Bell, Clive (Arthur Clive Howard Bell) (1881-1964) art critic, nonfiction writer

Clive Bell was born in East Shefford, Bedfordshire, England, to William Heyward Bell, a mining engineer. He attended Cambridge, where he was influenced by the moral philosophy of G. E. Moore, which emphasized the enjoyment of conversation and beautiful objects. In 1907 Bell married Vanessa Stephen, daughter of Leslie Stephen and sister of Virginia Woolf.

In his early career Bell wrote literary reviews for the Athenaeum periodical. In 1910 and 1912 he attended postimpressionist art exhibitions organized by his mentor and friend, Roger Fry. These events led Bell to focus his writing on art criticism. His first work on this subject, Art (1914), marked the beginning of his career as one of the world’s foremost art theorists.

In Art Bell sets forth his “significant form” concept in assessing aesthetic quality. Bell writes that in each work of art, “lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call ‘Significant Form’ . . . the one quality common to all works of visual art.” For Bell the focus of an artwork was not the subject but instead the form and design, and the feelings and ideas they expressed.

Art stirred great controversy at the time it was published. Many critics questioned Bell’s logic and could not understand why “significant form” is the essential great quality of great art. Critic Randall Davies asked, “But why should Mr. Bell suppose that the forms that move him are the only ones proper to move others?” Despite its detractors, Art helped boost popular interest in postimpressionist painters.

Bell’s other important works of art criticism include Since Cezanne (1922), a discussion of the French artist Paul Cezanne’s influence, and An Account of French Painting (1932), a history of French art over nine centuries. He also wrote On British Freedom (1923), a discussion of British politics and society; and Civilization (1928), an analysis of the qualities that make up a civilized state of society. In one of his later books, Old Friends: Personal Recollections (1956), Bell recalls the friendships he had while part of the loose-knit group of writers and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group. The scholar Donald Laing has written that Bell’s works “provide a valuable record, not only of some forty years of English art history, but also of a sensitive and intelligent man’s engagement with the major development to take place in the visual arts in the first half of the twentieth century.”

Works about Clive Bell:
- Bywater, William G., Jr. Clive Bell’s Eye. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975.
- Laing, Donald A. Clive Bell: An Annotated Bibliography of the Published Writings. New York: Garland, 1983.