Clark, Sir Kenneth Mackenzie, Lord Clark of Saltwood

Clark, Sir Kenneth Mackenzie, Lord Clark of Saltwood (1903-1983), English art historian, and a former director of the National Gallery, who is most famous for his television series Civilisation, first broadcast in 1969.

Born in London on July 13, 1903, he was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and was Keeper of Fine Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from 1931 to 1933. In 1934 he became both Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and Director of the National Gallery, posts that he held until 1944 and 1945 respectively. He demonstrated his interest in contemporary art both in his own private collecting and his chairmanship of the Arts Council from 1953 to 1960. He was made a life peer in 1969, when he assumed the title Lord Clark of Saltwood. In 1974 Clark published a first autobiography, Another Part of the Wood. A second autobiography, The Other Half, was published in 1977. He died at Hythe on May 21, 1983.

As well as his first book, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (1928), Clark’s early career included two important works on Leonardo da Vinci, a monograph of 1939 and a catalogue of Leonardo’s drawings at Windsor Castle, published in 1935. The range of Clark’s knowledge is illustrated by The Nude (1956), a discussion of representations of the nude in art, as well as by the Civilisation series, in which Clark used art to illustrate the various phases in the development of Western culture.

Certain of Clark’s works, such as the catalogue of Leonardo’s drawings at Windsor Castle, are still regarded as definitive. He was also highly influential as a broadcaster and lecturer.