Kenneth Clark
Kenneth Clark
Kenneth McKenzie Clark, Baron Clark OM CH KCB FBAwas a British author, museum director, broadcaster, and one of the best-known art historians and aesthetes of his generation, writing a series of books that appealed to a wide public, while remaining a serious scholar. In 1969, he achieved international fame as the writer, producer and presenter of the BBC Television series Civilisation, which pioneered television documentary series combining expert personalized narration with lavish photography on location...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 July 1903
I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possesses it.
Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.
A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
Almost all great painters in old age arrive at the same kind of broad, simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise the whole of their experience in a few strokes and blobs of colour.