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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

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Kenneth Clark
Believe
Almost
Units
Clear
Detail
Simple
Shape
Art
Details
Another
Parts
Cannot
Various
Body
Shapes
Every
Relationship
Perceived

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.
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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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A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
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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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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.
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Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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
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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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Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
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All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
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