Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation

When Kenneth Clark’s great grandfather invented the cotton spool, he didn’t just change British manufacturing, he changed the culture. His fortune – a substantial one – enabled his aesthete grandson to amass one of the most important private collections of art in the world while also using his patronage to the greater good.

It is cheesy to say, but it is impossible to overestimate Kenneth Clark’s role in shaping the 20th-century visual landscape. Often remembered for his 1969 TV series, Civilisation, from which this exhibition takes its name, he was then into his seventh decade and had already left marks all over the nation’s walls. In 1933, at only 30, he was made director of the National Gallery, the youngest ever. Previously, it had been a job given to favoured mandarins, but the young Clark was determined to get his hands dirty and set about changing the old guard.

Having already studied art history at Oxford and written several important books, he went on a personal and public spending spree. Mercifully, as the 270 works in this exhibition show, he bought well, and wisely. Under his 12-year tenure at the National Gallery, he purchased epic paintings, Constable’s Hadleigh Castle, for instance (the drawing for which is on show) and Rembrandt’s Saskia as Flora. King George V appointed him Surveyor of the King’s Pictures (and threw in a knighthood) and at the outbreak of war it was Clark who set up the War Artists Advisory Committee and directly commissioned most of the iconic images that captured the war’s horrific impact on the country. John Piper’s vivid portrayal of the ruins of Coventry Cathedral (1940) after its bombing, sits alongside Graham Sutherland’s gritty gouache depicting Kenneth Clark’s House in Gray’s Inn Square, After Bombing (1942).

Curator Chris Stephens has deftly themed the works into six very definite groups. Clark’s devotion (and encouragement) of the Bloomsbury Group, for example, is evident in the room called Patron. Vanessa Bell’s Portrait of Angelica as a Russian Princess is a jewel in a box full of them. Paul Nash, Victor Pasmore, Barnett Freedman – there were few artists who weren’t privy to his largesse. And then there is the Television room, a smaller selection chosen from the stars of the TV show, a tour of which will make you hanker after a bygone BBC.

Until 10 August at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1: 020-7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk