Clive Bell
Clive Bell
Arthur Clive Heward Bellwas an English art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group. Bell died, aged 83, in London...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth16 September 1881
mistake work class
Do not mistake a crowd of big wage earners for the leisure class.
above activity aesthetic appreciate art bring human ideas knowledge lifted memories moment shut stream transports work
For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life.
art reality details
Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art.
discovery cezanne columbus
Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form.
class comfort middle
Comfort came in with the middle classes.
art mean feelings
We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.
art quality degrees
There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.
age genius worship
Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.
art men two
Art and religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstacy.
reality significant form
It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.
beautiful art mean
We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.
art men occupation
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.
trying degrees emotion
I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.
art people peculiar
All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.