Quote

The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience.

Kenneth Clark

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Kenneth Clark
Experience
Analogies
Become
Structures
Part
Imaginative
Doe
Represent
Body
Relate
Structure
Relates
Simply
Nude
Beauty
Analogy

More quotes by Kenneth Clark

Image
People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.
Kenneth Clark
Image
Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.
Kenneth Clark
Image
A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.
Kenneth Clark
Image
The history of art cannot be properly understood without some reference to the history of science. In both we are studying the symbols by which man affirms his mental scheme, and these symbols, be they pictorial or mathematical, a fable or formula, will reflect the same changes.
Kenneth Clark
Image
I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum.
Kenneth Clark
Image
Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasures of recognition adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty.
Kenneth Clark
Image
Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography the good ones all welcomed it and used it.
Kenneth Clark
Image
Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.
Kenneth Clark
Image
The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
Kenneth Clark
Image
All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
Kenneth Clark
Image
The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.
Kenneth Clark
Image
In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.
Kenneth Clark
Image
Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.
Kenneth Clark
Image
Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.
Kenneth Clark
Image
The dark ghettos are social, political, educational and-above all-economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.
Kenneth Clark
Image
To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.
Kenneth Clark
Image
No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.
Kenneth Clark
Image
Evidently one cannot look for long at the Last Supper without ceasing to study it as a composition, and beginning to speak of it as a drama. It is the most literary of all great pictures, one of the few of which the effect may largely be conveyed - can even be enhanced - by description.
Kenneth Clark
Image
Over and above the political, economic, sociological, and international implications of racial prejudices, their major significance is that they place unnecessary burdens upon human beings.
Kenneth Clark
Image
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
Kenneth Clark