Kenneth Clark: A Biography
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Few figures in twentieth-century cultural life commanded as much influence, elegance, and controversy as Kenneth Clark — the art historian, museum director, and television personality whose 1969 BBC series Civilisation brought the history of Western art to millions of viewers worldwide. Meryle Secrest's Kenneth Clark: A Biography chronicles the extraordinary life of a man who shaped public taste like no other, tracing his ascent from a privileged but emotionally distant childhood to the directorship of the National Gallery in London, his wartime role as a guardian of Britain's artistic heritage, and his ultimate transformation into a household name. Secrest details the paradoxes at the heart of the man — the champion of beauty who was often accused of coldness, the public intellectual who harboured intensely private passions — with a narrative precision that illuminates both the person and the age he helped define. Drawing on intimate access to Clark's correspondence, diaries, and the recollections of those closest to him, Secrest presents a portrait that is as much a study of twentieth-century Britain as it is of a single remarkable life. Her biography stands as a definitive account of a man who believed art was not merely decoration but a measure of civilisation itself — a conviction that made him enemies and admirers in equal measure, and whose legacy continues to provoke the question: can one person truly change the way a nation sees?
Author: Meryle Secrest
Format: Paperback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Few figures in twentieth-century cultural life commanded as much influence, elegance, and controversy as Kenneth Clark — the art historian, museum director, and television personality whose 1969 BBC series Civilisation brought the history of Western art to millions of viewers worldwide. Meryle Secrest's Kenneth Clark: A Biography chronicles the extraordinary life of a man who shaped public taste like no other, tracing his ascent from a privileged but emotionally distant childhood to the directorship of the National Gallery in London, his wartime role as a guardian of Britain's artistic heritage, and his ultimate transformation into a household name. Secrest details the paradoxes at the heart of the man — the champion of beauty who was often accused of coldness, the public intellectual who harboured intensely private passions — with a narrative precision that illuminates both the person and the age he helped define. Drawing on intimate access to Clark's correspondence, diaries, and the recollections of those closest to him, Secrest presents a portrait that is as much a study of twentieth-century Britain as it is of a single remarkable life. Her biography stands as a definitive account of a man who believed art was not merely decoration but a measure of civilisation itself — a conviction that made him enemies and admirers in equal measure, and whose legacy continues to provoke the question: can one person truly change the way a nation sees?