Throughout his brilliant, multifaceted career as a scholar and patron of the arts, Kenneth Clark, later Lord Clark of Saltwood worked tirelessly to bring art to the people. Born in 1903 to a wealthy family and educated at Oxford, Clark became the youngest-ever director of the National Gallery at age twenty-nine. In 1939, as war with Hitler loomed, he arranged for the Gallery’s paintings to be hidden in slate mines in Wales to keep them safe. When the air raids began, he held concerts at the Gallery to keep up the spirits of Londoners. Later, at the height of the Cold War, his program Civilisation brilliantly conveyed a message of humanism and hope—wrapped inside a thirteen-part history lesson on Western art—to a remarkably wide audience. A man of contradictions, he was an elitist who believed to his core that access to art was “the right of every man.” With Kenneth Clark, James Stourton gives us the definitive biography of an unlikely popularizer—and renews Clark’s vision of art as a powerful force against the threat of chaos.

Kenneth Clark

James Stourton

William Collins

The youngest ever Director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark inspired a generation to appreciate the beauty of art and architecture through his groundbreaking TV series Civilisation. Yet his urbane, erudite public image concealed a troubled private life. Nominated Book of the year by the Sunday Times, the Spectator, the Economist and the New York Times, this biography perceptively analyses the emotional and intellectual contradictions of a complex and charismatic figure.

KENNETH CLARK- PB

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Rogues and Scholars: Boom and Bust in the London Art Market, 1945–2000 (Wolf Brother)

Apollo

<p>What is heritage? When was it invented? What is its place in the world today? What is its place tomorrow?<br />
Heritage is all around us: millions belong to its organisations, tens of thousands volunteer for it, and politicians pay lip service to it. When the Victorians began to employ the term in something approaching the modern sense, they applied it to cathedrals, castles, villages and certain landscapes. Since then a multiplicity of heritage labels have arisen, cultural and commercial, tangible and intangible – for just as every era has its notion of heritage, so does every social group, and every generation.<br />
In Heritage, James Stourton focuses on elements of our cultural and natural environment that have been deliberately preserved: the British countryside and national parks, buildings such as Blenheim Palace and Tattersall Castle, and the works of art inside them. He charts two heroic periods of conservation – the 1880s and the 1960s – and considers whether threats of wealth, rampant development and complacency are similar in the present day. Heritage is both a story of crisis and profound change in public perception, and one of hope and regeneration.</p>

Heritage

History

Europe

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Books by James Stourton