100 Details - Softcover

Clark, Kenneth

4.26

34 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674638638 ISBN 13: 9780674638631

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1990

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100 Details offers Kenneth Clark's personal choice of details of paintings in the National Gallery, London, and his responses to them. Clark chooses the pictures he likes best, hoping that we will come to like them too. The result is like taking a stroll through a glorious art collection with a critic of astounding eye and intellect at our side.

First published in 1938, the book is arranged in a series of facing page spreads, now reproduced in full color, enabling us to discern analogies and contrasts between painting that are rarely seen together--a faun from Piero di Cosimo, a satyr from Rubens. The running commentaries are Kenneth Clark at his best. They range from a few lines to an entire history of still life between Giotto and Picasso, all conveyed in easy style.

Clark insists that there are countless ways of enjoying paintings, provided we stop, look, and think. He has picked the ones to stop at: the detail makes us look. And his comments, wide in scope and catholic in approach, suggest lines of thought so diverse that it is inconceivable that none will strike a chord with the reader.

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About the Author:

Kenneth Clark is widely known for his television programs on art, especially "Civilisation" (1969). He was Director of the National Gallery from 1934 to 1945. He went on to become Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, and later Chairman of the Arts Council. He was made a life peer in 1969, and died in 1983.

Review:

This stroll through one of the world's greatest museums with one of the most erudite connoisseurs of this century delivers a master class in how to look at pictures. By isolating passages and comparing images, the book demonstrates how a cultivated eye distinguishes the great from the ordinary. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Kenneth Clark's 100 Details...provides a panoply of fine details from great masters of the past. (Christian Science Monitor)

Art lovers will delight in this reissue, which was originally written in 1938 while Kenneth Clark was director of the National Gallery. Presented for the first time in faithful full-color reproduction, the randomly chosen details from 71 of the Gallery's best-loved paintings are arranged in pairs of iconographic similarity. Some of the comparisons are obvious...and others are inspired...Clark's highly readable comments are typical of the style that endeared him years ago to a wide audience of art connoisseurs and amateurs alike. (J. William Shank Leonardo)

Affecting and illuminating. (Times Educational Supplement)

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