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Clive Bell

Clive Bell was an English art critic and a member of the Bloomsbury Group, closely associated with the painter and critic Roger Fry. In…

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1881 – 1964 · London; Sussex

Traditions: Analytic

Clive Bell was an English art critic and a member of the Bloomsbury Group, closely associated with the painter and critic Roger Fry. In Art he argued that what all genuine works of visual art share is 'significant form', a combination of lines and colours that arouses a distinctive aesthetic emotion. The theory gave influential support to Post-Impressionism and to formalism in aesthetics.

Key ideas

  • Significant form, arrangements of line and colour, is the common quality of all visual art.
  • The aesthetic emotion is a distinctive response to significant form.
  • Representational content is irrelevant to a work's value as art.
  • Formalism explains why art from very different cultures and periods can move us.

Major works

  • Art (1914)
  • Since Cézanne (1922)
  • Civilization (1928)

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