Clive Bell
Clive Bell: A Life of Artistic Dedication
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Full Name and Common Aliases
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Clive Bell was born as Claude Farrar Bell on June 17, 1881, in Upper Norwood, London. He is commonly known by his first name, Clive.
Birth and Death Dates
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Bell passed away on July 29, 1964.
Nationality and Profession(s)
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Bell was British and worked as an art critic, historian, and curator. His expertise spanned various areas of the art world, including modern art, aesthetics, and art history.
Early Life and Background
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Clive Bell's early life was marked by a passion for art and culture. His family encouraged his interest in literature and music from a young age. In 1898, he attended Cambridge University to study law but eventually shifted focus to the arts. During this period, he developed friendships with notable artists and intellectuals, including Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell (later his wife). These relationships would later influence his artistic pursuits.
Major Accomplishments
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Bell's most significant contributions were as an art critic for The Nation magazine and a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He played a pivotal role in shaping British modernism and introducing European avant-garde movements to British audiences through his writing. His 1914 book, _Art_, remains a foundational text on aesthetics.
Notable Works or Actions
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Some of Bell's notable works include:
_Art_ (1914), where he developed the concept of "significant form"
_Proust_ (1927), which analyzed Marcel Proust's literary style in relation to art criticism
* His curatorial work at the Victoria and Albert Museum, focusing on modern European art
Impact and Legacy
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Bell's influence extends beyond his written works. He introduced a new generation of artists and critics to modern movements like Cubism and Fauvism. Through his writing, he helped bridge the gap between traditional British culture and emerging artistic currents.
Why They Are Widely Quoted or Remembered
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Clive Bell is widely quoted for his astute observations on art, literature, and aesthetics. His ideas continue to inform contemporary discussions of modernism, art criticism, and cultural analysis.
Quotes by Clive Bell
Clive Bell's insights on:
The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience – that is to say, they must be subjective.
Art and relligion are not professions: they are not occupations for which men can be paid. The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity. They do not product to live – they live to produce.
It would follow that ‘significant form’ was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.
Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.
What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? Only one answer seems possible— significant form. In each, lines and colors combined in a particular way; certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colors, these aesthetically moving forms, I call ‘Significant Form’; and ‘Significant Form’ is the one quality common to all works of visual art.
Civilized people can talk about anything. For them no subject is taboo.... In civilized societies there will be no intellectual bogeys at sight of which great grownup babies are expected to hide their eyes.
It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colors, and the combination of those shapes, that we recognize the colorist. Color becomes significant only when it becomes form.
The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.
Let the artist have just enough to eat, and the tools of this trade: ask nothing of him. Materially make the life of the artist sufficiently miserable to be unattractive, and no-one will take to art save those in whom the divine daemon is absolute.