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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

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Kenneth Clark
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More quotes by Kenneth Clark

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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
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Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
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A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
Kenneth Clark
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Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs - it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers.
Kenneth Clark
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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
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Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.
Kenneth Clark
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You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.
Kenneth Clark
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.
Kenneth Clark
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One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called top people before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.
Kenneth Clark
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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
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All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
Kenneth Clark
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I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.
Kenneth Clark
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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
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To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.
Kenneth Clark
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Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a neutral or sexless agency, have a strange idea of doing service to his reputation.
Kenneth Clark
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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