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Home , Clive Bell, Roger Fry

1 (1881—1964) BRITISH CRITIC AND HISTORIAN

Clive Bell broke new ground in by defining art independently of representational subject matter, political content, emotional expression or social context. He developed a formalist that has become one of the classics of twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics. The initial, and now canonical, statement of it is found in the widely-read first chapter of his Art (1914), though some of his , both contemporaneous with and later than that book, give us a more nuanced picture of his views. He defines art in terms of a property he calls ‘significant form’. The grasp of significant form in art is, according to Bell, the source of aesthetic appreciation and one of the most exquisite human pleasures. Both his theory and his arguments have been attacked from many quarters but, as will be shown, he articulates something important about our experience of artworks that gives his work a heightened contemporary interest. That said, it will be useful to keep in mind three facts about Bell's artistic culture. First, , very much on the ascent, was thought to reproduce mechanically visual appearances. As he indicates in, for example, his first chapter to Landmarks in Nineteenth Century , (1927), Bell was eager to differentiate the painter's task from the photographer's. He speaks of painters who turned into ‘mere pictorial chatterboxes’. Second, the public was gaining access to artefacts from other cultures that were visually beautiful, but intellectually unintelligible or unfamiliar: for example, African masks, Japanese prints and Asian manuscripts. Third, artists of great talent were beginning to work towards abstraction. Bell's formalism, like any momentous aesthetic theory, is a response to the art world. He explains why people might appreciate an African mask as an aesthetic object, though they do not understand it in the way they might an English portrait. Moreover, at a time when the typical spectator gravitated to representational artworks that were impressive in their verisimilitude or effective for eliciting moral sentiment, Bell argues that representational content is irrelevant to true. aesthetic appreciation of artworks. His notion of appreciation includes both enjoyment and a distinctive, intuitive discernment, which leads to the rapture that Bell deems unique to aesthetic experience. Representational content, for Bell, except in an enlightened spectator, will either conceal or cloud the artistic essence of a work, which one cannot appreciate while focusing on the subject matter or technical virtuosity of the artist. This aesthetic meaning resides, for Bell, only in the formal elements of an artwork. Thus he championed successfully artists such as Gauguin, Matisse, , and his two heroes, Cezanne and Picasso, all of whom were painting in ways that baffled many spectators, at least those who bothered to heed the works of these painters at all. He achieved this both through his critical writings and through his collaboration with on the groundbreaking First (1910) and Second (1912) Post-Impressionist Exhibitions in London. Fry, too, developed an influential version of formalism in response to art. Unlike Fry, however, Bell has a central place in philosophical aesthetics because his formalism has deep roots in the ethics and epistemology of G.E. Moore, one of the seminal figures in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Moore, an ethical intuitionist whom Bell encountered at Cam-bridge in 1899, influenced all of the members of the , but Bell made special use of Moore's views. While some scholars have questioned the acuity of Bell's understanding of Moore, Bell's work does reflect Moore's analytic method and ethical ideals. He modelled his own idea of aesthetic goodness as immediately known and unanalysable on Moore's notion of ethical goodness. Less centrally, he seems to appeal to Moore's ethical notions to justify the moral value of aesthetic experience, which he takes as one of the most exalted and worthwhile human activities. As for the moral value of art, Bell insists that an artwork, qua artwork, should have no moral content, but that the purely aesthetic experience of artworks is one of the greatest human ethical attainments. This has led some to charge that Bell draws an elitist separation of art from morality and culture. 2 Let us look more closely at the theory itself. Not only is art independent of morality, Bell argues, but art, by its essence, has nothing to do with the emotions of everyday life or history or ordinary of the material world, for art must be defined by reference to its purely formal elements, more specifically a he calls ‘significant form’. What is ‘significant form’? In developing this idea, he begins from two premises, both based on the data of introspection: first, that there is a distinctive aesthetic experience; and second, that this experience is the same whether one is appreciating an early classical Greek pot, a Picasso drawing, a Rembrandt self- portrait, or the mosaics at Ravenna. Just as the same base conditions obtain whenever we have a perceptual experience of yellow, so the same conditions must give rise to every occurrence of the aesthetic experience. Though he refers to the aesthetic experience as the ‘aesthetic emotion’, he construes it much more as a perception than an emotion. Thus he reasons that all works that elicit this experience share a common property, which is the source of aesthetic value and the defining feature of art. This property, ‘significant form’, is both necessary and sufficient for art. In order for a created object to be an artwork, then, it must possess significant form; even if a canvas is painted by Leonardo da Vinci, without significant form it cannot attain the status of art. In Since Cezanne (1922), he avers that the only important distinction to be drawn between artists is that between good and bad artists, not between artists of one movement and those of another — a radical claim for a critic so conversant with . He describes significant form as emerging from colours, lines, forms and their relations that ‘stir our ’. Many commentators have found his account at best inexact; others have charged him with circularity: significant form is what elicits the aesthetic experience, and the aesthetic experience is that which we feel in the presence of significant form. Bell does not really address this matter, but his problem is that facing any philosophical theory moving from the subjectivity of experience to a world existing outside of that experience. As for his imprecision in characterizing significant form, it is reasonable to say that it is a higher- order quality that emerges from the combination of purely formal qualities, such as line, colour, picture space and texture; significant form emerges from these formal qualities in the way that, for example, arises from the combination of two musical notes. Significant form, according to Bell, cannot be the same as , for our responses to beauty are conditioned by our desires and emotions of everyday life. A portrait of a beautiful person elicits in us emotions that may be tinged with , personal psychological associations, or political feelings. For Bell, such responses have nothing to do with art. Our responses to significant form are separate from so-called ordinary life. Thus, representation in art is not inherently bad, nor is beauty; they simply must not be confused with the aesthetic dimension of the work. What he does judge bad, however, is purely descriptive or political art, such as that of the Italian Futurists, which he declines to call art. In contrast, in an essay on Pierre Bonnard in Since Cezanne, Bell remarks that Bonnard, while he ‘loves what he paints’ conveys ‘something more significant than his feelings for cups or cats or human beings’. Rather, Bonnard ‘created form with a significance of its own, to the making of which went his passion and its object, but which is something quite distinct from both ... a .’ Just as, for Bell, significant form is separate from life, we grasp significant form by means of a separate aesthetic sense, which remains uncultivated in many people. Significant form is discerned immediately, intuitively, and non-inferentially. The immediacy of this aesthetic perception may require great concentration. We see the lines, colours and shapes visually, but we must focus on them and their relations in order to have that grasp of significant form. Indeed, Bell writes often of the responsibility of the critic to emphasize those formal qualities that will lead the viewer to an experience of significant form. Again, his essay on Bonnard, whose works admit of a plurality of interpretations, provides a good example: ‘tones of miraculous subtlety seem to be flowing into an enchanted pool ... From this pool emerge gradually forms which appear sometimes vaporous and sometimes tentative . . . When we have 3 realized that the pool of colour is, in fact, a design of extraordinary originality and perfect coherence our aesthetic appreciation is at its height.’ One might ask why Bell refers to aesthetic form as ‘significant’. Bell sometimes suggests that significant form does in a way signify. In Art, he proposes a ‘metaphysical hypothesis’ whereby significant form reveals something about ultimate reality. He rarely returns to this theme, but he persists in affirming, as he does in Art, that ‘Great art remains stable and unobscure because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place…’ Some aestheticians and critics object to the distance Bell appears to place between art and life, between art and culture. Some, among them would be defenders of 's aesthetics, object to his implication that a work can be understood independently of an artist's intentions or psyche; others to his clear opposition to the recently voguish historicist or political interpretations of artworks. Indeed, Bell himself does not always seem to follow his own admonition to the critics to focus on form alone. These are complex issues, for Bell does seem sensitive to the role of personality and history in the artist's vision. Clearly, he is inimical to a historicist criticism that would analyse a work of art as a document revealing the historical and social conditions of a specific culture. He is equally hostile to a critical approach that treats the artwork as the key to an artist's individual psyche. But, as his critical essays make evident, he values the history of art; he looks for the influence of Pissarro on Cezanne, and understands the politics of the art world and the idiomatic nature of artistic expression. Similarly, he remarks on the individual sensibility of various artists. The key to this is his notion of the ‘artistic problem’: the projects that artists set for themselves, projects partly determined by the art that has preceded them, partly by an artist's own aesthetic and intellectual imagination. Bell advises us to understand the artistic problem in analysing a painting, which an analysis of its form will enable us to do. In truth, though, Bell's own critical essay shows that we do need more outside information than Bell explicitly admits. We can see the value of Bell's contribution by looking at his own underlying project. His endeavour is to make the analysis of art both aesthetic and non-subjective. He clearly acknowledges the role of aesthetic pleasure in our response to artworks, but he also believes that we should give reasons for our about art. Art, he is telling us, is too rigorous to be treated as a matter of mere preference. Even those many contemporary aestheticians who defend relativism about art, or who reject the notion of there being a single essence exemplified by all of the wildly different things we call art, acknowledge the importance of Bell's contribution. Bell's theory is beset with conceptual problems and is now surpassed by later formalist thinkers such as Monroe Beardsley, and, more recently, Nick Zangwill. None the less Bell, with his insouciant erudition and passion for art, remains a key figure in theory.

Biography Arthur Clive Heward Bell Born East Shefford, Berkshire, 16 September 1881, son of a wealthy coal merchant. Bell went up to University in 1899, where he met G.E. Moore, , and Thoby Stephens, friends who would lead him to the centre of Bloomsbury. After Cambridge, Bell went to France, becoming immersed in avant-garde art. In 1908 he married the artist Vanessa Stephen, the sister of . Dividing his time between France and , Bell was an active art reviewer and cultural critic. With Roger Fry, he organized the First (1910) and Second (1912) Post-Impressionist Exhibitions in London. Important publications were Art, 1914, and Since Cezanne, 1922. Bell died in London on 17 September 1964.