Does culture matter in times of national crisis?

During World War II, Kenneth Clark, the subject of James Stourton’s crisp and authoritative new biography, was director of the National Gallery in London. To prevent the collection from being destroyed in the Blitz, he oversaw the successful relocation of nearly 2,000 paintings to an abandoned slate quarry in northern Wales.

(Some of the museum’s trustees had argued that the art should be shipped to the United States or Canada for safekeeping. Clark took this idea to Winston Churchill, who scribbled in red ink on the memorandum, “Bury them in the Bowels of the Earth, but not a picture shall leave this Island.”)

Next, Clark (1903-1983) did something no one anticipated. Bereft at how emergency orders had shut down so much of the cultural life in London, he began to open the now-empty and echoing National Gallery for a vastly popular series of noontime concerts.

The BBC took notice and began to broadcast them. “At the beginning of the war,” Mr. Stourton writes of the BBC, “the Corporation had not understood the mood of the nation, and believed that people wanted nothing but light music.” ...