7 quotes
Energy is eternal delight; and from the earliest times human beings have tried to imprison it in some durable hieroglyphic. It is perhaps the first of all the subjects of art.
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951)
Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951)
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.
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951)
His long struggle with physical passion was almost over, and, as with many other great sensualists, its place had been taken by an obsession with death.
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951)
No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow — and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951)
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.
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951)
Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favorite specimens of Greek sculpture, from the sixth century onward, were originally parts of compositions, and if we were faced with the complete group in which the Charioteer of Delphi was once a subsidiary figure, we might well experience a moment of revulsion. We have come to think of the fragment as more vivid, more concentrated, and more authentic.
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951)