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Kenneth Clark Biography

Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron Clark OM CH KCB FBA (13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983) was a British art historian, museum director, and broadcaster. After running two important art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television, presenting a succession of series about the arts during the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the series Civilisation in 1969.

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Kenneth Clark Quotes

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.

Bored, Boredom, Given, Long, People, Trial

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.

Animal, Caliban, Expression, Human, Left, Passion

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.

Beings, Doctrine, Firsts, Flash, Insight, Phrases

The great artist takes what he needs.

Artist, Great Art, Needs, Takes

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.

Down, Human, Museums, Reading, Rooms, Thought

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.

Artist, Century, Design, Mean, Photography, Record

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

Analogies, Analogy, Beauty, Become, Doe, Part

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.

Abstraction, Art, Lines, Mean, Reconciling, Sacred

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

Beings, Damage, Humans, Inevitably, Racist

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

Defying, Fall, Fine, Human, Like, Roles

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.

Art, Law, Organisms, Personality, Sanctity

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

Become, Children, Ifs, Treated

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.

Art, Desire, Difficulties, Erotic, Hidden, Judgement

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

Bears, Burden, Formal, Losing, Thought

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.

Age, Colour, Kind, Same, Strokes, Style

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

Action, Behave, Country, Men, Stupid, War

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.

Art, Century, Experience, Greek, Group, Thinking

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.

America, Indicate, Justice, Luxury, Negroes, Racial

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.

Art, Believe, Detail, Parts, Shape, Simple

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

Achievement, Catholic, Harmonizing, Impulses, Lay, People

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