The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form

Kenneth Clark – 1956

Anyone who’s seen the mammoth BBC documentary series Civilisation (1969) will remember Kenneth Clark as its learned, eloquent, passionate host; taking us through the world’s history of artistic achievement.  The series brought him fame, but for decades prior he was a renowned scholar, lecturer and museum director.  Compiled from a series of discourses given in 1953, Clark’s book The Nude was a celebrated breath of fresh air in the middle of a period of anxiety in the art world; when abstract expressionism was resented as an affront to social realism.  Clark presented a vision of art that was integrated, humanistic and high above ideology, stretching from the ancient Greeks to Picasso, in which the one, obvious, unifying subject of study and admiration is the human body.  By using Apollo and Venus as the ultimate symbols of male and female beauty,  Clark demonstrates the continuity of artistic progression; that moments of great artistry did not erupt out of nowhere but evolved from past traditions of which the masters were always aware.  The feature of the book that is perhaps most overwhelming is the surplus of illustrations on virtually every page; and in a 500-page book, that’s a lot.  The technique is brilliant because for virtually every insight Clark offers, he immediately presents visual evidence on the same page; creating an effect likely similar to the slide-shows that accompanied his lectures.  In chapters provocatively titled Apollo, Venus, Energy, Pathos and Ecstasy, Clark argues that “the nude is not the subject of art, but a form of art.” 

Excerpt:  “The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude.  To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition.  The word “nude,” on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone.  The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body reformed.  In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the early eighteenth century to persuade the artless islanders that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central subject of art.”