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May 2014

Vol. 156 | No. 1334

Art in Britain

Editorial

Kenneth Clark

The reputation acquired by Kenneth Clark for his television series Civilisation (1969) made him a household name and gave him considerable international celebrity, particularly in North America. But soon after his death in 1983, the balloon of fame gradually deflated. Today, a younger generation of art-history students will know his name but do not perhaps read his books. Others will view him as a titled arts supremo from a distant historical period; or even, perhaps, as the remote father in the diaries of his son Alan Clark MP. It will thus be of great interest to gauge the reaction to Tate Britain’s exhibition Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation running from 20th May to 10th August. This will explore the various aspects of Clark’s career as museum director and art historian, as collector, writer and communicator. Will the balloon refloat, once visitors have been engrossed in this remarkable and influential figure, perhaps the last cultured Grand Tourist in the twentieth-century Age of Anxiety?

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Free review

Richard Hamilton

The wistful melody of Doris Day singing the famous song ‘Che sarà sarà / Whatever will be, will be / The future’s not ours to see . . .’, recorded for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 film The Man Who Knew Too Much, is one of the jukebox songs greeting visitors to the retrospective of works by Richard Hamilton at Tate Modern, London (to 26th May).1 The jukebox is part of a recreation of the famous ‘fun-house’ display created by Hamilton and his collaborators for the exhibition This is Tomorrow, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the same year that Hitchcock’s film appeared. It was the moment when Pop art went public. Visitors to the present retro­spective, however, are greeted by an entirely different aesthetic, with a recreation of Growth and form, an installation devised by Hamilton for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1951, combining futuristic display modules and inscrutable scientific objects.

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  • ‘Eliza Fortuna’: reconsidering the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I

    By James R. Jewitt

    A re-reading of the Ditchley portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (c.1592) as the goddess Fortune, by Marcus Gheeraerts.

  • Henrietta Finch, sculptor?

    By Malcolm Baker

    A recently acquired marble bust (1741) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is attributed to Henrietta Finch.

  • New documents by Thomas Gainsborough

    By Hugh Belsey

    Some unpublished documents on Thomas Gainsborough.

  • A friend in need: Thomas Lawrence and the Baring family

    By John Orbell

    Unpublished letters from the Baring archive reveal Thomas Lawrence’s financial problems and detail the help he received from the family through loans and portrait commissions.

  • The Pre-Pre-Raphaelite: John Rogers Herbert

    By Nancy Langham Hooper

    The influence the painter John Rogers Herbert had on the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and particularly on the work of Millais.

  • Graham Reynolds (1914–2013)

    By Anne Lyles