SOURCE: Bell, Clive. Review of Landscape into Art, by Kenneth Clark. New Statesman and Nation 38 (26 November 1949): 616-18.

In the following review, Bell proclaims Clark to be the best man to teach the English youth to care for the arts and praises his book, Landscape into Art.

Skillfully manipulated as they have been, these lectures [Landscape into Art]—the first Sir Kenneth Clark has given as Slade Professor at Oxford—remain lectures; and according to Sir Kenneth “the publication of lectures is a well-known form of literary suicide.” All I can say is, the corpse is doing wonderfully well. A good lecture on painting is almost bound to be discursive: unexplored theories and novel comparisons start into the lecturer's mind as he contemplates a slide with which, perhaps, he is illustrating his central theme; and, for a moment, the theme is lost. The new Slade Professor has a central...