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Kenneth McKenzie Clark, Baron Clark war ein britischer Kunsthistoriker, Museumsdirektor und Autor. In Großbritannien gehörte Clark durch die Fernsehserie-Serie Civilisation, die er für die BBC schrieb, produzierte und im Fernsehen präsentierte, zu einem der bekanntesten Kunsthistoriker seiner Zeit. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. Juli 1903 – 21. Mai 1983
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Kenneth Clark: Zitate auf Englisch

“To anyone who is not an artist it must seem rather strange that Degas who could do anything — for whom setting down what he saw presented no difficulties at all — should have continued to draw the same poses year after year — often, it would seem, with increasing difficulty. 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. He was continually struggling to achieve an idea of perfect form, but this did not prevent him looking for the truth in what might seem an artificial situation.”

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Kenneth Clark

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

“Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.”

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Kenneth Clark

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

“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.”

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Kenneth Clark

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

“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.”

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Kenneth Clark

Quelle: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 1: The Skin of Our Teeth

“Two pictures painted in the year 1907 can conveniently be taken as the starting point of twentieth-century art. They are Matisse's Blue Nude and Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon; and both these cardinal, revolutionary pictures represent the nude. The reason is that the revolt of twentieth-century painters was not against academicism: that had been achieved by the impressionists. It was a revolt against the doctrine, with which the impressionists implicitly agreed, that the painter should be no more than a sensitive and well-informed camera. And the very elements of symbolism and abstraction that made the nude an unsuitable subject for the impressionists commended it to their successors. When art was once more concerned with concepts rather than sensations, the nude was the first concept that came to mind.”

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Kenneth Clark

Quelle: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. IX: The Nude As an End in Itself

“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.”

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Kenneth Clark

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

“Bright-minded young people think poorly of existing institutions and want to abolish them. Well, one doesn't need to be young to dislike institutions. But the dreary fact remains that, even in the darkest ages, it was institutions that made society work, and if civilisation is to survive society must somehow be made to work.At this point I reveal myself in my true colours, as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. 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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Kenneth Clark

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

“Sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance.”

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Kenneth Clark

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

“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.”

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Kenneth Clark

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

“What on earth has given opera its prestige in western civilisation — a prestige that has outlasted so many different fashions and ways of thought? Why are people prepared to sit silently for three hours listening to a performance of which they do not understand a word and of which they very seldom know the plot? Why do quite small towns all over Germany and Italy still devote a large portion of their budgets to this irrational entertainment? Partly, of course, because it is a display of skill, like a football match. But chiefly, I think, because it is irrational. "What is too silly to be said may be sung" — well, yes; but what is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious — these things can also be sung and can only be sung.”

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Kenneth Clark

Quelle: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 9: The Pursuit of Happiness; "What is too silly to be said may be sung" is a commonly used translation or paraphrase of lines from Act I, Scene ii of the play The Barber of Seville by Pierre de Beaumarchais, which was the basis of famous operas.

“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.”

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Kenneth Clark

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

“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.”

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Kenneth Clark

Quelle: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 1: The Skin of Our Teeth

“Millet was one of those artists on whom a few formal ideas make so deep an impression that they feel compelled to spend the whole of their lives in trying to lever them out. Perhaps this is the chief distinguishing mark of the classical artist; certainly it is what distinguishes his use of subject matter from that of the illustrator. 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. He must give to his subjects an air of complete inevitability, and this becomes a problem of formal completeness. That is why the classic artists, Degas no less than Poussin, return to the same motives again and again, hoping each time to mould the subject closer to the idea.”

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Quelle: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 12: Millet

“As for the Messiah, it is, like Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, one of those rare works that appeal immediately to everyone, and yet is indisputably a masterpiece of the highest order.”

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Kenneth Clark

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

“There is no doubt that Goya thought that one of the drugs chiefly responsible for the sleep of reason was the Church, and he had the lowest possible opinion of ecclesiastical institutions. However, this did not prevent him from painting religious pictures, completely sincerely because, like all Latin people, however little he believed in Christianity, he felt himself to be within the structure of the Catholic Church. One of his finest works was the decoration of a church near Madrid called S. Antonio de la Florida. He used the kind of device that would have appealed to Tiepolo. He painted a balcony round the drum of a cupola, and behind it he put a crowd of loiterers who are supposed to be watching the saint raise a man from the dead. Very few of them are interested in this unusual event. They are interested in each other or themselves, and show very well the curious tension between the individual and the collective, which is the essence of a crowd.”

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Kenneth Clark

Quelle: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 3: Goya

“Totalitarian art must be a form of classicism: the state which is founded on order and subordination demands an art with a similar basis. Romantic painting, however popular, expresses the revolt of the individual. The State also requires an art of reason by which appropriate works may be produced as required. Inspiration is outside state control. The classic attitude toward subject matter — that it should be clear and unequivocal — supports the attitude of unquestioning belief. Add the fact that totalitarian art must be real enough to please the ignorant, ideal enough to commemorate a national hero, and well enough designed to present a memorable image, and one sees how perfectly The Death of Marat fills the bill. That it happens also to be a great work of art makes it dangerously misleading.”

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Kenneth Clark

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

“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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Kenneth Clark

Quelle: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. IX: The Nude As an End in Itself

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