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Annotations for Clive Bell, Art
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Who was
Clive Bell?
English art and literary critic Clive Bell
(Arthur Clive Heward Bell), b. Sept. 16, 1881, d. Sept. 18, 1964, figured prominently in the Bloomsbury
Group. Educated at Cambridge, he married (1907) Vanessa Stephen, a painter who was a daughter of the editor Sir Leslie
Stephen and the sister of the writer Virginia Woolf. Some of Bell's criticism is found in
Art (1914), in which he expounded on his theory of "significant form," An
Account of French Painting (1932), and Since Cezanne (1922), in which he
defended modernism in art. His other writings include Proust (1929) and Old Friends (1956). Quentin Bell, his son, wrote about his parents in
Bloomsbury (1968).
The foregoing was drawn from the Grolier Encyclopedia.
Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-73),
Dignity and Impudence.
Oil on canvas. 1839. Tate Gallery, London, UK.
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GIOTTO (c. 1267 - 1337) (Ambrogio Bondone),
The
Banishment of Joachim from the Temple. Fresco
For more information about fresco technique,
click
here.
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St. Sophia Church, Kiev, Ukraine.
Main construction completed in 1037.
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Stained Glass at Chartres Cathedral
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Kettle, Glass and Plate with Fruit
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)
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Significant form
Bell: "Only one answer seems possible - significant form. In each,
lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic
emotions."
Compare Bell's thesis with the
following defense of abstract
expressionism and modernism:
"Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi,
even Klee,
Matisse, and Cezanne, derive their chief
inspiration from the medium
they work in. The excitement
of their art seem to lie most of all in its
pure preoccupation
with the invention and arrangement of spaces,
surfaces,
shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily
implicated in these factors."
-- Clement Greenberg
"Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939)
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The intentional fallacy
Bell: "for the purposes of aesthetics we have no right, neither
is there any
necessity, to pry behind the object into the state
of mind of him who made
it."
This sentence endorses Bell's position
on what was later
called the intentional fallacy. For those who regard
it as a
genuine fallacy (a common mistake in reasoning), the
intentional
fallacy is the mistake of thinking that
interpretation or evaluation of
a work of art necessarily
requires insight into the intentions of the
work's creator.
Bell clearly regards reference to artistic intentions as
unnecessary. He thinks that it is is a fallacy to appeal to
those
intentions.
To learn more about the intentional fallacy, click
here.
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William Powell Frith
(1819-1909), The Railway Station,
1862
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commentary © 2002 Theodore Gracyk
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Last updated Nov. 15, 2007 |
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