Kenneth Clark Lord (Kenneth Mackenzie Lord Clark) Biography

British art historian and critic, educated at Winchester and at Trinity College, Oxford. The influence of both Ruskin and Berenson is evident in his first work, The Gothic Revival (1928). Of his many public appointments he was director of the National Gallery (1934–45), Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford (1946–50), and Chairman of the Arts Council (1953–60). In 1953 he published his greatest work The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art. His television series Civilization, published as a book in 1969, gained him a wide audience and a peerage; it argued that truly civilized art both expresses its times and transcends them. Other works include Leonardo da Vinci (1939), Florentine Painting (1945), Landscape into Art (1949), and two volumes of autobiography, Another Part of the Wood (1974) and The Other Half (1977).