Kenneth Clark's Assessment Of Nudity In Western Art

Kenneth Clark has voiced his opinion that to be naked is to be in a vulnerable situation; unclothed and ashamed. His assessment of nudity is the body disrobed and embraced. Clark gathers that the nude has endured in Western art because man will always dream about the perfect female body and will seek, neverendingly, to create one to suit their need for sexual arousal. Clark believes the nude is not demeaning to women because it is an art form that depicts ideal beauty. To him, portraying the realistic or natural elements of a woman brings nothing but disappointment. Apparently, reproducing true features should be kept to animals and landscapes. Nature is meant to be copied but the female body is meant to be perfected. To remove imperfections is to remove reality; which is applicable because the perfect woman does not

He claims that it is within all of us that we want to preserve ourselves, and a way to do this is to create an arousing nude. An imaginary rule he seems to have made up, is that if a nude art does not arouse the viewer, it is bad art. A man should be sexually attracted to it or it has failed to be art. His view on the Japanese versions is that they must not understand how to do a nude because they incorporate aging and changing throughout life. It seems like he thinks that Durer’s drawings were failures because he drew them too accurate. The perfect nude is a combination of favored parts of hundreds of women. Supposedly, a proper nude is somewhere in between a mythical and realistic woman. Either it lacks enough beauty or it is too fake and cannot be real, therefore neither can be considered a successful nude. Nudes should be “ideal beauty” which differs not only from man to man, but from time to time. Therefore, he thinks that nudes will be a permanent factor