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“... In​ the opening scene of his television series Civilisation (1969), Kenneth Clark admits that while he can’t define exactly what civilisation is, he knows it when he sees it. The camera pans towards Notre Dame Cathedral as if to say ‘this is it.’ For Clark, the artistic achievement of the medieval period was European ...”

“... as a Modernist, or at least as an important source for Modernism, was most carefully made by Kenneth Clark in the Sixties, a decade which saw its own ‘Beardsley boom’, a popular revival which accompanied op art, Beaton’s Ascot, Yellow Submarine and Performance. Clark described the drawings from Salome as ...”

“... preserved in Hiberno-Saxon fastness. I should not be surprised if visitors remembered the lamented Kenneth Clark, transported to whatever northern and wind-buffeted island to tell us ‘we came through by the skin of our teeth.’ Knowing a little of the determination needed to accomplish this project, set back once at least by the financial ...”

“... and vulnerable object cross the Channel – looks to have been done no later than the mid-1480s. Kenneth Clark even thought Leonardo might have brought the panel with him from Florence to Milan (though this cannot be right). Let’s say it was finished by 1485. Then something went wrong between Leonardo and his patrons. The picture was originally ...”

“... uneasiness about its very concrete power to inspire action: an uneasiness that is pervasive in Kenneth Clark’s latest book. Feminine Beauty insists on the ethereal or strictly formal qualities of beauty, continuing the same line of argument as Clark’s magisterial earlier work, The Nude. The introduction to ...”

“... and with more pleasure to her then I think in all the time of our marriage before’.) Alan Clark’s Diaries 1983-91, published a few years ago, were applauded for their beastly candour but Clark was nowhere near as winningly ingenuous as Pepys. Mrs Clark was generally pitied at ...”

“... arts, or to the need evidently felt by its audience for authoritative/enthusiastic communicators (Kenneth Clark, Robert Hughes, Wendy Beckett) which no other artistic public feels – though these things are doubtless relevant. I mean the priority given to a mode of address: when the critic performs, not by talking to us about work to which we’re both ...”

“... the rooftops, where he found aspects of Windsor Castle more to his liking. Patronage was tricky. Kenneth Clark, intimate of the queen, had secured the commission for six or more Windsor watercolours for the Royal Collection. Thanks to Clark he had a good war, employed as he was for much of it as an official war artist ...”

“... disregarding the ways in which Neo-Romanticism was grafted onto Surrealism and even Cubism. Kenneth Clark, who supported British (Fuller actually says English) Neo-Romanticism and was a champion of Moore, Piper and Sutherland, was not a ‘great opponent of Modernism’ as Fuller claims. His Landscape into Art (1949) ends by relating Sutherland’s ...”

“... When Madame Moitessier arrived at the National Gallery in 1936 (a coup for its young director, Kenneth Clark), one critic protested: ‘Surely the little finger of a normal right hand should be articulated to a knucklebone and not drop from the off-side of the metacarpus.’ But as that early study shows, if you give the three remaining fingers their ...”

“... a board game called Masterpiece, and it was small, blurred and usually incomprehensible, even when Kenneth Clark was standing in front of it sounding enthusiastic on television. Why was a naked man wrapped in a curtain jumping over a wagon from behind a tree, twisting his head oddly as he did so to look towards a girl who seemed to be pushing an imaginary ...”

“... in 1955. In Lisbon, Gulbenkian began to plan for the future of his collection. In 1936 he had met Kenneth Clark, then director of the National Gallery, when Clark came to view his collection. Gulbenkian was pleased that Clark was interested in the Egyptian antiquities and Islamic ...”

“... as a skeletal, ruinous memorial to the British dead of the First World War, while after the Blitz, Kenneth Clark suggested a similar strategy for some at least of the ruined churches in the City of London, ‘with their going the ordeal which we passed will seem remote, unreal, perhaps forgotten. Save us, then, some of our ruins.’ As if to guard against ...”

“... for. The whole enterprise is lavish, but generically little different from the sort of thing Kenneth Clark long ago accustomed us to. Like Lord Clark, Neil MacGregor walks around or stands in front of all manner of splendid things and comments wisely about them. One has the usual vulgar frissons: did they really ...”

“... some glimmers of his old genius for descriptive prose, a genius liberally represented in Lord Clark’s Ruskin Today, first published in 1964, which Penguin has restored to print. Generally, however, the famous lapidary style of Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice doesn’t often appear in Ruskin’s side of the correspondence. The Carlyle of the ...”