Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Kenneth Clark
Invention
Architecture
Western
Foreseen
Process
Strangest
Next
Gothic
Men
Inventions
Opera
Logical

More quotes by 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
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
You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.
Kenneth Clark
Image
All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
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
The illustrator is essentially a reporter: his subjects come from the outside, lit by a flash. A subject comes to the classical artist from inside, and when he discovers confirmation of it in the outside world he feels that it has been there all the time.
Kenneth Clark
Image
I just don't think the moon is going to be an adequate substitute for the fact that we haven't addressed ourselves to clearing up the slums.
Kenneth Clark
Image
Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.
Kenneth Clark
Image
A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
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
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
Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.
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
Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
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
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
The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.
Kenneth Clark