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Kenneth Clark citations

Kenneth McKenzie Clark , est un historien de l'art, auteur britannique, directeur de musée et producteur d'une série à la télévision.

En 1961, cinq ans après John Pope-Hennessy et un an avant Anthony Blunt, Kenneth Clark occupe la chaire Slade à l'université d'Oxford, surnommée « chaire John Ruskin » en mémoire de son premier titulaire. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. juillet 1903 – 21. mai 1983
Kenneth Clark: 47 citations0 J'aime

Kenneth Clark: Citations en anglais

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

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Kenneth Clark

Source: Leonardo da Vinci (1939), Ch. Nine: 1513-1519

“Seen by itself the David's body might be some unusually taut and vivid work of antiquity; it is only when we come to the head that we are aware of a spiritual force that the ancient world never knew. I suppose that this quality, which I may call heroic, is not a part of most people's idea of civilisation. It involves a contempt for convenience and a sacrifice of all those pleasures that contribute to what we call civilised life. It is the enemy of happiness. And yet we recognise that to despise material obstacles, and even to defy the blind forces of fate, is man's supreme achievement; and since, in the end, civilisation depends on man's extending his powers of mind and spirit to the utmost, we must reckon the emergence of Michelangelo as one of the great events in the history of western man.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 5: The Hero as Artist

“Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. VIII: The Alternative Convention

“Early artists considered the human body, that forked radish, that defenseless starfish, a poor vehicle for the expression of energy, compared to the muscle-rippling bull and the streamlined antelope. Once more it was the Greeks, by their idealization of man, who turned the human body into an incarnation of energy, to us the most satisfying of all, for although it can never attain the uninhibited physical flow of the animal, its movements concern us more closely. Through art we can relive them in our own bodies, and achieve thereby that enhanced vitality which all thinkers on art, from Goethe to Berenson, have recognized as one of the chief sources of aesthetic pleasure.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. V: Energy

“The convention by which the great events in biblical or secular history could be enacted only by magnificent physical specimens, handsome and well-groomed, went on for a long time — till the middle of the nineteenth century. Only a very few artists — perhaps only Rembrandt and Caravaggio in the first rank — were independent enough to stand against it. And I think that this convention, which was an element in the so-called grand manner, became a deadening influence on the European mind. It deadened our sense of truth, even our sense of moral responsibility.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 5: The Hero as Artist

“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. 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.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 4: Ingres I: The Years of Inspiration

“I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 7: Grandeur and Obedience

“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. Ruskin said in his Elements of Drawing, "Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel-pit, a little whitening, and some coal dust, and I will paint you a luminous picture, if you give me time to gradate my mud, and subdue my dust."”

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Kenneth Clark

In many works by the greatest colourists — Rembrandt and Watteau are examples — there are very few identifiable colours.
Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 10: Turner II: The Liberation of Colour

“However much the various phases of the French Revolution may have modelled themselves on Roman history — the early phase on Republican virtue, the later on Imperial grandeur — the fact remains that classicism depended on a fixed and rational philosophy; whereas the spirit of the Revolution was one of change and of emotion.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 1: David

“It is widely supposed that the naked human body is in itself an object upon which the eye dwells with pleasure and which we are glad to see depicted. But anyone who has frequented art schools and seen the shapeless, pitiful model that the students are industriously drawing will know this is an illusion. The body is not one of those objects which can be made into art by direct transcription — like a tiger or a snowy landscape. Often in looking at the natural and animal world we joyfully identify ourselves with what we see and from this happy union create a work of art. This is the process students of aesthetics call empathy, and it is at the opposite pole of creative activity to the state of mind that has produced the nude. A mass of naked figures does not move us to empathy, but to disillusion and dismay.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. 1: The Naked and the Nude

“This became Delacroix's theme: that the achievements of the spirit — all that a great library contained — were the result of a state of society so delicately balanced that at the least touch they would be crushed beneath an avalanche of pent-up animal forces.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 8: Delacroix

“The great artist takes what he needs.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 5: The Hero as Artist

“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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Kenneth Clark

Source: Leonardo da Vinci (1939), Ch. Two: 1481-1490

“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.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. V: Energy

“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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Kenneth Clark

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 9: The Pursuit of Happiness

“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.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 13: Heroic Materialism

“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.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. VI: Pathos

“We are so much accustomed to the humanitarian outlook that we forget how little it counted in earlier ages of civilisation. Ask any decent person in England or America what he thinks matters most in human conduct: five to one his answer will be "kindness." It's not a word that would have crossed the lips of any of the earlier heroes of this series. If you had asked St. Francis what mattered in life, he would, we know, have answered "chastity, obedience and poverty"; if you had asked Dante or Michelangelo, they might have answered "disdain of baseness and injustice"; if you had asked Goethe, he would have said "to live in the whole and the beautiful."”

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Kenneth Clark

But kindness, never. Our ancestors didn't use the word, and they did not greatly value the quality — except perhaps insofar as they valued compassion.
Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 13: Heroic Materialism

“The nude gains its enduring value from the fact that it reconciles several contrary states. It takes the most sensual and immediately interesting object, the human body, and puts it out of reach of time and desire; it takes the most purely rational concept of which mankind is capable, mathematical order, and makes it a delight to the senses; and it takes the vague fears of the unknown and sweetens them by showing that the gods are like men and may be worshiped for their life-giving beauty rather than their death-dealing powers.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. I: The Naked and the Nude

“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.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. 1: The Naked and the Nude

“Gargoyles were the complement to saints; Leonardo's caricatures were complementary to his untiring search for ideal beauty. And gargoyles were the expression of all the passions, the animal forces, the Caliban gruntings and groanings which are left in human nature when the divine has been poured away. Leonardo was less concerned than his Gothic predecessors with the ethereal parts of our nature, and so his caricatures, in their expression of passionate energy, merge imperceptibly into the heroic.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: Leonardo da Vinci (1939), Ch. Three: The Notebooks

“For the student of visionary art the interesting fact is that an image comes first and takes up residence in the mind long before the artist has any notion why it is there or what it means. Whether visions come from some great reservoir of symbolic images which are eternally there (and if one examines the recurrence of images in history this proposition is not quite as crazy as it sounds) or whether they are due to buried memories, their obsessive power over an artist's mind, and their clear, compulsive emergence in his work depends on a mental condition that can come and go. When, for some reason, they no longer present themselves to the mind's eye, alive or clamoring to be born, the visionary artist has a hard time — dark days. This is particularly true if he has lost the habit of feeding his mind on the observation of nature.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 6: Blake

“Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. Degas liked it not only because it provided an accurate record, but because the snapshot showed him a means of escape from the classical rules of design. Through it he learnt to make a composition without the use of formal symmetry.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 13: Degas

“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.”

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Kenneth Clark

Section 3: A Note on Ruskin's Writings on Art and Architecture
Ruskin Today (1964)

“It remains true that Michelangelo's intensely personal use of the nude greatly altered its character. He changed it from a means of embodying ideas to a means of expressing emotions; he transformed it from the world of living to the world of becoming. And he projected his world of the imagination with such unequaled artistic power that its shadow fell on every male nude in art for three hundred and fifty years. Painters either imitated his heroic poses and proportions or they reacted against them self-consciously and sought a new repertoire of attitudes in the art of fifth-century Greece. In the nineteenth century the ghost of Michelangelo was still posing the models in art schools.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. V: Energy

“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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Kenneth Clark

Source: Leonardo da Vinci (1939), Ch. Five: 1485-1496

“Changes in the structure of society are not brought about solely by massive engines of doctrine. The first flash of insight which persuades human beings to change their basic assumptions is usually contained in a few phrases.”

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Kenneth Clark

Section 5: A Note on Ruskin's Writings on Society and Economics
Ruskin Today (1964)

“To Leonardo a landscape, like a human being, was part of a vast machine, to be understood part by part and, if possible, in the whole. Rocks were not simply decorative silhouettes. They were part of the earth's bones, with an anatomy of their own, caused by some remote seismic upheaval. Clouds were not random curls of the brush, drawn by some celestial artist, but were the congregation of tiny drops formed from the evaporation of the sea, and soon would pour back their rain into the rivers.”

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Kenneth Clark

Source: Leonardo da Vinci (1939), Ch. Six: 1497-1503

“His long struggle with physical passion was almost over, and, as with many other great sensualists, its place had been taken by an obsession with death.”

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Kenneth Clark

Referring to Michelangelo
Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. VI: Pathos

“In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.”

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Kenneth Clark

The Other Half: A Self Portrait http://books.google.com/books?id=4gg0AAAAMAAJ&q=%22In+time+of+war+all+countries+behave+equally+badly+because+the+power+of+action+is+handed+over+to+stupid+and+obstinate+men%22&pg=PA4#v=onepage (1977)