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The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form
The author traces the history of the depiction of the human body from the earliest civilized times to the present day. Starting with the Greeks who used the nude to express certain fundamental human needs, such as the need for harmony and order (Apollo), and the need to sublimate desire (Venus), he shows how these types of bodily expression were revived in 15th-century Italy and given new urgency by Michelangelo, whose genius almost exhausted the possibilities of the male nude. The female body, however, through Titian, Rubens, Ingres and Renoir has continued to be a source of pictorial inspiration, and the author examines the uneasy relationship with the nude of such moderns as Matisse and Picasso.
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First published January 1, 1956
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About the author
Kenneth M. Clark
68 books59 followersSir Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (1903 -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 programmes on the arts during the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the Civilisation series in 1969.
The son of rich parents, Clark was introduced to the arts at an early age. Among his early influences were the writings of John Ruskin, which instilled in him the belief that everyone should have access to great art. After coming under the influence of the connoisseur and dealer Bernard Berenson, Clark was appointed director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford aged twenty-seven, and three years later he was put in charge of Britain's National Gallery. His twelve years there saw the gallery transformed to make it accessible and inviting to a wider public.
During the Second World War, when the collection was moved from London for safe keeping, Clark made the building available for a series of daily concerts which proved a celebrated morale booster during the Blitz.
After the war, and three years as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, Clark surprised many by accepting the chairmanship of the UK's first commercial television network. Once the service had been successfully launched he agreed to write and present programmes about the arts. These established him as a household name in Britain, and he was asked to create the first colour series about the arts, Civilisation, first broadcast in 1969 in Britain and in many other countries soon afterwards.
Among many honours, Clark was knighted at the unusually young age of thirty-five, and three decades later was made a life peer shortly before the first transmission of Civilisation. Three decades after his death, Clark was celebrated in an exhibition at Tate Britain in London, prompting a reappraisal of his career by a new generation of critics and historians. Opinions varied about his aesthetic judgment, particularly in attributing paintings to old masters, but his skill as a writer and his enthusiasm for popularising the arts were widely recognised. Both the BBC and the Tate described him in retrospect as one of the most influential figures in British art of the twentieth century.
The son of rich parents, Clark was introduced to the arts at an early age. Among his early influences were the writings of John Ruskin, which instilled in him the belief that everyone should have access to great art. After coming under the influence of the connoisseur and dealer Bernard Berenson, Clark was appointed director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford aged twenty-seven, and three years later he was put in charge of Britain's National Gallery. His twelve years there saw the gallery transformed to make it accessible and inviting to a wider public.
During the Second World War, when the collection was moved from London for safe keeping, Clark made the building available for a series of daily concerts which proved a celebrated morale booster during the Blitz.
After the war, and three years as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, Clark surprised many by accepting the chairmanship of the UK's first commercial television network. Once the service had been successfully launched he agreed to write and present programmes about the arts. These established him as a household name in Britain, and he was asked to create the first colour series about the arts, Civilisation, first broadcast in 1969 in Britain and in many other countries soon afterwards.
Among many honours, Clark was knighted at the unusually young age of thirty-five, and three decades later was made a life peer shortly before the first transmission of Civilisation. Three decades after his death, Clark was celebrated in an exhibition at Tate Britain in London, prompting a reappraisal of his career by a new generation of critics and historians. Opinions varied about his aesthetic judgment, particularly in attributing paintings to old masters, but his skill as a writer and his enthusiasm for popularising the arts were widely recognised. Both the BBC and the Tate described him in retrospect as one of the most influential figures in British art of the twentieth century.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
September 13, 2016
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, unself-supporting. 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 bulb-like women and root-like men seem to have been dragged out of the protective darkness in which the human body had lain muffled for a thousand years."
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, unself-supporting. 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 bulb-like women and root-like men seem to have been dragged out of the protective darkness in which the human body had lain muffled for a thousand years."
Want to read
June 7, 2025Kenneth Clark does not believe it possible for photography to do justice to the nude, since blemishes and wrinkles are inevitable. With such a view, I’d like to know what he would have made of Lucian Freud’s “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” (1995). So much for connoisseurship.
October 22, 2011
A must read; a touchstone — A great book, which, by way of discussing one art form, anatomises the study of art, one might even say, the philosophy of art. If you can only ever read one book on art, this is it!
February 10, 2013
This is what I took away: it was all about nude men for a while because of the greeks predilections, but eventually nude women were depicted.
AND
"since the earliest times the obsessive, unreasonable nature of human desire has sought relief in images, and to give these images a form by which Venus may cease to be vulgar and become celestial"
AND
There have been some key variations on the theme; the celebratory ideal, the stretched out mannerist, the Rubenesque, the shameful gothic, the impressionistic, the abstract.
AND
"no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even though it be only the faintest shadow - if it does not so, it is bad art and false morals"
SO
Clearly an old school gent who not only believes in the canon but in an erotic litmus test. Well, maybe there is something to it. And if he can better appreciate art by having it explained in a bajillion pages, more power to him.
But for me, the academy tends to put a buzzkill on art. Its beauty (mostly)! Just shut up and let the magic happen.
UMM
Did you ever feel like your calling in life was to take pictures of nude women? In elementary school I remember for a time I wanted this to be the case. Then I read "my name is asher lev" during high school and the feeling stayed for several years but the impulse faded like how a starved plant withers. That may have been for the best. Now I nurture my artistic longings by greasing escalator sprockets.
AND
"since the earliest times the obsessive, unreasonable nature of human desire has sought relief in images, and to give these images a form by which Venus may cease to be vulgar and become celestial"
AND
There have been some key variations on the theme; the celebratory ideal, the stretched out mannerist, the Rubenesque, the shameful gothic, the impressionistic, the abstract.
AND
"no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even though it be only the faintest shadow - if it does not so, it is bad art and false morals"
SO
Clearly an old school gent who not only believes in the canon but in an erotic litmus test. Well, maybe there is something to it. And if he can better appreciate art by having it explained in a bajillion pages, more power to him.
But for me, the academy tends to put a buzzkill on art. Its beauty (mostly)! Just shut up and let the magic happen.
UMM
Did you ever feel like your calling in life was to take pictures of nude women? In elementary school I remember for a time I wanted this to be the case. Then I read "my name is asher lev" during high school and the feeling stayed for several years but the impulse faded like how a starved plant withers. That may have been for the best. Now I nurture my artistic longings by greasing escalator sprockets.
January 5, 2014
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.
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.
October 6, 2021
For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make. —Spenser, Hymne in Honour of
Beautie, 1596
This could have been such an excellent read, could have so easily gone to favourites, but somewhere around page 3 of 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 narrow-minded 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 Pollaiuolo'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 The 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.
Beautie, 1596
This could have been such an excellent read, could have so easily gone to favourites, but somewhere around page 3 of 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 narrow-minded 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 Pollaiuolo'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 The 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.
November 13, 2023
Świetna książka o akcie w sztuce. Poszerza horyzonty
April 6, 2020
Excellent book! Bought this years ago after I bought The 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: 757.
Bought this one used at AbeBooks for $19.95, putting the 2020 book expenses to $155.46.
For Dewey, this one is: 757.
Bought this one used at AbeBooks for $19.95, putting the 2020 book expenses to $155.46.
May 18, 2022
"And 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 worshipped for their life-giving beauty rather than their death-dealing powers."
I picked this up randomly from my favorite local bookstore for aesthetic reasons more than anything else. But I thought since I had it, it'd be worth reading, so I did.
And I am so glad! This was honestly a fantastic piece of art historical analysis and honestly one I'm shocked I've never heard of before. I loved the way Clark divided his chapters. The work as a whole was really easy to follow and just so well-written.
One thing I'll note is that this does lack the intersectional awareness, particularly the feminism, that has increasingly begun to infiltrate contemporary art history. Clark's analysis is never, at least in my opnion, overtly problematic, but there were definitely some gaps left here that some good feminist discourse could take further. A great dissertation topic, perhaps, for any fellow art history students out there.
But all in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this and I'm so glad I found it. Now that my art history degree is coming to an end, I'm definitely going to have to keep an eye out for more works like this one.
February 19, 2018
I try to dabble in reading outside my normal interests occasionally and art and art history is a bit outside my lane. A big reason I picked this book is the fact that it's a Folio Society book and I saw it for sale at a price far below normal.
The author tells us this study of the history of the nude human form in art was written in part to respond to this issue: "The dwindling appreciation of of antique art during the last fifty years has greatly impoverished our understanding of art in general; and professional writers on classical archeology, microscopically re-examining their scanty evidence, have not helped us to understand why it was that for four hundred years artists and amateurs shed tears of admiration before works which arouse no tremor of emotion in us."
In short, this now classic art appreciation text reviews the history of the nude form in art as one of the most important parts of classic art. The author discusses the reaction to the nude form and why it has been and is an appropriate part of how art is created and displayed. Growing up in a very conservative family the unclothed human form was viewed as a bad thing - worthy of only private eroticism between two married people or public scorn.
While I've been aware that antique/classical art contained nudes I don't know that I really wondered much about why they were so common until I visited the American Library of Congress. There are nude women everywhere built into the decor as a repeating motif. This art choice was meant for the public and represents a very different worldview on what is art and good. Indeed there was a significant period of Church history where the Roman Catholic church was comfortable with nude figures as appropriate decor even within their cathedrals - a far cry from from the ideas about humanity and beauty I was raised with.
Some comments that stood out -
"...in our Diogenes search for physical beauty our instinctive desire is not imitate but to perfect. This is part of our Greek inheritance, and it was formulated by Aristotle with his usual deceptive simplicity. 'Art, he says, 'completes what nature cannot bring to a finish. The artist gives us knowledge of of nature unrealized ends' A great many assumptions underlie this statement, the chief of which is that everything has an ideal form of which the phenomena of experience are more or less corrupted replicas. This beautiful fancy has teased the minds of philosophers and writers on aesthetics for over two thousand years, and although we need not plunge into a seas of speculation, we cannot discuss without considering its practical application, because every time we criticise a figure, saying the neck is too long, hips too wide, or breasts too small, we are admitting, in quote concrete terms, the existence of ideal beauty."
"It is through facial expression that every intimacy begins. This is true of the classic nude, where the head often seems to be no more than an element in the geometry of the figure and the expression is reduced to a minimum. In fact, try as e will to expunge all individuality in the interests of the whole, our responses to facial expression are so sensitive that the slightest accent gives a suggestion of mood or inner life."
"In the first centuries of Christianity many causes had combined to bury the nude. The Jewish element in Christian thought condemned all human images as involving a breach of the second commandment, an pagan idols were were particularly dangerous because, in the opinion of the early church, they were not simply pieces of profane sculpture, but were the abode of devils who had cunningly assumed the shapes and names of beautiful human beings. The fact that these god and goddesses were, for the most part, naked gave to nudity a a diabolical association which it long retained."
"Art is justified, as man is justified by the faculty of forming ideas...."
"Is there, after all any reason why certain quasi-geometrical shapes should be satisfying except that they are simplified statements of the forms that please us in a woman's body? - A shape, like a word, has innumerable associations which vibrate in the memory, and any attempt to explain it by a single analogy is as futile as the translation of a poem."
The author tells us this study of the history of the nude human form in art was written in part to respond to this issue: "The dwindling appreciation of of antique art during the last fifty years has greatly impoverished our understanding of art in general; and professional writers on classical archeology, microscopically re-examining their scanty evidence, have not helped us to understand why it was that for four hundred years artists and amateurs shed tears of admiration before works which arouse no tremor of emotion in us."
In short, this now classic art appreciation text reviews the history of the nude form in art as one of the most important parts of classic art. The author discusses the reaction to the nude form and why it has been and is an appropriate part of how art is created and displayed. Growing up in a very conservative family the unclothed human form was viewed as a bad thing - worthy of only private eroticism between two married people or public scorn.
While I've been aware that antique/classical art contained nudes I don't know that I really wondered much about why they were so common until I visited the American Library of Congress. There are nude women everywhere built into the decor as a repeating motif. This art choice was meant for the public and represents a very different worldview on what is art and good. Indeed there was a significant period of Church history where the Roman Catholic church was comfortable with nude figures as appropriate decor even within their cathedrals - a far cry from from the ideas about humanity and beauty I was raised with.
Some comments that stood out -
"...in our Diogenes search for physical beauty our instinctive desire is not imitate but to perfect. This is part of our Greek inheritance, and it was formulated by Aristotle with his usual deceptive simplicity. 'Art, he says, 'completes what nature cannot bring to a finish. The artist gives us knowledge of of nature unrealized ends' A great many assumptions underlie this statement, the chief of which is that everything has an ideal form of which the phenomena of experience are more or less corrupted replicas. This beautiful fancy has teased the minds of philosophers and writers on aesthetics for over two thousand years, and although we need not plunge into a seas of speculation, we cannot discuss without considering its practical application, because every time we criticise a figure, saying the neck is too long, hips too wide, or breasts too small, we are admitting, in quote concrete terms, the existence of ideal beauty."
"It is through facial expression that every intimacy begins. This is true of the classic nude, where the head often seems to be no more than an element in the geometry of the figure and the expression is reduced to a minimum. In fact, try as e will to expunge all individuality in the interests of the whole, our responses to facial expression are so sensitive that the slightest accent gives a suggestion of mood or inner life."
"In the first centuries of Christianity many causes had combined to bury the nude. The Jewish element in Christian thought condemned all human images as involving a breach of the second commandment, an pagan idols were were particularly dangerous because, in the opinion of the early church, they were not simply pieces of profane sculpture, but were the abode of devils who had cunningly assumed the shapes and names of beautiful human beings. The fact that these god and goddesses were, for the most part, naked gave to nudity a a diabolical association which it long retained."
"Art is justified, as man is justified by the faculty of forming ideas...."
"Is there, after all any reason why certain quasi-geometrical shapes should be satisfying except that they are simplified statements of the forms that please us in a woman's body? - A shape, like a word, has innumerable associations which vibrate in the memory, and any attempt to explain it by a single analogy is as futile as the translation of a poem."
July 15, 2017
When browsing through the Art and Art History section of my local second-hand 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 R15, 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 post-Renaissance. 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 old-school 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 pigeon-hole, 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 don’t 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 7/10.
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 post-Renaissance. 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 old-school 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 pigeon-hole, 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 don’t 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 7/10.
Want to read
March 12, 2012Bought this whilst a monk back in 1968.
(I recall some monkish friends being very scandalised!!)
Have looked at the pictures,
read captions
and copied
and used illustrations
but
have NEVER read it!!!
Hopefully recording this may get me to finally READ the text!!!
I wonder if such a text can ever get outmoded.
Some of the English TV Art Programs are hosted
by some real little egotists
who consider themselves more important than the art they're discussing,
tell blantant lies, or do second-rate research!!!
and love to disparage the artists.
Simon Schama i think escapes all these accusations.
I feel sure Sir Kenneth Clark will also escape
being a gentleman and a scholar in the best sense.
The Times have fallen on Hard Times, I fear.
November 30, 2020
Art Historian Kenneth Clark's book is a sweeping overview of the nude as an art form and vehicle for study. He examines the changing styles and roles of nudes from classical art through modern art. His insightful and often playful commentary lend an authoritative but accessible voice. Some prior art history knowledge and a good willingness to perform Internet searches is helpful, as there are only so many plates to support Clark's voluminous knowledge and use of examples. I'm not sure if this was available with color illustrations, but my copy has only black and white, limiting the effectiveness of the included examples.
July 27, 2010
This isn't a box breaking look at The nude in art, a lot of fundamental things go unexplored, but this is still a fantastic book.
Clark has a way of littering his writing with really engaging and exciting ideas, his special way of looking at art with love and respect means he opens up any work no matter how familiar and really gets you into the ideas behind it.
The sections are an good basic framework, though the venus/apollo sections are far less engaging than his marvellous chapters on energy and pathos etc, I think those sections have relevance far beyond the nude.
Clark has a way of littering his writing with really engaging and exciting ideas, his special way of looking at art with love and respect means he opens up any work no matter how familiar and really gets you into the ideas behind it.
The sections are an good basic framework, though the venus/apollo sections are far less engaging than his marvellous chapters on energy and pathos etc, I think those sections have relevance far beyond the nude.
December 29, 2018
While it's written in a very accessible style, this book is aimed at art historians. If statements like "The ideal form of Apollo scarcely appears again before that false dawn of the Renaissance, Nicola Pisano's pulpit in the Baptistery of Pisa" don't leave you scratching your head about who Pisano was and when that false dawn happened (the book doesn't give even a hint), then you might really get a lot out of it. Amateurs can still enjoy it, but might feel--as I did--that they're missing out on many of Clark's finer points.
April 8, 2012
This book is a great read. It describes the history of the nude in western art from the ancient Greek sculptures up to modern art ending with Matisse, Picasso and Henry Moore. It tells how the Greeks used proportion and elements of geometry to construct their creations which usually were about their gods and heroes. The chapters include Apollo, Venus, Energy, Pathos, Ecstasy, etc. If you're into art history this is a must read.
June 29, 2017
A joy. If you are like me, a person who enjoys art but without formal training, then this book will be a pleasure from beginning to end. Clark takes you through a number of topics and themes and provdes a discourse aimed at the intelligent reader leading you from each masterpiece to the next highlighting aspects of interest that may be easily missed. As such he is an expert guide and this book is a joy and not to be missed. Highly recommended.
Currently reading
November 1, 2008As part of the curriculum here at New York Academy of Art, there are chapters that are required as reading assignments and discussions that occur in class. I didn't read the book from beginning to end. It's assuredly interesting and a must for anyone at the fore of creating figurative artwork.
June 11, 2015
Very much out of fashion but I still enjoyed this a lot. I found the chapters on the most recent art the least convincing, but his insights into Greek and Roman sculpture fascinating. I had not read it for thirty years but it certainly stood the test of time.
March 21, 2007
Although I don't agree with everything he says, the book offers art-historical categories and interpretive frameworks for approaching representations of the human figure.
May 12, 2009
Something to learn each time I read it.
January 13, 2019
Written as a bunch of lectures, some a bit outdated, but an interesting view on the beauty of the nude and the human form in general
November 29, 2020
K. Clark writes beautifully and authoritatively about forms in art.
September 22, 2023
Some good and interesting information in here, but man was the absolutely, 100% written by a man in the 1950s. Despite the male torso on the cover, there are not many male nudes to be found here. Nudes have been drawn and sculpted and painted by men for time immemorial, and they almost exclusively depicted women... unless we're admiring the muscles on a man.
I actually had a lot of fun with my copy because it had previously been read, and annotated, by someone just as flabbergasted at the blatant sexism as I was. Reading this stranger's marginal notes kept me giggling through some of the pages and passages that would have otherwise left a very sour taste.
Still, if you're studying art, having a foundation in the human form and the way we've been depicting it in the (mostly) western world is not the worst thing. That said, I bet there's something more recent that isn't quite so misogynistic.
I actually had a lot of fun with my copy because it had previously been read, and annotated, by someone just as flabbergasted at the blatant sexism as I was. Reading this stranger's marginal notes kept me giggling through some of the pages and passages that would have otherwise left a very sour taste.
Still, if you're studying art, having a foundation in the human form and the way we've been depicting it in the (mostly) western world is not the worst thing. That said, I bet there's something more recent that isn't quite so misogynistic.
Want to read
April 3, 2023Paul graham rec - “What really makes him stand out, though, is the quality of his ideas. His style is deceptively casual, but there is more in his books than in a library of art monographs. Reading The Nude is like a ride in a Ferrari. Just as you're getting settled, you're slammed back in your seat by the acceleration. Before you can adjust, you're thrown sideways as the car screeches into the first turn. His brain throws off ideas almost too fast to grasp them. Finally at the end of the chapter you come to a halt, with your eyes wide and a big smile on your face.
Kenneth Clark was a star in his day, thanks to the documentary series Civilisation. And if you read only one book about art history, Civilisation is the one I'd recommend. It's much better than the drab Sears Catalogs of art that undergraduates are forced to buy for Art History 101.”
Kenneth Clark was a star in his day, thanks to the documentary series Civilisation. And if you read only one book about art history, Civilisation is the one I'd recommend. It's much better than the drab Sears Catalogs of art that undergraduates are forced to buy for Art History 101.”
June 1, 2023
Super interesting book, I really wish I'd actually read it when I got it as a gift in undergrad since I think it could've helped me think about my art in different ways (I was doing a lot of nudes). I do have a couple of things to complain about. The first is that even though the book includes images of most of the pieces it references, it also leaves out a lot. It would've been nice to maybe have a picture glossary in the back of everything referenced so I wouldn't have to look up every other work Clark mentions. I also wish Clark had talked a little bit more about non-European art traditions, if only to contrast the differences between the European nude and the art of other cultures. He mentions Indian art a handful of times, but never really gets into how it's different or similar from the European nudes he discusses.
November 7, 2023
An interesting take on art and art making.
The nude is a historical overview of poses and subjects both spiritual and secular.
It provides insight into sources of inspiration and the history of certain poses.
It also provides a thinly veiled argument against originality in art.
The poses and subjects discussed change slowly over the years, generally giving way to concepts spearheaded by the “greats” we so often mention in art, from Raphael, to Michelangelo and da Vinci.
Always interesting if not always riveting, the book as a whole provides fascinating insight into our cultural history and though a little rough when it comes to women, he compares the average woman to a potato…. It is a great reminder that everything comes from somewhere and little is ever truly original…
Worth a read for anyone doing life drawing or Interested in art history.
The nude is a historical overview of poses and subjects both spiritual and secular.
It provides insight into sources of inspiration and the history of certain poses.
It also provides a thinly veiled argument against originality in art.
The poses and subjects discussed change slowly over the years, generally giving way to concepts spearheaded by the “greats” we so often mention in art, from Raphael, to Michelangelo and da Vinci.
Always interesting if not always riveting, the book as a whole provides fascinating insight into our cultural history and though a little rough when it comes to women, he compares the average woman to a potato…. It is a great reminder that everything comes from somewhere and little is ever truly original…
Worth a read for anyone doing life drawing or Interested in art history.
October 12, 2022
This book is a fantastic scholarly resource whether you are an artist, a historian, or someone who is just really into naked people and why we look at them in art museums. I have read and reread this book for years.
July 2, 2023
lacking in an actual point
this was my hate read for the plane and GOD was it entertaining
had me screaming at the pages near the end
no other white man could ever get that reaction out of me
so thanks kenneth ig
this was my hate read for the plane and GOD was it entertaining
had me screaming at the pages near the end
no other white man could ever get that reaction out of me
so thanks kenneth ig
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