nostalgia for a rurally-focused English lifestyle—values pressed in the influential literary journals Horizon and Penguin New Writing.[35]

Kenneth Clark had not allayed artists’ qualms about his growing power when he wrote again for the Listener late in 1939. Art was in a mess due to a decline in patronage, he claimed, with artists painting what they pleased instead of working for their cultivated betters.[36] Hostility mounted. Within months the art historian was being openly accused of empire building, of being a dictator, and of misusing his authority to advance his personal favourites.[37] Clark responded to criticisms aired in the press by claiming his decisions went through committees.[38] (In his autobiography he later dismissed opponents as fuddy-duddies who saw him as “a dangerous revolutionary”.[39]) The hecklers were not placated; because the uncomfortable fact is that Sir Kenneth Clark KCB was now Britain’s art supremo. To his friends he was still known affectionately as “K”, however in ultra-modern circles Clark was being called “the Führer”.[40]

“Hampstead was less picturesque than it looked from a distance,” Stella Gibbons wrote of those testing, blitzed days in her contemporaneous novel Westwood (1946).

Like the rest of London, it needed painting; it had been bombed; its streets were disfigured by brick shelters and its walls by posters instructing the population how to deal with butterfly or incendiary bombs; most of its small shops which had sold antiques or home-made sweets or smart hats before the war were empty; and its narrow streets were crowded with foreigners, for the village and its lower districts of Belsize Park, St John’s Wood and Swiss Cottage had been taken over by refugees, and their population almost doubled.[41]

A comedy set on the fringes of the wartime cultural scene, Westwood makes light of the “sad sallow faces and unfamiliar accents” in the Old Vienna Café and the Free German Club—humourless figures caricatured in the eccentric refugee Zita Mandelbaum.[42]

Historical reality was far more absorbing than popular fiction conveyed. Take the Isokon Building, a modern block of geometrised flats on Hampstead’s Lawn Road.[43] Among its émigré tenants from the mid-1930s were three former Bauhaus staff members: the architect Walter Gropius, the artist-designer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and the furniture designer Marcel Breuer. Their presence ensured that “The Iso Bar”, a constructivist-style restaurant-cum-drinking-den on the ground floor, became a rallying point for progressive thinkers. Wander in during the evening and there were the brightest and the best of Europe’s modernists joking, schmoozing, or more often haggling. Agatha Christie, who was enthralled by the conversation there, leased flat number twenty-two in 1940.

Fitzjohn’s Avenue to the west had been inhabited by establishment artists for decades (Sigmund and Anna Freud took a house in the next street, Maresfield Gardens, during 1938). While just north a succession of moderns used the cheap airy rooms at the top of the Vale Hotel (Stanley Spencer painted a resurrection there). But so far as vanguard British art was concerned, the foremost residential address was the Mall Studios. This was a long building of seven stable-like studios, all with skylights, and another detached studio at the end, nestling behind a row of Victorian houses in leafy Parkhill Road, Belsize Park. It had been designed specifically for artists.[44] Among the tenants in the 1930s were Henry Moore and his wife Irena; Herbert Read and his wife Ludo; the painter John Skeaping and his wife the sculptor Barbara Hepworth; the painter Ben Nicholson and his wife the painter Winifred Dacre Roberts (Hepworth and Nicholson began their infamous romance at the studios). There were also modernist heavyweights in adjacent houses, including the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, the Russian sculptor Naum Gabo and his wife Miriam, while Paul Nash, Adrian Stokes, E.T.L. Mesens, Ivon Hitchens and Bernard Meninsky were in encircling streets.

These artist-neighbours were close. They gave feedback on each other’s works, sometimes ate together, went to dance halls (the Bedford, the Camden Palace) or the cinema (the Haverstock Hill Odeon), minded each other’s children (Mondrian was an avuncular babysitter), made trips to Mayfair galleries.[45] The Reads, who entertained often, introduced the artists to poets. Geoffrey Grigson of New Verse recalls that T.S. Eliot was a habitual guest, although the Auden clique was not welcome.[46] They invited overseas figures, too: Jean Hélion, Peggy Guggenheim, Braque once, Dali, Alexander Calder, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard.

Of course, when war broke out the Mall Studios’ residents dug in the garden and furnished a bomb shelter, which they shared during Luftwaffe raids. There was a genuine communal feeling. When the house opposite Mondrian was blitzed and his studio jarred into dusty and cracked disarray, Hepworth, the Reads and the Gabos arrived to clean up and lend crockery.

These environs were the setting for a festering quarrel over the future of English art. On one side were the English modernists and their émigré allies who defended their cause in a climate where they were stigmatised and mocked. Opposing them was Kenneth Clark and his acolytes who cast modern painting as foreign, and leading English art astray. Mixed up with their bickering were the little alliances and petty deceits typical of art politicking. Much speculation and envy centred on three ambitious artists—John Piper, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore[47]—who were ingratiating themselves with the National Gallery’s director.

Formerly a leading abstractionist, Piper’s changed artistic outlook was crucial. In 1935 his partner, the writer Myfawny Evans, had set up an avant-garde magazine with the geometric title Axis.[48] Instant support came from Parisian abstractionists, and Evans gathered articles by the leading figures Kandinsky, Hélion and Léger. The first issue made quite a splash. Piper and Evans found themselves with glittering new London chums. The artist used the opportunity to charm his way to Kenneth and Jane Clark, who purchased some pictures.

Within a year gossip was heating up about Piper and Axis. The magazine was now siding against the abstraction it was founded to support, in fact Evans refused an article she had requested from Mondrian. More alarming, John Piper changed style, reverting to a form of sentimental figuration, and was being spruiked by Kenneth Clark as the best painter of his generation. Piper and Evans, who soon married, were henceforth regular guests at Portland Place where they mixed with the upper echelons of London society. On Clark’s prompting, the Queen commissioned from Piper several views of Windsor Castle.

In the studios of Hampstead, Piper’s change was regarded as a defection. Painters shook their heads at his natty landscapes. This nouveau rusticism was illustrative, insipid, commercial. Nevertheless, pieces appeared inside and on the cover of Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon; and Oswald Sitwell offered the artist a stipend to paint melancholy images of stately homes. There was intense rumour on the role played throughout by the National Gallery’s suave director, that annoying critic of modernity. Most animated was Herbert Read, who would harp about Clark in studios, tearooms and “The Iso Bar”. Faust had made his bargain with Mephistopheles, the émigré artists muttered.

In late December 1940 one of the Mall Studios’ artists, Henry Moore, began making work for the WAAC. This was significant. War artist schemes draw in commercial picture makers by default, because their purpose is to make visual records. Sure enough the WAAC’s first salaried recruits were the illustrators Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman and Edward Ardizzone, who were trusted to communicate what they saw in line or watercolour, plus the distinguished portraitist Reginald Eves to paint generals at British HQ. The committee made clear to them there were to be no abstract or surreal overtones, or pretensions to “Fine” art.[49] But as a modernist, and a sculptor at that, Moore did not meet this pattern.

Art cynics decoded the move as Kenneth Clark bestowing favours on a pal—after all, Piper and Sutherland were already WAAC painters. The evidence supports such gossip, Piper’s and Sutherland’s biographers both describing Clark as the trio’s patron.[50] It was not only that the artists and their families took breaks from London by staying with Jane Clark and the children in Gloucestershire, Sutherland’s wife Kathleen remaining a houseguest for the duration. All three artists corresponded with Jane Clark in the early months of the war, making discreet appeals for support through her. K privately promised work to them (he gave £50 cheques to Sutherland and Moore to tide them over).[51] They expected to paint camouflage, and were chuffed when Clark swung them into the war artist scheme.

Sutherland produced for the WAAC mostly bleak watercolours of London streetscapes devastated in the Blitz, and Piper made a speciality of painting blasted churches and historic buildings ruined in the Baedeker raids (named for the Baedeker travel guides; the Nazis had selected towns for air attack based on heritage value alone). However, Henry Moore undertook a unique project. It arose through several drawings made on spec. Clark’s biographer relates the circumstances:

One evening Henry Moore was coming back from dinner at the Café Royal and was caught in an air raid. The buses had stopped running so he went into the Underground. He had heard that people were sleeping on the platforms but never seen it. At Piccadilly women were undressing their children right there, while the trains came in and out. People had taken over and there was nothing they could do about it. He got as far as Belsize Park and was not allowed to leave the station. Anti-aircraft guns had been set up on the outskirts of the city and all pandemonium was let loose. So he stayed in the shelters, observing those sleepers lying helpless, deep in the earth, as if wrapped in winding sheets instead of blankets. Henry Moore filled a sketchbook full of studies and gave it to the Clarks.[52]

Moore explained:

I was fascinated by the sight of people camping out deep under the ground. I had never seen so many rows of reclining figures and even the holes out of which the trains were coming seemed to me like the holes in my sculpture. And there were intimate little touches. Children fast asleep with trains roaring past only a couple of yards away. People who were obviously strangers to one another forming tight little intimate groups.[53]

Clark wanted Moore to develop further drawings of Londoners sheltering in the Underground. The artist refused to join up, stating he would sell pieces to the WAAC instead. So he stopped sculpture and applied himself exclusively to drawing for over a year, periodically allowing the committee to purchase a selection. (This income and other sales allowed the Moores to vacate Belsize Park and purchase a small farmhouse at Much Hadham, Hertfordshire.) These drawings were featured in exhibitions and illustrated in magazines, and, for a 1944 documentary film titled Out of Chaos, the Ministry of Information filmed Moore wandering through darkened tube stations, halting to draw slumbering Cockneys. A myth was soon in the making.

The standard historical explanation skips much about the gestation of Moore’s work—such as how the first drawings seen by Kenneth Clark were not jottings made on the spot. They were developed over weeks. Nor did Moore make drawings in tube stations. The lighting was inadequate; and he could not carry a drawing board and the selection of pencils, conté crayons, ink pens and pastels needed to work. Privacy was an issue, too: he would not intrude on sheltering families. Instead, making no sketches and later relying on memory in the studio, Moore went to tube stations to look intently:

I had a permit which got me into any Underground I wanted to visit. I had my favourites. Sometimes I went out to the station at Cricklewood, and I was very interested in a huge shelter at Tilbury, which wasn’t a tube station but the basement of a warehouse. But the shelter which interested me most of all was the Liverpool Street Underground Extension. A new tunnel had been bored and the reinforcement of the walls completed but there were no rails, and at night it was occupied along its entire length by a double row of sleeping figures.[54]

The idea was not uniquely his. Another Belsize Park friend, the photographer Bill Brandt, was flat out recording London’s blackout for the magazines Picture Post and Lilliput, as well as the Home Office.[55] He had turned his Leica on air-raid shelters in September 1940, visiting up to five a night in search of compelling material. It was Brandt who struck visual gold at the Liverpool Street and the Elephant & Castle stations, printing up grim photographs he showed to friends. Moore, who was still toying with the idea, was bowled over when he saw them. Cyril Connolly ran some of Brandt’s photos in Horizon in February 1942 when the worst of the Blitz was over; then, the following December, Tom Hopkinson at Lilliput ran a multiple-page spread of the tube photos mixed with Moore’s drawings.[56] (Brandt’s art-collector father purchased one of the drawings.)

Still, there is a gap between Brandt’s and Moore’s perspectives, and not just because the reclining figure was the sculptor’s long-standing obsession. Those drawings plumb his feelings about warfare. Henry Moore loathed Hitler, and saw the fight against fascism as essential. But as a Great War veteran he would not glorify military life. He had known the trenches, and carried the memory of his comrades agonisingly coughing their lungs up in a gas attack—nearly 400 died that day, and Moore was hospitalised for three months. So he had no taste for battle.

What his abstract drawings were about was the pity of war. And he conveyed what no photograph could by using the organicist forms of biomorphic surrealism. Building up the weird bodies from clusters of undulating lines upon darkened grounds, Moore suggested several things at once. His cocooned figures are civilians sheltering in tunnels, and corpses laid out in murky catacombs, as well as worm-beings in a stifling burrow: they are the vulnerable living, yet also potentially the massed dead, and creatures of a ghastly underworld. This was why there were no art scene detractors when Henry Moore’s shelter drawings were unveiled. Artists respected his stylistic invention, the multiple suggestions, his emphatic humanity.[57]

How did Kenneth Clark accept such potently surrealist drawings? If the gallery director had liked Moore personally for some years, he had mixed feelings about the abstract sculpture. Such art reminded one of “hot water bottles” he had joked, being no more than “vitalised stones”.[58] Perhaps this is why Moore took his first Underground drawings to Jane Clark, who responded positively; and it was she who pressed her husband to get Moore doing further compositions on the war artists program.

Having been commissioned, Moore became more abstract in many pieces, leavening his output with figurative images. He added to drawings enticing echoes of great works that Clark would savour: like suggesting the draped reclining figures in the Elgin marbles, and, playing directly to his patron, the slumbering disciples in Mantegna’s painting Christ at Gethsemane owned by London’s National Gallery. One understands why, years later, Meryle Secrest candidly asked Moore if Clark had tried to influence him: “Not enough to change one’s course, no—no. But one knows what an expert he is and one does take notice of people whose opinions one values.”[59]

The summer of 1941 saw Piper, Sutherland and Moore participating in a three-artist travelling exhibition, beginning at Leeds. The exhibit was launched by none other than Clark, who extolled the trio as leading lights of contemporary culture. The CEMA-funded show was insistently promoted by Clark when it reached London. It attracted national attention and is still construed by scholars as a watershed event for modern English art.

Clark’s support for the three artists was now impossible to ignore. Having emptied the National Gallery of its treasures, Clark began to display there a selection of recent art. Pieces by Piper, Moore and Sutherland became permanent fixtures. The publisher Allen Lane asked Clark if he might edit books on modern English art under the Penguin imprint. Clark rapidly had John Betjeman writing on Piper, Geoffrey Grigson handling Moore, and Eddie Sackville-West interpreting Sutherland for the first books. At the same time Clark pulled strings to get the BBC to devote to Piper, Moore and Sutherland an episode of the arts-focused Third Program. He also ensured the three artists were strongly represented in shows of war art sent to America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. And Clark had the Ministry of Information make a documentary film which featured the favoured three. The gallery director was using his smothering influence to inscribe his chums into art history; by war’s end he had made them English household names.[60] One appreciates why the editor of the usually reticent journal Connoisseur was moved to observe that “the arbitrary selection of certain fortunate and fashionable men has had ridiculous results”.[61]

Even as this was occurring modern artists and designers were leaving Hampstead in droves. They were fleeing as much the antipathy of the London scene as they were driven out by the Blitz. Advanced art was said to be too foreign in a wartime climate of heightened nationalism, some claiming to detect a Germanic severity in modern paintings, or a French timidity (with the idea that the French hadn’t put up a fight, anti-Gallic sentiment was rising in Britain). This was too much to bear, especially for émigré artists seeking sanctuary: unorthodox ideas were being “chased out of the country”, Mondrian wrote to friends after bidding farewell to London, “for art it was impossible to go on any longer”.[62]

Those English modernists who had not joined the armed forces mostly headed for rural refuge. The residue of the Mall Studios circle re-established itself at St Ives, Cornwall, the locality becoming a magnet for disaffected artists. And they had cause to feel discouraged. Take Ben Nicholson. There were subtle changes to his abstractions after he settled in St Ives, as if the fishing village was soaking into his imagination. Visually there were distinct echoes of his surroundings: the quirky geometry of tiny interlocking streets, the tawny hues and rhythmic patterns of stones laid in cottage walls, a sense of slate and whitewash and patinated time-worn granite. So much is evoked in his muted arrangements of wiry lines over textured shapes, sometimes floating before an abbreviated still life. This was a lean art that sang of the spirit of Cornwall, an almost Methodist restraint of form.

But war and Kenneth Clark ground Ben Nicholson down.[63] With his wife Barbara Hepworth and three toddlers to support, and no chance of sales in London’s galleries, the artist was desperate for paying work. He appealed repeatedly to Clark and the WAAC in 1940 and 1941, offering to draw or paint anything in whatever manner was required, to no avail. Herbert Read commiserated in regular letters: “There is only one art, and Kenneth Clark knows all about it,” he quipped, “My Art is a jealous Art, and will not suffer other forms to usurp its holy name.”[64] Then the Studio magazine arrived. It carried an article by the National Gallery’s director which held up Nicholson as typifying “those pure painters who are interested solely in putting down their feelings about shapes and colours, and not facts, drama, human emotions and life generally”.[65] Nicholson was at his wits’ end. His work throbbed with Cornwall, but Clark would not see. The worst of it was that living in a coastal community in time of war Nicholson required a special pass to sketch or paint outdoors. Applications were made. Permission never came.

Even as English modernists were leaving London for the countryside, those European émigrés who could get visas crossed the Atlantic. They found a liberal climate in New York. Their art was exhibited and collected, they were invited to teach. Americans were enthusiastic and generous, indeed a contingent of former Bauhaus staff were to run a new Institute of Design in Chicago.

And Kenneth Clark’s reaction to the exodus? “The influence of international ‘French’ painting,” he wrote in 1942, “for twenty years a necessary tonic, is now declining, and the national virtues are free to reassert themselves.”[66] His comment came in a self-congratulatory piece on a large exhibit of WAAC works held at the National Gallery. Here it was, a proud display of Clark’s contribution to the war effort: his artists, working for his committee, hung in his museum.

This was the event that fixed Kenneth Clark’s position in the public imagination, the exhibit that confirmed his reputation as an enlightened supporter of modern art. Certain leading lights, including Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Moore, Sutherland and the stylishly inventive Eric Ravilious, delivered pieces of high creative achievement. There was no doubting their artistic quality. However, the patriotic show was dominated by competently depictive work, a mingling of illustration and touches of rural nostalgia for a green and pleasant land. The crowds that swarmed into the National Gallery were delighted. Visual story-telling abounded. Clark extolled the artists for reinvigorating traditions abandoned in the early nineteenth century, turning away from international modern trends and embracing their robust native culture: “On the whole it gives the impression that English painting is becoming a great deal more English.”[67]

Some artists found the nepotism insufferable. There appeared no stopping. Even as visitors were flocking to the exhibit, Geoffrey Grigson published a patriotic anthology of British poetry, The Romantics, dedicated to John Piper. Then British Romantic Art appeared, a much publicised book written by Piper himself, which charted the movement historically concluding with Graham Sutherland.[68] Clark and Betjeman read the proofs, of course, and pictures from the National Gallery and Clark’s collection were illustrated. Mind you, Piper now had reservations about the “meddling” scholar: “He will persist in thinking he knows more than any writer or artist about anything,” he wrote to Betjeman.[69]

The following spring saw the New Statesman affirm that—led by Sutherland, Piper and Moore—a new distinctly English art movement, “Neo-Romanticism”, had latterly evolved.[70] The label stuck as critics and curators applauded the reappearance of a native sensibility in art. Clark was jubilant. And forecasts were made for the lustrous future of English painting.

None of the predictions came to pass. What no one grasped at the time, least of all Kenneth Clark, were the long-term cultural stakes. Britain had just had its chance to embrace the international vanguard. There had been a genuine opportunity to establish London as the artistic capital following the fall of France: Paris was no longer the centre. But the innovators had been repelled. So they went to New York, taking the prospects for modern art with them.