Retrieve The Nude: A Study In Ideal Form Fabricated By Kenneth Clark Displayed In Manuscript
doesn't seem entirely sure about the nude unless he can find a metaphysical reason for it, At least it's a change from some of the sillier feminist tracts on the subject, Excellent book! Bought this years ago after I bought sitelinkThe Naked Nude, which referenced this book so often in the first few pages, Took a while before I started this one but so happy I did, Clark was an expert art critic and his prose is wonderful, If I weren't in the middle of COVID and new puppy and a couple other books, I would have read this straight through, I will read The Naked Nude next,
For Dewey, this one is:,
Bought this one used at AbeBooks for,, putting thebook expenses to,. This is a book for someone who sees Hercules and the Lion and thinks "look at how the artist is evoking the body's movement with the movement in the cloak" and not "I like the gold pubes!"
Bits:
"The drift of all popular art is towards the lowest common denominator, and, on the whole, there are more women whose bodies look like a potato than like the Knidian Aphrodite.
"
On Sacred and Profane Love: "Titian has even broken the line of the arm by a cast of crimson drapery exactly where it would have been broken by time.
"
"One of Courbet's nudes was intended to provoke and succeeded imperially, for Napoleon III struck at her with his riding crop, "
"The skin was to Rubens almost what the muscles had been to Michelangelo, "
"Roots and bulbs, pulled up into the light, give us for a moment a feeling of shame, They are pale, defenceless, unselfsupporting, They have the formless character of life which has been both protected and oppressed, In the darkness their slow, biological gropings have been contrary to the quick, resolute movements of free creatures, bird, fish or dancer, flashing through a transparent medium, and have made them baggy, scraggy and indeterminate.
Looking at a group of naked figures in a Gothic painting or a miniature, we experience the same sensation, The bulblike women and rootlike men seem to have been dragged out of the protective darkness in which the human body had lain muffled for a thousand years.
"
For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make, Spenser, Hymne in Honour of
Beautie,
This could have been such an excellent read, could have so easily gone to favourites, but somewhere around pageof Chapter One I realised that whilst Clark is an excellent researcher, he is also an incredibly bad writer, biased and heavily opinionated, his ideas terribly terribly narrowminded and disillusioned to fit his own agenda.
What agenda is this Nobody knows, especially Clark,
"A mass of naked figures does not move us to empathy, but to disillusion and dismay, We are immediately disturbed by wrinkles, pouches, and other small imperfections, which, in the classical scheme, are eliminated, "
Us, us who What of Rubens and his Venus, with a cornucopia of vegetable abundance Durer
"Since the seventeenth century we have come to think of the female nude as a more normal and appealing subject than the male.
But this was not so originally, In Greece no sculpture of nude women dates from the sixth century, and it is still extremely rare in the fifth, There were both religious and social reasons for the scarcity, Whereas the nakedness of Apollo was a part of his divinity, there were evidently ancient traditions of ritual and taboo that Aphrodite must be swathed in draperies.
"
This coming from the man who talks of Raphael's Three Graces as "these sweet round bodies as sensuous as a strawberry" but I digress.
. .
"It is necessary to labour the obvious and say that no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even though it be only the faintest shadow and if it does not do so, it is bad art and false morals.
To generalise this is puerile, not everyone has a dirty little mind, some may simply derive aesthetic pleasure from looking at nude art.
Just like a book review tells more of the reviewer than of the actual book, so does our reaction to a Nude tell us more about the Artist and about the Viewer themselves.
Yes, any Nude contains erotic content, it is pathologically natural for the Viewer's synapses to fire up and create primordial biological needs, but this is a human experience as a means of expression, again that says more about the Viewer than about the piece of art Itself.
True art mustn't Do anything, It satisfies no whim. Serves no purpose designed by social construct, It has no master. Art is. One is supposed to look at it and deal with it, Deal with whatever it is that it throws at you, emotion or lack thereof, A nude is. It is innocent to believe the Viewer appraises the art, the viewer is always appraising himself in the art through the presence of erotic stirring or lack thereof.
One nude creates one billion different feelings for each of the one billion people, but if ten thousand are not erotically stirred, does this make this nude bad art Does it mean the rest are promoting false morals
Clarks says of sitelinkPollaiuolo's Battle of the Nude Men: "The early convention for the active body, with its large arcs for hips, thigh, and calf, does not promote what we have come to call physical beauty.
Moreover, the athletes who raced and wrestled in the palaestra were, in the sixth century, of ungainly build, The wrestlers were strong men, Homeric heroes, hugging one another like bears, The runners had high shoulders, wasp waists, and swollen thighs,
But this is contradiction of the highest order, According to Clarke, if I am then stirred by Pollaiuolo's "strong men, with arched shoulders and ungainly build", the Nude itself promotes false morals as it does not promote physical beauty and this Viewer lacks what the Italian connoisseurs call gran gusto.
Finally, after endless prattle, Clarke says that sitelinkThe Hermes of Praxiteles "represents the last triumph of the idea of wholeness physical beauty is one with strength, grace, gentleness, and benevolence", which only made this reader chuckle, as clearly Clarke simply has an aesthetic preference for Hellenic abdomens, not Italian.
And just had to write a book about it,
When browsing through the Art and Art History section of my local secondhand bookshop, I stumbled across The Nude by Kenneth Clarke, a book that had been a part of our required course readings in first year that I had been unable to find upon the shelves of the library.
Needless to say, at the price of R, I thought to buy the battered copy and see what I had missed,
The Nude is a book dedicated to mapping out the history of the nude in the Western art canon, from the Ancient Greeks to the Neoclassicists, examining and explaining how the nude had evolved from the style of the Archaic period to the looser, less controlled forms of the postRenaissance.
As someone who might have a decent understanding of the Western art canon, but not of the theory and the more intricate details, I did find the book to be incredibly interesting in some respects, such as how the Western nude had to evolve from a rigid form, to the looser, freer forms that we see today.
It was illuminating to learn that certain poses had to be, supposedly, invented see for example the contrapposto, It was fascinating to learn about how the representations of the nude could be traced back through time, to see and know how the representations evolved over the centuries.
However, it could be quite frustrating in some respects, Clarke is quite clearly an oldschool art historian who will casually throw out dates and references that he expects the reader to understand implicitly he will often use many French phrases, to the point where half a paragraph will be in French.
This does a disservice to the reader, as even if one were to take the time to translate it, many of the nuances would be lost.
I found it quite difficult to swallow the idea that many such poses and forms could be labeled and neatly slotted into a pigeonhole, but then, that is something that seems to be quite common amongst the study of the Western tradition.
I would believe that it would be a matter of convenience for it to be so, if not for the fact that Clarke does not care to make things easy for the reader.
Despite what issues and confusions I had with The Nude, I dont regret taking the time to read it I took away a fair bit of knowledge from it, and not only that of art history, but also of general European history, politics, religion, and ideology.
I would give The Nude a/, Just over one year ago I slowly walked through the "Art of the Ancient World" collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with a previous girlfriend.
Filled with many nude portraits and stone sculptures, it represented pretty much everything that did not interest either of us, I'm not sure why but this type of art never appealed to me I now realize I just needed to take a closer look, Our largely negative attitude toward the nude inspired me to discover if I couldn't unearth the underlying reasons,
Clark takes you into a whole different world, Having never studied any type of art, the deep complexity this field has to offer took me wholly by surprise, Studying the evolution of beauty has utterly changed my perception of the human body as well as the modern representation of beauty, This came as very welcome relief PUN as the modern evolution of the nude, though different in its representation of past periods, shares many of its patterns.
Digital post production has given artists an unparalleled, newfound power that today at least accentuates extremes, as a harrowing look at the modern pornography industry easily confirms.
But just as in the past, the pendulum might swing back and this new power might be grounded in more subtle directions that would prevail for a time until some new, novel fashion speeds things forward.
To take the opposite approach, leaning
on the history of the rise too easy of the female hip as an example, this recent extremism may just be the beginning of an astoundingly unsubtle expression.
A Study in Ideal Form has given me a new lens through which to enjoy this complex evolution, .