SOTHEBY’S CHAIRMAN PLANS TO LEAVE POST, WRITE KENNETH CLARK BIOGRAPHY

According to Gareth Harris in the Art Newspaper, James Stourton, the current chair of Sotheby’s, will be leaving his post later this year in order to pen a biography on Kenneth Clark, the former director of the National Gallery in London. Harris writes that Clark was a “a towering figure of twentieth-century British cultural life.” Stourton’s book has been approved by the Clark estate and is due to be published in 2016 by Harper Collins. A British publisher had commissioned a Clark biography from Fram Dinshaw of Oxford University in the 1990s, though no book has materialized yet. The “grandest of grandees in the art world” in Stouton’s words, Clark was the chairman of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee and after the war helped launch what eventually became the Arts Council.