Editing Kenneth Clark (section)

===Postwar===
[[File:Resurrection detail.JPG|thumb|Detail from ''[[The Resurrection (Piero della Francesca)|The Resurrection]]'' by [[Piero della Francesca]], subject of Clark's 1951 study]]
In July 1946 Clark was appointed [[Slade Professor of Fine Art]] at [[University of Oxford|Oxford]] for a three-year term.<ref>"Sir Kenneth Clark's Appointment", ''The Times'', 25 July 1946, p. 4</ref> The post required him to give eight public lectures each year on the "History, Theory, and Practice of the Fine Arts".<ref>[http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/global/wwwoxacuk/localsites/currentvacancies/furtherparticularsforprofessorships/sladeprofs.pdf "Slade Professorship of Fine Art"] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130425214807/http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/global/wwwoxacuk/localsites/currentvacancies/furtherparticularsforprofessorships/sladeprofs.pdf |date=25 April 2013 }}, University of Oxford, retrieved 21 June 2017</ref> The first holder of the professorship had been Ruskin; Clark took as his first subject Ruskin's tenure of the post.<ref name=s224/> [[James Stourton]], Clark's authorised biographer, judges the appointment to be the most rewarding his subject ever held, and notes how, during this period, Clark established himself as Britain's most sought-after lecturer, and wrote two of his finest books, ''Landscape into Art'' (1947) and ''Piero della Francesca'' (1951).<ref name=s224>Stourton, pp. 224–225</ref>{{refn|In 1961, by when the appointment was for an annual term, Clark was again Slade Professor at Oxford.<ref name=dnb/>|group= n}} By this time Clark no longer hankered after a career in pure scholarship, but saw his role as sharing his knowledge and experience with the wide public.<ref>Rothenstein, p. 48</ref>

Clark served on numerous official committees during this period,{{refn|Stourton lists the British Committee on the Preservation and Restitution of Works of Art; the governing council of the Bath Institute of Art; the governing body of the Courtauld; the Council of the [[Festival of Britain]]; and the [[Royal Fine Art Commission]].<ref>Stourton, p. 253</ref>|group= n}} and helped to stage a ground-breaking exhibition in Paris of works by his friend and protégé Henry Moore. He was more in sympathy with modern painting and sculpture than with much of modern architecture. He admired [[Giles Gilbert Scott]], [[Maxwell Fry]], [[Frank Lloyd Wright]], [[Alvar Aalto]] and others, but found many contemporary buildings mediocre.<ref>Stourton, pp. 234–235</ref> Clark had been among the first to conclude that private patronage could no longer support the arts; during the war he had been a prominent member of the state-funded Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. When it was reconstituted as the [[Arts Council of Great Britain]] in 1945 he was invited to serve as a member of its executive committee, and as chairman of the council's arts panel.<ref>"Sir Kenneth Clark", ''The Manchester Guardian'', 24 June 1945, p. 4; and "The Arts Council", ''The Manchester Guardian'', 29 August 1946, p. 4</ref>

In 1953 Clark became the Arts Council's chairman. He held the post until 1960, but it was a frustrating experience for him; he found himself chiefly a figurehead. Moreover, he was concerned that the way the council went about funding the arts was in danger of damaging the individualism of the artists whom it supported.<ref name=dnb/>