Kenneth Clark Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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. — Kenneth Clark

The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience. — Kenneth Clark

Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it. — Kenneth Clark

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. — Kenneth Clark

Everybody who writes about Blake begins by saying that he was a visionary. It is a vague term. All artists, even the most realistic, start with some kind of vision - that is what leads them to select what they need from the infinite diversity of appearances. — Kenneth Clark

All great civilizations, in their early stages, are based on success in war. — Kenneth Clark

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it. — Kenneth Clark

As I have said, it may be difficult to define civilization, but it isn't so difficult to recognize barbarism. — Kenneth Clark

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. — Kenneth Clark

Ruthless, greedy, tyrannical, disreputable ... they have had one principle worth all the rest, the principle of delight! — Kenneth Clark

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. — Kenneth Clark

Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable. — Kenneth Clark

Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasures of recognition; adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty. — Kenneth Clark

The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people. — Kenneth Clark

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. — Kenneth Clark

One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans. — Kenneth Clark

You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters. — Kenneth Clark

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. — Kenneth Clark

We are part of a great whole. All living things are our brothers and sisters. — Kenneth Clark

Sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance. — Kenneth Clark

Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes. — Kenneth Clark

In the early twelfth century century the Virgin had been the supreme protectress of civilisation. She had taught a race of tough and ruthless barbarians the virtues of tenderness and compassion. The great cathedrals of the Middle Ages were her dwelling places upon earth. In the Renaissance, while remaining the Queen of Heaven, she became also the human mother in whom everyone could recognise qualities of warmth and love and approachability ...
The stabilising, comprehensive religions of the world, the religions which penetrate to every part of a man's being
in Egypt, India or China
gave the female principle of creation at least as much importance as the male, and wouldn't have taken seriously a philosophy that failed to include them both ... It's a curious fact that the
all-male religions have produced no religious imagery
in most cases have positively forbidden it. The great religious art of the world is deeply involved with the female principle. — Kenneth Clark

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. — Kenneth Clark

I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos. — Kenneth Clark

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. — Kenneth Clark

A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike. — Kenneth Clark

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. — Kenneth Clark

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

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. — Kenneth Clark

All color is no color. — Kenneth Clark

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

People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater. — Kenneth Clark

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

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. — Kenneth Clark

Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possesses it. — Kenneth Clark

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

At certain epochs, man has felt conscious of something about himself - body and spirit - which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear; and he has felt the need to develop these qualities of thought and feeling so that they might approach as nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection - reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium. He has managed to satisfy this need in various ways - through myths, through dance and song, through systems of philosophy and through the order that he has imposed upon the visible world. — Kenneth Clark

Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society. — Kenneth Clark

The Cathedrals were built to the glory of God; New York was built to the glory of Mammon. — Kenneth Clark

I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. 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 try to learn from history. — Kenneth Clark

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process. — Kenneth Clark

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

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

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

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

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

A lot of people you think you know you don't know until you find out you don't know then it may be too late to know. — Kenneth Clark

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

The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn't enough. — Kenneth Clark

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

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. — Kenneth Clark

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. — Kenneth Clark

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. — Kenneth Clark

The dark ghettos are social, political, educational and-above all-economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters. — Kenneth Clark

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. — Kenneth Clark

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. — Kenneth Clark

I just don't think the moon is going to be an adequate substitute for the fact that we haven't addressed ourselves to clearing up the slums. — Kenneth Clark

Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself. — Kenneth Clark

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. — 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. — Kenneth Clark

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. — Kenneth Clark

To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life. — Kenneth Clark

The recognized achievements of some Negroes, despite rigid racial barriers, indicate that society by its prejudices may be depriving itself of valuable contributions from many others. It is now doubtful whether America can afford the luxury of such a waste of human resources. — Kenneth Clark

Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well. — Kenneth Clark

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. — Kenneth Clark

Look at this charming donkey! — Kenneth Clark

The great artist takes what he needs. — Kenneth Clark