|
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Artists category:
The great artist takes what he needs. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Books category:
It would be unfair to say that I prefer the back of a book to its contents, but it is true that the sight of a lot of books gives me the hope that I may some day read them, which sometimes develops into the belief that I have read them. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Brother/Sisterhood category:
- Civilization...
We are part of a great whole. All living things are our brothers and sisters. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Collectors category:
-on collectors...
Ruthless, greedy, tyrannical, disreputable... they have had one principle worth all the rest, the principle of delight! (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Colour category:
All color is no color. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Colour category:
Fine colour implies a unified relationship, in which each part is subordinate to the whole, and the transitions between them are felt to be as precious and beautiful as the colours themselves. In fact, the colours themselves must be continuously modified and broken as part of the transition. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Curiosity category:
-on Leonardo da Vinci...
...undoubtedly the most curious man who ever lived. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Design category:
Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasures of recognition; adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Drawing category:
-on Leonardo da Vinci...
It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Ego category:
I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Energy category:
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. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Eroticism category:
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. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Fire category:
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. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Genius category:
I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the History category:
-Civilization...
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. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Humanity category:
It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Invention category:
Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Lines category:
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. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Lines category:
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. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Nudes category:
The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Photography category:
Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Portraiture category:
You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Repetition category:
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. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Seeing category:
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. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Subject category:
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. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Subject category:
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. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Symbols category:
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. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Thought category:
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. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Universe category:
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. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
Sir Kenneth Clark - From the Writing category:
To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
| 
