Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Nude, a Study in Ideal Form by Kenneth Clark

Review by: Joseph C. Sloane
Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Dec., 1957), pp. 276-
277
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/427616
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 276 REVIEWS

completas, ed. Mille [Madrid, 1

gusto and derives from it the
ties and perfections of all crea
painting and that of the poetr
poetic portrait, etc.
Among the most rewarding
personal relations between pa
technique of both arts shared b
larger number of poets who
This book is therefore of int
of literature.
LuIs MoNGUI6

CLARK, KENNETH. The Nude, A Study in Ideal Form. New York, 1956, Pantheon Books,
Bollingen Series XXXV-2, pp. xxi + 458, 298 pls., $7.50.
This fine book is so superbly written that reading it was a delight for the reviewer. There
are few scholars who carry their learning as lightly as Sir Kenneth Clark, and fewer still
whose literary style is so deft, exact, and full of cheerfully unexpected turns of phrase.
Speaking of Diirer's drawing of Apollo, the author remarks, "Not for the last time a German
artist has constructed a work of irreproachable classicism; yet a construction it remains,
concealing only temporarily (though with wonderful mastery) Direr's real conviction that
the body was a curious and rather alarming mechanism." The books abounds in phrases
just as felicitous, but it also steers a remarkable course through the rocks and shoals of a
subject which our lingering Puritanism fills with danger for the less expert helmsman. All
the implications of the unclothed body are dealt with, and at length; but the experience for
the reader, rather than being shocking, is such as to give him a new sense of the worth of his
own body and its power to interpret man to himself. The volume has a certain informality,
possibly because it is an amplification of the A. W. Mellon lectures delivered in the Na-
tional Gallery in Washington in the spring of 1953, an occasion which must surely have been
a joy to the audience.
After making a basic and necessary distinction between nakedness and nudity-a naked
body is one deprived of its clothes, while a nude one is "balanced, prosperous, and confi-
dent"-Clark proceeds to maintain that it was the Greeks who established the Western
idea of both the male and female nude, two pieces of living architecture to which all the
masters of the classic tradition turned for centuries. The one great exception to the history
of the variations on this theme is the appearance, near the beginning of the fifteenth cen-
tury, of the fully realized Northern version of the body as seen in the work of artists like
Jan Van Eyck or Hugo Van der Goes. The classical concept of this form sees it as a symbol
for order whose beauty results from a fusion of that order with desire: a proud, graceful,
flexible, deeply human thing well protected by style and quite capable of expressing ideas
of a spiritual as well as a physical nature. To this ideal Clark compares the other type in
a startling simile: "Roots and bulbs, pulled up into the light, give us for a moment a feeling
of shame. They are pale, defenseless, unself-supporting. They have the formless character
of life that has been both protected and oppressed. In the darkness their slow, biological
gropings have been the contrary of 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 miniature,
we experience the same sensation." Small wonder that the bulk of the essay concerns the
ideal body!
To make the subject manageable, the author has compressed the uses of the nude into
the expression of a few very broad concepts: energy, pathos, and ecstasy. The Greeks con-
tributed the original forms and the elementary exploration of the possibilities of the figure,
but it remained for the masters of the Renaissance tradition to exploit them fully. Dona-
tello, Pollaiuolo, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Titian, the Mannerists, and later
Rubens, Poussin, Watteau, Boucher, Ingres, Degas, and Renoir all found precious ore in

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 REVIEWS 277

this nearly inexhaustible mine

all, ancient or modern, is the m
master of the human form, th
the innumerable generalizations
(like Mantegna, El Greco), or
given their due, but the autho
speak what he thinks, feels, a
forms and practitioners of his
The argument of the last cha
briefly, is too complex to discu
lieves that success of any lastin
still tie the nude body firmly t
artistic strength and fascinatio
The plates for the most part a
too dark to illumine the point
work analyzed in the text, but
ber intervened. Notes, a brief
study of a difficult subject.
JOSEPH C. SLOANE

L6PEZ-REY, JosE. A Cycle of Goya's Drawings. The Expression of Truth and Liberty. New
York, 1956, Macmillan, pp. 159, 134 ills., $12.75.
A Cycle of Goya's Drawings by Jos6 L6pez-Rey, associate professor at the Institute of
Fine Arts, New York University, adds another discussion of the artist's work to the already
extensive literature existing in many languages. This group of drawings, all but one of which
remain together in the Prado at Madrid, if previously published and discussed in part, have
never been treated as a whole. This present exposition attempts to define them, first, as
great expressions of the artist's own genius and as notable works of art; and secondly, in
terms of the political atmosphere of the period, if not necessarily as the result thereof.
Goya's high place among the world's outstanding creators, his profoundly absorbing and
moving genius as a creator, has for one hundred and fifty years brought forth a varied abun-
dance of opinion in writing, especially in recent times, so that the appearance of additional
comment runs the risk of challenge in opinion and interpretation. Goya's importance as an
artist reflecting his own time, and as one acutely sensitive to the tempo of change from the
eighteenth to the nineteenth century with its revolutionary shift in viewpoint, marked
him as the precursor of new generations of artists both spiritually and technically. The
extent of his influence on the rapid changes of French nineteenth-century painting and
drawing makes him one of the key formulators of present-day painting.
In the first part of this book, L6pez-Rey reviews the history and position of Spain from
the time of the French Revolution in 1789, through Napoleon's invasion of Spain and the
years following, up to those last few years when Goya became self-exiled in Bordeaux. He
discusses Goya's liberal ideas against this background, his wisdom in remaining as aloof
and independent as possible within the complex and changing scene in which he often be-
came involved through his court connections. He shows that Goya's ideas and sympathies
were specifically liberal in terms of the period and not always in tune with revolutionary
trends. He treats Goya's attitude in his art as a commentary on Goya's own and the work
as a "temperature" of the times rather than as a direct expression of the background as
motivation for his art-these drawings specifically-taking care to indicate that "the series
was not conceived or produced as a limited changing comment on the day, or chronicle on
current events; but rather that he used the subjects, which allude to contemporary events,
in the broadest sense of expressing his own latent feelings, in a universality of purpose,
transcending political events."
L6pez-Rey dates the series between 1810-20. He associates them with the oil murals of
around 1819, now in the Prado, with which Goya decorated his country house on the out-
skirts of Madrid, and "which offer meaningful stylistic peculiarities."

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