Word: humanics
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...called "classic" eras, indeed, between any culture and another, lies in attitudes toward physical beauty. American life and letters are largely centered on sex, but the failure of contemporary art, especially public sculpture--for most sculpture has always been public--to find especial satisfaction and success in depicting the human form points toward a loss of feeling for the plastics of human beauty. What seems to intrigue us often is a sort of peeping-tom attitude, that seems to offer delight in a sort of pseudo-wickedness, yet is extremely embarrassed by acknowledgement of the physical facts. Clark refreshingly does...
...nude, then, need not only hymn what a marvelous work is man, but also how pathetic. The emotions that shape the internal world in which every man lives are perhaps most tellingly portrayed in art in terms of the human body. By one's very close to it, one cannot think otherwise. "Our continuous effort to keep ourselves balanced upright on our legs affects every judgment on design. The disposition of areas in the torso is related to our most vivid experiences, so that abstract shapes, the square and the circle, seem to us male and female, and that...
This "truth" of the nude is reenforced by the knowledge that human beauty is transitory. The Greeks felt that the human figure in its prime is the highest subject of art, but not, one suspects, from the unbalanced optimism about the powers of man for which they are often given credit, but from a sense of tragedy of the mortal before the immortal and of the fleetingness of youth and happiness...
...Christian morality served to sharpen its erotic impact. The formula of the classical ideal had been more protective than any drapery; whereas the shape of the Gothic body, which suggested that it was normally clothed, gave it the impropriety of a secret." Ergo, a rebirth of interest in the human form as a subject of art in the Renaissance, although with a different view of man implicit in every muscle, for the Renaissance--especially the Michelangelo--nude was burdened with a soul...
...second way in which complementarity may be used is to bring man to the realization that though he must always strive for order in knowledge, he must concurrently realize that there are limitations on that knowledge imposed by the scope of human reason and experience...