Search Results

“... as nice as he looks.’ In that mode of feline understatement, nothing can overtake the words of Kenneth Clark (who was all eyes), that ‘Cyril was not conventionally handsome.’ The crayon sketch of Connolly on the jacket, by Augustus John, is no oil painting. But what might make us reluctant to spring to Connolly’s defence is that he said the same ...”

“... did not exist: it was the three small rooms of the Leicester Galleries which are described by Kenneth Clark in his autobiography as ‘more like a shop than a gallery’. It is an interesting exercise to imagine the recent art on display at the Royal Academy in such a small and unpretentious environment. The exhibition concludes with a mural ...”

“... 1942, not long before Courtauld’s funding was due to end, supporters of the institute, including Kenneth Clark and Lee, decided to approach Rab Butler, the secretary of state for education, who happened to be Courtauld’s son-in-law. His first idea was to attach the Warburg to the Victoria and Albert Museum, financed by a grant in aid, a proposal ...”

“... the experimental mimeographed magazine 0 to 9, which combined work by poets and artists – Clark Coolidge, Kenneth Koch, Adrian Piper, Robert Smithson, Yvonne Rainer. From Memory by Bernadette Mayer, Siglio, 2020. Courtesy Bernadette Mayer Papers, Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San ...”

“... artist. No modern critic has approached this role of the antique with more tact and success than Kenneth Clark in his book The Nude, and it is a pity that this title is absent from the extensive bibliography given by the authors. It would certainly be possible to interpret the ‘rules of art’ derived from this approach as technical rules for the ...”

“... sleep, thirst, lust.’ And another: ‘Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.’ Leonardo, Kenneth Clark said, was ‘the most relentlessly curious man in history’. The notebooks log that great quest of interestedness. His habit of inquisitiveness is even expressed in a little scribal tic, found on scores of manuscript pages. When he wanted to ...”

“... a picture in a morning. Some found Freud’s stylistic switch alarming, or worse that that: Kenneth Clark, an early admirer, wrote to Freud suggesting that he was deliberately suppressing what made his work remarkable. ‘I never saw him again,’ Freud tells Gayford. Another one off the Tiberian cliff. This looser brushwork did not lead to any ...”

“... appears as static as a Monet locomotive idling at the Gare St Lazare. He also left out the hare. Kenneth Clark described Rain, Steam and Speed as the ‘most extraordinary’ of Turner’s paintings. ‘I suppose that everybody today would accept it as one of the cardinal pictures of the 19th century on account of its subject as well as its ...”

“... was an aberration in which personality conspired with circumstances, creating a tangle which Axel Clark, in this admirably hard-headed critical biography, does much to sort out. Brennan was a prodigy of the Australian Fin-de-Siècle who had pretty well given up writing by the beginning of the Twenties, thereby giving himself more time in the day to be drunk ...”

“... the Nineties is to have first-hand experience of l’entre-siècle, a useful word I picked up from Kenneth Silver. Expect to see signs of what Henri Focillon in his book on the year 1000 identified as ‘centurial mysticism’, an affliction even more likely to be endemic when the century that is ending is also ending a millennium. These chronological ...”

“... of brush: previously he had used sable, afterwards hog-hair.’ This change in his work alienated Kenneth Clark, among others: ‘He wrote a card saying that I had deliberately suppressed everything that made my work remarkable, or something like that, and ended: “I admire your courage.” I never saw him again.’ Among Freud’s supporters was ...”

“... was a club his friends thought he ought to belong to – as they (Isaiah, Stuart, "K” [Kenneth Clark], Noel, Freddy) did.’ Part of the difficulty of saying anything even halfway critical of Spender is similar to the difficulty of raising even the mildest reservations about the genre of contemporary literary biography: one risks being cast as ...”

“... Bloomsbury have sent out the first publicity pack for Kenneth Tynan’s diaries, edited by John Lahr, which are to be published in October. Among the slogans (‘Think Alan Clark meets Alan Bennett’ – no, don’t) and the paraphernalia (a padlock and key) is a pamphlet of highlights ...”

“... the BBC books that accompanied the famous television series of the late 1960s and early 1970s – Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, The Ascent of Man, Life on Earth – and we were working on the Listener, which published the scripts. (The Listener’s circulation rose by 16,000 with the first Clark lecture and dipped by ...”

“... introduced Bacon to collectors and galleries and other painters, even persuading Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, to visit Bacon’s studio. (‘Interesting, yes,’ Clark said. ‘What extraordinary times we live in.’) In 1945, Ben Nicholson pulled out of a planned six-artist show ...”