'Civilisation' turns 40

At the beginning of his 13-hour television docu-essay Civilisation, a "personal" telling of the history of Western civilization, Kenneth Clark quotes John Ruskin: "Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last."

The quote tells us where Clark is going, why he's going there, and in whose tradition he hopes to follow. Civilisation, which turns 40 this year, is the best kind of epic relic: It's 13-part, appointment-viewing, single-teller, great-man history, told broadly, with a ridiculously huge sweeping arc -- and in colour, a near-first. It's personal, it's opinionated and it dared to make mistakes. This weekend the National Gallery of Art will celebrateCivilisation with two days of programming. Earlier this year the BBC celebrated its own programme with Civilisation: A Television Landmark at 40 (which the NGA will screen on Saturday).

The program (and the accompanying book) are notably imperfect. Women are almost totally absent. Clark is strikingly western European Christian-centric, at the expense of Judaism, the Orthodox church and Islam. He misses artists and important developments in art: Mannerism, from El Greco to the Florentine portraiture of Bronzino and Pontormo, is absent. Venetian painting, in the persons of only Bellini and Titian, gets no more than a few dozen words. Goya, Velazquez and Cranach surface for only the briefest mentions -- part of the program's bias for Italian, French and British figures at the expense of Spaniards and Germans. Apparently civilization ends with impressionism, a nearly incomprehensible, indefensible endpoint. In failing to include Dada, Clark failed to chronicle the greatest impact art had on civilization in the 20thC: It enabled the first anti-war movement.

Even with all that -- and I could have kept going -- there's still something fantastically ambitious about the series. It is grounded in a certain middlebrow belief in self-improvement through broader understanding. It resolutely insists on the centrality of non-political developments in the development of man, of societies and of nations. It reminds us that great art lasts in a way that almost nothing else does. And, best of all, it's a lot of fun.

Related: The BBC looks at the influence the programme had on television. David Attenborough on the impact the programme had on him and on the BBC. The DVD of the entire series is $57.