Culture's Minister

London's Tory Daily Mail reported the news with obvious distaste, and sardonically observed that it would "delight the 'gaga' school." What made the Mail so grumpy was the announcement last week that 48-year-old Sir Kenneth Clark, chairman of the art panel of Britain's Arts Council, had just been moved up to run the whole show. It is a job that makes him the minister of culture in Britain, and Sir Kenneth is a man with some advanced ideas.

A suave, clear-spoken critic and art historian. Sir Kenneth is taking over an institution that was started in 1940 as a shoestring wartime experiment. Its first job was to organize factory concerts, send repertory companies around the country, put artists to work painting war pictures.

Now that bruising taxes have crippled old-style philanthropy, the council has be come a permanent agency with -L-575,000 a year to spend on the judicious encourage ment of art, music, ballet and the theater.

Bellowing Conservatives. Music, ballet and theater have raised few problems.

The council simply funnels state funds to such established groups as London's Covent Garden Opera, Sadler's Wells Ballet and Old Vic, contributes to the support of ma jor symphony orchestras, etc. But art is a different matter. Instead of handing its money to, say, the Royal Academy, the council has concentrated on organizing its own exhibitions, and on buying works of art for its own collection.

A large proportion of the council's art purchases have been moderns, and this fact alone has been enough to set conservatives bellowing. Last year, the old guard even got a chance to bellow with laughter : the council paid out -L-500 for a spiky abstraction called Autumn Landscape which proved to be so thoroughly abstract that it got printed upside down in the Festival of Britain catalogue. But doughty Horse Painter Sir Alfred Munnings, 73, onetime president of the Royal Academy, was not amused. "This thrusting of . . . third-rate opinions down the throats of a public who still believe in tradition and drawing," he said, may "temporarily reduce the fine arts to a dust heap." Established Revolutionaries. Actually, Sir Kenneth and his council panel have kept a pretty fair balance between new & old. Their program has included makes tions of Picasso ceramics and "Young Contemporaries," but also shows of Rem brandt, Rowlandson and even needlework.

Said the London Observer of the council's bast week: "Broadly, they have supported the 'advanced' type of artist of the now well-established kind--the revolutionaries of the day-before-yesterday."

In any event, Sir Kenneth expects to go right on as before in his new job. A student of famed Critic Bernard Berenson and the youngest man (30) ever to direct Britain's National Gallery, he hopes to do his best for both conservatives and moderns. Said he: "I am probably one of the few men living who likes both Sir Alfred Munnings and [Modernist] Graham Suterland."

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