Electric Contrasts: Kenneth Clark and Vision in 1930s Britain

In 1938, the National Gallery in London issued One Hundred Details from Pictures in the National Gallery, written by its director, Kenneth Clark. Paintings in the collection were presented as cropped, black-and-white pairs. Clark captured the different approaches to viewing art, informed by Heinrich Wölfflin, Aby Warburg, and Bernard Berenson. Yet the book was not rooted in the past, but was shaped by cinema, television, and the radio. One Hundred Details emerges as a pivotal re-imagining of art history itself, privileging the effect of a work’s detail over the whole image, and reaching a new audience for Old Master painting.