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person1881-1964

Clive Bell

Disciplines:
aesthetics
cultural criticism/art criticism

Summary

British art critic and Bloomsbury Group member who developed the formalist aesthetic theory of significant form — the claim that what makes art valuable is its formal properties, not its representational content.

Core Contribution

Significant form: the combination of lines, shapes, and colors in a work of art that produces a specific aesthetic emotion. Representative or narrative content is irrelevant to a work's value as art.

Key Spikes & Highlights

  • Argued that representational painting is aesthetically irrelevant — a Raphael Madonna has value as arrangement of form, not as a depiction of the Virgin.
  • His theory was criticized for being circular: significant form is what produces aesthetic emotion, and aesthetic emotion is what significant form produces.

Notable Works & Achievements

Art

Since Cézanne

Civilization

Historical Influences

Roger Fry G. E. Moore Paul Cézanne

Intellectual Lineage

British AestheticismPost-ImpressionismBloomsbury Group

Contemporaries & Peers

Roger Fry Virginia Woolf John Maynard Keynes

Minds Influenced

Monroe Beardsley Nelson Goodman

Intellectual Posterity

Aesthetic Formalism

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Clive Bell

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