The BBC’s plan to remake Civilisation, the great 1969 television series written and presented by Kenneth Clark, is a topic to set hearts racing. What an ambitious idea, what an audacious project. Can British TV in the 21st century match the heights it reached in the era of Civilisation, not to mention the similarly ambitious television essays it inspired and provoked, from The Ascent of Man to The Shock of the New?
The proposed new show was mentioned this week, naturally enough, in a Guardian editorial speculating on what retiring British Museum director Neil MacGregor may do next. MacGregor is plainly a man who could step into Clark’s shoes; they have even held the same job as director of the National Gallery.
But I have been involved for several months as a consultant on the Civilisation remake, and while that’s about as much as I can reveal, I do feel irked that once again, as in almost every article about Clark and his seminal series, some cliches were repeated by this week’s Guardian view.
Clark, we are told, was “immensely rich” and well educated, and he saw himself as preaching high art to the masses, from the top down, without questioning “what high art might mean in a democratic age”. His series had a “narrow focus on western art”.
This is a stereotype of Clark’s Civilisation. Far from lofty or icily patrician, it is a passionate, personal and very witty essay. Far from dogmatic, it is constantly rethinking its arguments. In one episode, Clark builds an ambitious thesis that baroque art in 17th-century Rome was an apogee of civilisation, only to gleefully undermine everything he’s just said in a final sequence shot in the grandiose Vatican Museums. “No great work of the human spirit has ever been created in a big room,” he says, and walks away down an immense painted corridor. It’s a shot worthy of Visconti.
The reason I agreed to get involved in the new Civilisation is precisely because I adore the old one. In some moods, I think the remake should be a shot-by-shot re-creation, like Gus van Sant’s Psycho, with Benedict Cumberbatch performing Clark’s script word for word. At other moments I wonder if it’s even possible to rival Clark’s sheer naughtiness; perhaps the series needs to be presented by a comedian rather than an art historian.
As for Clark believing that high art needs no justification in an age of democracy – he was right. The greatest works of humanity remain superbly uncorrupted by time. The beauty of Civilisation is that Clark makes no apology for sharing those wonders. It is true love we see: Clark was indeed rich, but his enthusiasm for beauty transcends class. It is sad if you can’t hear the generosity behind that posh accent.
Was he Eurocentric? Again, that leaden criticism fails to capture the subtleties of this classic series. If Clark was trotting out a “triumph of the west” story, he would have started with ancient Greece. Instead, Clark begins with the dark ages, and a Europe that was primitive and poor. In a moment of global vision in his second episode he claims the entire world “suddenly warmed up” in the 11th century, and eloquently describes the achievements of Asian civilisations.
Even on modern art, he surprises us. He compares Vermeer, for instance, with Mondrian.
Clark never pretended to tell the entire history of civilisation – and he refused to define it. Far from being arrogant or lofty, his series is a tentative and supple essay on what “civilisation” might be.
He undoubtedly believes one thing though: civilisation is a good thing. As he says in the first episode: “Some people claim to prefer barbarism – I doubt if they have tried it long enough.”
A lot of people currently trying to survive the rule of the Islamic State might applaud that remark.
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