Artist Quotes by Kenneth Clark

The great artist takes what he needs.

— Kenneth Clark

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

— Kenneth Clark

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and…

— 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

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

— Kenneth Clark

It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew…

— Kenneth Clark

The illustrator is essentially a reporter: his subjects come from the outside, lit by a flash. A subject comes to the classical…

— Kenneth Clark

Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was…

— Kenneth Clark

We can hardly imagine a state of mind in which all material objects were regarded as symbols of spirtual truths or episodes…

— Kenneth Clark

Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a neutral or sexless…

— Kenneth Clark

Almost all great painters in old age arrive at the same kind of broad, simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise…

— Kenneth Clark

The history of art cannot be properly understood without some reference to the history of science. In both we are studying the…

— Kenneth Clark

Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly,…

— Kenneth Clark

Our universe cannot even be stated symbolically. And this touches us all more directly than one might suppose. For example, artists, who…

— Kenneth Clark

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and…

— Kenneth Clark

Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies - in fact the very narrowness of primitive society gives their ornamental…

— Kenneth Clark