Kenneth Clark Quotes About Art

Quotes about: Art

• We can hardly imagine a state of mind in which all material objects were regarded as symbols of spirtual truths or episodes in sacred history. Yet, unless we make this effort of imagination, Medieval art is largely incomprehensible.

  Kenneth Clark

  Art, Imagination, Effort

• 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

  Art, Giving, Energy

• 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

  Art, Believe, Simple

  Kenneth Clark (1956). “The nude: a study in ideal form”, M J F Books

• 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

  Art, Erotic, Feelings

  Kenneth Clark (1956). “The nude: a study in ideal form”, M J F Books

• Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favorite specimens of Greek sculpture, from the sixth century onward, were originally parts of compositions, and if we were faced with the complete group in which the Charioteer of Delphi was once a subsidiary figure, we might well experience a moment of revulsion. We have come to think of the fragment as more vivid, more concentrated, and more authentic.

  Kenneth Clark

  Art, Thinking, Greek

  Kenneth Clark (1956). “The nude: a study in ideal form”, M J F Books

• Energy is eternal delight; and from the earliest times human beings have tried to imprison it in some durable hieroglyphic. It is perhaps the first of all the subjects of art.

  Kenneth Clark

  Art, Energy, Delight

  Kenneth Clark (2015). “The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form: A Study in Ideal Form”, p.173, Princeton University Press

• Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the whole of human personality. His insistence on the sanctity of nature was part of an attempt to develop Goethe's intuition that form cannot be put together in the mind by an additive process, but is to be deduced from the laws of growth in living organisms, and their resistance to the elements.

  Kenneth Clark

  Art, Law, Personality

  John Ruskin, Kenneth Clark (1991). “Selected writings”, Penguin Group USA

• No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling... The desire to grasp and be united with another human is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgement of what is known as 'pure form' is inevitably influenced by it, and one of the difficulties of the nude as a subject for art is that these instincts cannot be hidden.

  Kenneth Clark

  Art, Judgement, Erotic

  Kenneth Clark (1956). “The nude: a study in ideal form”, M J F Books

• Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies - in fact the very narrowness of primitive society gives their ornamental art a peculiar concentration and vitality. At some time in the ninth century one could have looked down the Seine and seen the prow of a Viking ship coming up the river. Looked at today in the British Museum, it is a powerful work of art; but to the mother of a family trying to settle down in her little hut, it would have seemed less agreeable - as menacing to her civilisation as the periscope of a nuclear submarine.

  Kenneth Clark

  Mother, Art, Powerful

  "Civilisation" by Kenneth Clark, (Ch. 1), 1969.

• Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility.

  Kenneth Clark

  Art, Mean, Lines

  Kenneth Clark (1973). “The romantic rebellion: romantic versus classic art”

• 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

  Art, Men, Fables

  "How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day". Book by Michael J. Gelb (p. 127), October 21, 2009.

• Our universe cannot even be stated symbolically. And this touches us all more directly than one might suppose. For example, artists, who have been very little influenced by social systems, have always responded instinctively to latent assumptions about the shape of the universe. The incomprehensibility of our new cosmos seems to me, ultimately, to be the reason for the chaos of modern art.

  Kenneth Clark

  Art, Shapes, Littles

  "Civilisation" by Kenneth Clark, (Ch. 13), 1969.

• Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.

  Kenneth Clark

  Art, Leonardo, Art History

  Kenneth Clark (1988). “Leonardo da Vinci”, Viking Pr

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin