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Quote by Kenneth Clark

“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.”

Quote by Kenneth Clark

Book:The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form: A Study in Ideal Form

Work

The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form: A Study in Ideal Form

This work explores the concept of the nude in Western art history, analyzing how artists have transformed the human body into an idealized, aesthetic form. The study likely traces the evolution of this ideal from classical antiquity through the Renaissance to modern times, discussing the philosophical and cultural underpinnings that have shaped the depiction of the unclothed body as a subject of beauty, proportion, and symbolic meaning. It examines the distinction between the naked body and the artistic nude, considering how conventions of form, composition, and technique have been employed to elevate the figure beyond mere representation into a timeless ideal. more

Author

Kenneth Clark was a renowned psychologist, born on July 24, 1914, and passed away on May 1, 2005. He made significant contributions to the field of psychology, particularly in the areas of cognitive psychology and child psychology. more

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“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.”

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Book:The nude: a study in ideal form

Source: The nude: a study in ideal form

“I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.”

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“I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.”

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“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.”

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Book:The romantic rebellion: romantic versus classic art

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“The difference between what we see and a sheet of white paper with a few thin lines on it is very great. Yet this abstraction is one which we seem to have adopted almost instinctively at an early stage in our development, not only in Neolithic graffiti but in early Egyptian drawings. And in spite of its abstract character, the outline is responsive to the least tremor of sensibility.”

Source: The romantic rebellion: romantic versus classic art

“I drink a lot of water and I never leave the house without putting on moisturizer and lip gloss.”

House Water Drink Lips Gloss Lip Gloss

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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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Source: The romantic rebellion: romantic versus classic art

“You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.”

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Author:Kenneth Clark

“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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“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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Book:The nude: a study in ideal form

Source: The nude: a study in ideal form