KENNETH CLARK

If Jack Boynton Priestley was something of an anti-bourgeois bourgeois, then the art historian Kenneth Clark was, by contrast, a pro-bourgeois bourgeois, a grand bourgeois for whom the world of art history primarily meant the great men of the Renaissance - Botticelli, da Vinci, Michelangelo; the great Dutch and Flemish masters - Brueghel, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer; the great Romantics - Blake, David, Delacroix, Turner, Constable; the leading Impressionists - Manet, Monet, Renoir; and various by and large early twentieth-century masters, including Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian. Not to mention various architects and sculptors from each of those schools or periods, including Bernini and Rodin.

Thus, fundamentally, Clark was culturally conservative, even if, as has been claimed, he leant a little to the Left in politics, though doubtfully towards the Labour Left. His forte was representational art, or bourgeois realism of one kind or another, and it quite surprised him to discover, one day, that he could derive some aesthetic pleasure from Mondrian's art, which may be described as petty-bourgeois idealist.

Certainly a distinction exists in twentieth-century art, as in politics, between the materialistic and the idealistic, with Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism on the one side, and Impressionism and Abstract Impressionism (more usually termed Post-Painterly Abstraction) on the other side, as though between Labour and Tory, Democratic Socialist and Conservative, levels of political absolutism, with Classical (bourgeois) Realism and Modern (petty-bourgeois) Realism serving as the painterly equivalents to Liberalism and Liberal Democracy - those middle-of-the-road atomic kinds of realism.

Whether Kenneth Clark would have agreed with me here, I don't know. But it is patently obvious that painterly art, meaning all art on canvas, appertains to a democratically relative tradition, as though inherently a kind of middle-of-the-road art coming in-between autocratic sculpture on the one hand and theocratic light art on the other, so that even the most abstract examples of this art will appertain to that same democratic tradition, albeit pushed to a decadent extremism of materialistic/idealistic confrontation, with realism, scarcely perceptible or credible, sandwiched in-between - a sort of Liberal anachronism hanging-on in the ideological background as a memento to what was but no longer is, Tory and Labour extremes having won the democratic day, a contrast between wavicle impressionism and particle expressionism the degenerate norm, all compromise discarded, as each side pursues its absolutist bent irrespective and seemingly oblivious of the other, the reduction of atomic form to the particle materialism of Abstract Expressionism no less obnoxious to the parliamentary (canvas) Extreme Right ... than the elevation of atomic form to the wavicle idealism of Abstract Impressionism is obnoxious to the parliamentary (canvas) Extreme Left.

Is not twentieth-century art this tug-of-war between the conservatism of painterly idealism and the socialism of painterly materialism ... with the liberalism of painterly realism helplessly looking on, unable, in countries like Britain and France, to halt the divergence of the two absolutes, absolutes which lead, in due course, to yet more extreme absolutes that completely transcend the parliamentary (canvas) traditions, with a bias one way or the other, depending on the country in question?

No doubt in my mind, at any rate! And if, on the avowed strength of his art-historicising theories, Kenneth Clark can be ascribed any particular bias ... it would surely be as a liberal looker-on lamenting the death of realism, unable to comprehend or sympathize with the decadent extremes of Western civilization, longing for the day when realism would be resurrected - wishful thinking? - and art returned to something like its traditional representations, saved, as it were, from the ogres of partisan absolutes.

Ah, poor Kenneth! I fear that no such return is possible for Western art except, ironically, in the alien guise of Socialist Realism, a type of realism that you, with your romantic and humanistic leanings, would surely find unattractive and uncongenial. Knowing your books as I do, including the two-part autobiography, I can only suppose that Modern Realism was your last hope and solace before the grave, soulless by comparison with Classical Realism perhaps, but nonetheless preferable, in its Liberal Democratic urbanity, to the militant barbarism of Socialist Realism.