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Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.

Kenneth Clark

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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
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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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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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Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
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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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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.
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We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
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The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
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