Bell, Clive

Art critic and Bloomsbury theorist. Bell was son of William Heward Bell (1849-1927), a civil engineer, and Hannah Taylor Cory (1850-1942). He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1899 studying history. There he was greatly influenced by G. E. Moore's philosophy. He was awared a Earl of Derby studentship in 1902 to study in Paris which he instead spend looking at art. Upon his return, he joined the "Thursday evenings" at the Gordon Square home of Thoby Stephen (1880-1906), whom he had met at Cambridge. Others in this group were Thoby's brother, Adrian, and their sisters, Vanessa and Virginia (the future Virginia Woolf). These evenings formed the basis for the British esthetic movement Bloomsbury. Bell married Vanessa Stephen in 1907 and became a major figure in the group. The Bell's second son was Quentin Bell, who also became an art writer. In 1910 Bell met the art historian Roger Fry. Together Bell and Fry mounted the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London in 1912. Bell adopted many of the ideas Fry had written about and publish a simplified version of the esthetic, Art, in 1914. The book was responsible for popularizing the term "significant form." Bell's numerous affairs with women ranging from his sister-in-law, Virginia (before she married Leonard Woolf) to others, seemed to affect Vanessa little. She simply lived from 1915 with her soul mate, Duncan Grant, whose child, Angelica Bell (b. 1918), she bore. Clive Bell joined the pacifist movement in World War I, issuing a pamphlet Peace at Once, which was confiscated by the Lord Mayor of London in 1916. Other writings followed, including On British Freedom (1923) criticizing British taste as "genteel servitude." He followed this with a survey of Impressionism, Landmarks in Nineteenth-century Painting, in 1927. His book on Proust published in, 1928, was Britain's first book on the French writer. The same year he issued Civilization, arguing the necessity of a leisured élite for the maintenance of civilization. A memoir, Old Friends: Personal Recollections, was published in 1956. Bell's book, Art was highly influential. It went through numerous editions and established the Bloomsbury art-for-art's sake esthetic, "significant form" condoning form, independent of content, as most significant aspect of a work of art. As such, Bell could link the art of different periods together through their form, such as works from the renaissance and modern eras. He capitalized on the burgeoning interest in Italian renaissance so-called "primitives" by writing, "go to Santa Croce or the Arena Chapel and admit tht if the greatest name in European painting is not Cézanne, it is Giotto."