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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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Kenneth Clark
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More quotes by Kenneth Clark

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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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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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To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.
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We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
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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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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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Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
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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.
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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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Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.
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You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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