To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. Th...e word "nude," on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the early eighteenth century to persuade artless islanders that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central subject of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is just as wrong to judge paintings from the point of view of pictures as it is to judge pictures from the point of view of pai...nting. A painting has its own rule, its own justification within itself. A picture has its criterion outside itself, in the external reality it imitates. Several critics have recently made the remark that nonrepresentational art has this major defect, that being unrelated to external reality, it has no criterion by which it can be judged. The argument would be valid if the art of painting were the art of picturing. As it is, all judgments and appreciations of paintings founded upon their relation to an external model are irrelevant to painting. A painting is the embodiment of a form in a matter; the whole being of a picture is determined by the relationship that obtains between the image itself and some external reality.... As compared with a painting, whose ultimate end is to achieve a fitting object of contemplation, images are characterized by their ambition to represent all the objects they include, and to represent these objects with all the details that are compatible with their pictorial representation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Macduff. What three things does drink especially provoke? Porter. Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, ...it provokes, and unprovokes: it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things ... nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes: it ...provokes the desire but it takes away the performance. Therefore much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him and it mars him; it sets him on and it takes him off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Critics of visual arts and of music describe in words--that is to say, a system of signs other than those made by brushes on canva...s or chisels into stone or notes of music--those characteristics of painting or sculpture or music which can be described or analysed. Visual artists and composers can disregard critics on the ground that the medium of verbal criticism bears so indirect a relation to the medium in which they make something. Poets are in a different situation. With the development of so-called scientific methods of criticism they are made ever conscious that criticism of poetry is in the same medium of work as the art which they practise. "Close analysis" is useful to critics and readers. But for the poet there is the danger of disintegration of poetry into paraphrase, examination of technique, influences, all analysed in the language of criticism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no kind of false Wit which has been so recommended by the Practice of all Ages, as that which consists in a Jingle of Wor...ds, and is comprehended under the general Name of Punning. It is indeed impossible to kill a Weed, which the Soil has a natural Disposition to produce. The seeds of Punning are in the Minds of all Men, and tho' they may be subdued by Reason, Reflection, and good Sense, they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest Genius, that is not broken and cultivated by the Rules of Art. Imitation is natural to us, and when it does not raise the Mind to Poetry, Painting, Musick, or other more noble Arts, it often breaks out in Punns and Quibbles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I never wanted to live an unembellished life, and I have never done it.... Living under such a compulsion has been like painting p...ictures of life, and I don't take kindly to suggestions that I might have been less egotistically employed had I become a trained nurse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A bather whose clothing was strewed By winds that left her quite nude... Saw a man come along And, unless I am wrong, You expected this line to be rude.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was a young man of Australia Who painted his ass like a dahlia.... The drawing was fine And the painting divine But the aroma--that was the failure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »