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You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.

Kenneth Clark

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Kenneth Clark
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More quotes by Kenneth Clark

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Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.
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All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
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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.
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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.
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All color is no color.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.
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In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.
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Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.
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I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.
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Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.
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A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
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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
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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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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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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