Art: Clark's Tour

Not many Americans have seen it yet, but those who have are enthusiastic about a film series called Civilisation, written and narrated by British Art Historian Kenneth Clark. The tiny 300-seat auditorium at Washington's National Gallery was jammed throughout the series' initial 13-week run. The White House ordered up a special showing in its elegant ground-floor theater on a twice-a-week schedule. In New York, the Metropolitan Museum and New York University showed it at Manhattan's Town Hall for invitation-only audiences and found they had to have six screenings per episode to accommodate the demand. Since then, museums and universities have bought or rented the series.

The program originated at BBC Television's Second Network. "The very simple thought I started from," said BBC-TV Director of Programs David Attenborough, "was to get on the screen the loveliest things created by European man in the past thousand years. The key decision was to tap Kenneth Clark as guide and commentator. It happened almost by accident, as Clark tells it. "They wanted advice about a series—perhaps on the history of art—and took me to lunch. By accident, the word civilization was mentioned. I experienced what Godfearing people of an earlier age used to describe as 'a call.' Yes, yes, I thought. Civilization is in danger and it's worth trying, if only to make people realize how fragile civilization is and how easily it might slip from our grasp. I went on eating smoked salmon and the whole plan came to me."

Question of Belief. Clark's idea was that the series should be not just a Cook's tour of the greatest art museums, monuments, cities and plazas of Europe and America, but a visual account of Western man's entire pageant, from the first tentative re-emergence of art and philosophy under Charlemagne to the "heroic materialism" of today.

It is hard to cover twelve centuries of history in 13 hours, and at times Civilisation seems the cinematic equivalent of a coffee-table art book—handsome to look at but not very deep. All in all, however, Clark's tour is as impressive as might be expected when one of today's most literate and engaging art writers joins forces with the vivid immediacy of film documentary at its best. "What I hope people will get from it is a belief in humanity with all its shortcomings, a belief in a balance of intellectual and emotional faculties, and a belief in man as a whole."