Bell, Clive

Bell, Clive (1881–1964). British writer on art, born at East Shefford, Berkshire, the son of a civil engineer. He studied history at Trinity College, Cambridge, then spent a year in Paris, 1903–4, looking at art and enjoying the company of painters. In 1910 he met Roger Fry (by chance, on a train) and—immediately discovering they were kindred spirits—he became Fry's chief apostle in helping to spread an appreciation of the Post-Impressionist painters in Britain. Bell helped with the organization of Fry's first Post-Impressionist exhibition (1910), and he chose the British section of the second one (1912), including work by his wife Vanessa Bell, Fry himself, and Duncan Grant among Bloomsbury Group artists, with Spencer Gore and Wyndham Lewis representing the more radical wing. His aesthetic ideas, expressed most fully in his book Art (1914), were much con cerned with the theory of ‘significant form'. He invented this term to denote ‘the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other classes of objects'—a quality never found in nature but common to all works of art and existing independently of representational or symbolic content. The book is not now taken seriously as philosophy, and it contains some absurd statements (‘The bulk of those who flourished between the high Renaissance and the contemporary movement may be divided into two classes, virtuosi and dunces'); however, it is written with fervour, and his ideas were undoubtedly influential in spreading an attitude that placed emphasis on the formal qualities of a work of art (see FORMALISM). Bell was a great Francophile; his other books include An Account of French Painting (1931) and a study of the writer Marcel Proust (1928). He was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour but received no comparable distinction from his own country.

Quentin Bell (1910–1996), the son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, was a painter, sculptor, potter, and author, probably best known for his writings on art, mainly on the Victorian period and the Bloomsbury Group. Between 1962 and 1975 he was a professor successively at the universities of Leeds, Hull, and Sussex. Quentin's daughter, Cressida Bell, is a textile designer, and his son, Julian Bell (1952– ), is a painter and writer on art, author of a monograph on Bonnard (1994).