“Clive Bell” by Henry Lamb, Bell lived: 1881-1964
Clive Bell (the portrait on the right is by Roger Fry)
Clive Bell  “Form in Modern Painting” from his book Art  1914
–	Art theorist and critic.
–	Champion of the post-impressionists.
–	1899 a student at Cambridge. 
–	Bloomsbury group, G.E. Moore, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant 

His books
–	Art (1914) 
–	Pot-boilers (1918) 
–	Since Cézanne (1922) 
–	Civilization (1928) 
–	Proust (1929) 
–	An Account of French Painting (1931) 
–	Old Friends (1956) 

G.E. Moore  1873-1958
•	Principia Ethica 1903
•	Bell on Moore “Mr. Moore [asks] what things are good in themselves, as ends that is to say. He comes to a conclusion with which we all agree…’states of mind,’…  alone are good as end.”  Art 
Values
•	“Bell believed that ultimately the value of anything whatever lies only in its being a means to "good states of mind." Since he also believed that "there is no state of mind more excellent or more intense than the state of aesthetic contemplation" he believed that works of visual art were among the most valuable things there could be.” Wikipedia article on Clive Bell. 
Bell’s own illustration, frontispiece, Art, WEI FIGURE, FIFTH CENTURY

Gu Kaizhi  (344-405 CE) Chinese. “The Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies” [Bell mentions this artist with approval in Art]
46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London, where the Bloomsbury Group met starting in 1905 Vanessa Bell and Virginia Wolfe lived here.  Clive Bell visited.
Virginia Woolf (centre) outside a summerhouse with her house guests, economist Maynard Keynes (right) and Angelica Bell, Vanessa Bell and Clive Bell, 1930s. 
Charleston, England: home and country meeting place for the writers, painters and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group. 
Interior of Charleston

•	“Vanessa Bell, née Stephen” by Duncan Grant 
Photograph of Roger Fry, Desmond McCarthy and Clive Bell sitting in the garden at Charleston. 1933
The starting point of aesthetics is  the personal experience of a peculiar emotion [aesthetic emotion]
•	Objects that provoke it are works of art, sensitive people agree.
•	The emotions are not the same but are of the same kind.
•	They are provoked by every kind of visual art:  pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles.
•	This emotion is called the aesthetic emotion.
Common Quality
•	We need to find some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke this emotion to solve the central problem of aesthetics: the essential quality of the work of art, that distinguishes it from all other classes of objects [like Plato].

“work of art”
•	If works of art do not have a common quality "work of art" is meaningless.
•	There must be some one such quality possessing which in the least degree the work is not worthless.
•	What provokes our aesthetic emotions?

Significant Form
•	He gives examples [from many cultures]:  Sta. Sophia, Chartres, Mexican sculpture, Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto, Poussin, Piero, and Cezanne.
•	answer:   Significant Form:  lines and colors combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms 
HAGIA SOPHIA, or Santa Sophia = Greek for "Holy Wisdom"  known as the Ayasofya Museum a former Eastern Orthodox church converted to a mosque in 1453 -    Istanbul Turkey.   360 CE
Rose Window, Chartres Cathedral, France, 1215 CE
Aztec sculpture, Quetzalcoatl, Tenochtitlan, Mexico, 1500 CE?
Bell’s own illustration, PERSIAN DISH, ELEVENTH CENTURY (?)

Chinese rug late 19th century
Giotto 1304-06  Fresco Capella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel) Padua, Italy

Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego.  c. 1655
PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA, Flagellation of Christ,  1440.
CEZANNE Paul, Apples & Oranges, c. 1899
Cezanne.  The Large Bathers, 1895-1906.   
Bell’s own illustration CÉZANNE, House in Province near Gardanne, 1886-90, Photo, Druet

Merely Subjective?
–	Is aesthetics then merely subjective because the objects that provoke this emotion are different for each person?
–	Aesthetics cannot be objective:  we recognize works of art only by our feeling. 
–	About taste there is no disputing.
–	[However] a good critic can make me see things I overlooked in a picture [relation to Hume].
The critic.
–	The function of criticism is to point out those parts, the combination of which unite to produce significant form.
–	And in receiving the aesthetic emotion I will see it as a work of art.
–	The critic cannot tell me:  he must make me feel it for myself, make me see it.
–	I have no right to consider anything a work of art to which I cannot react emotionally

Possibility of a generally valid aesthetic theory. 
•	I am not implying that no theory of aesthetics can have general validity.
•	X may be the only quality believed to be common in the works that move us, even though the works that move us are different:  we may just disagree about the presence of x.
•	Significant form is the only quality common to the works that move me, and I ask others whether it is the only common quality that moves them. [X = significant form]
Why are we profoundly moved by such forms?
–	The question is irrelevant to aesthetics, where we need consider only our emotions and their object.
–	For aesthetics, we have no right, nor need, to pry into the state of mind of the creator.
–	relation of art to life? (saved till later)
–	We need only say forms arranged and combined according to unknown and mysterious laws do move us in a particular way.
The business of the artist
–	The business of an artist is to so combine and arrange forms that they shall move us.

forgetting color?
•	Significant form includes combinations of lines and colors. [Kant did not consider color important, but Bell does.]
•	The distinction between form and color is unreal:  one cannot perceive a colorless line or space [true?], or formless relations of colors.
•	White and black are counted as colors.
Bell’s own illustration, Picasso
Detail of wall painted by PERSUE X ENUE X JAES AT THE WRITERZ BLOK, SAN DIEGO, FRIDAY, MAY 29, 2009, accessed Oct. 6, 2010 
What about beauty?
   	
•	You can use “beauty” if you mean by that combinations of lines and colors that provoke a certain emotion.
•	Everyone has called a butterfly or a flower beautiful, but no one feels the same kind of emotion towards these as towards a cathedral or a picture.
•	We do not feel an aesthetic emotion for natural beauty.
•	Although some people may feel towards nature what we feel towards art, most feel something very different for birds and flowers than for pots and statues.
•	Later I will answer the question why are we so profoundly moved by combinations of lines and color.
Confusion of aesthetic and sensual
•	There is an aesthetic and a non-aesthetic use of “beautiful.”  “Beautiful huntin” is non-aesthetic.
•	“Beautiful woman.” When an artist calls a withered hag [Portrait of an old woman, Rembrandt,1655] beautiful or a battered torso [Venus de Milo] it moves him aesthetically.

•	Aphrodite of Milos better known as the Venus de Milo, is an ancient Greek statue and one of the most famous works of ancient Greek sculpture. Created sometime between 130 and 100 BC.
“Beautiful”
•	To the man in the street “beautiful” usually means “desirable.”  To many, the sexual flavor of “beauty” is stronger than the aesthetic:  for them, a beautiful picture is a photo of a pretty girl.
•	Confusion of the aesthetic and sensual beauty is why I do not use the term “beauty.”
•	I have no quarrel with anyone who wants to call this “significant relations of form” and call these relations rhythm.
There are pictures that interest and excite us but do not move us aesthetically as works of art.
–	In “Descriptive Painting” forms are used as means of suggesting emotion or conveying information. 
–	Examples:  portraits, topographical works,   pictures that tell stories [Paddington Station example], illustrations

Not Art!
–	A drawing can be excellent as illustration but worthless as art.
–	Many descriptive pictures possess formal significance and are art, but many do not, and do not move us aesthetically, and so are not art.
–	It is not their forms but the ideas conveyed by the forms that affect us.

Sir Edwin Landseer  (1802-73),  
Dignity and Impudence.
Oil on canvas. 1839. Tate Gallery, London, UK.
Edwin Landseer, Monarch of the Glen (1851) 
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema Expectations 1885
Paddington Station
•	“Few pictures are better known or liked than Frith’s Paddington Station; certainly I should be the last to grudge it its popularity. Many a weary forty minutes have I whiled away disentangling its fascinating incidents and forging for each an imaginary past and an improbable future. But certain though it is that Frith’s masterpiece, or engravings of it, have provided thousands with half-hours of curious and fanciful pleasure, it is not less certain that no one has experienced before it one half-second of aesthetic rapture — and this although the picture contains several pretty passages of colour, and is by no means badly painted.”  Bell  Art
W. P. Frith The Railway Station [Paddington Station]  1862

Frith, detail
Not a Work of Art
•	“Paddington Station is not a work of art; it is an interesting and amusing document. In it line and colour are used to recount anecdotes, suggest ideas, and indicate the manners and customs of an age; they are not used to provoke aesthetic emotion. Forms and the relations of forms were for Frith not objects of emotion, but means of suggesting emotion and conveying ideas.” 

Photography makes such paintings useless!
•	“The ideas and information conveyed by Paddington Station are so amusing and so well presented that the picture has considerable value and is well worth preserving. But, with the perfection of photographic processes and of the cinematograph [movies], pictures of this sort are becoming otiose [superfluous, useless].” 
April 16, 1912, Sinking of Titanic
•	“Who doubts that one of those Daily Mirror photographers in collaboration with a Daily Mail reporter can tell us far more about “London day by day” than any Royal Academician? For an account of manners and fashions we shall go, in future, to photographs, supported by a little bright journalism, rather than to descriptive painting.”

Superfluous
•	“pictures in the Frith tradition are grown superfluous; they merely waste the hours of able men who might be more profitably employed in works of a wider beneficence.”

Samuel Luke Fildes: The Doctor (1891 or 1887) 
The Doctor is sentimental.
•	“Of course, The Doctor is not a work of art. In it form is not used as an object of emotion, but as a means of suggesting emotions. This alone suffices to make it nugatory [of no value]; it is worse than nugatory because the emotion it suggests is false. What it suggests is not pity and admiration but a sense of complacency in our own pitifulness and generosity. It is sentimental. Art is above morals, or, rather, all art is moral because, as I hope to show presently, works of art are immediate means to good.” 
Art beyond morality!
•	“Once we have judged a thing a work of art, we have judged it ethically of the first importance and put it beyond the reach of the moralist. But descriptive pictures which are not works of art, and, therefore, are not necessarily means to good states of mind, are proper objects of the ethical philosopher’s attention. Not being a work of art, The Doctor has none of the immense ethical value possessed by all objects that provoke aesthetic ecstasy; and the state of mind to which it is a means, as illustration, appears to me undesirable.”

Primitive art is good, except…
•	“Most people who care much about art find that of the work that moves them most the greater part is what scholars call "Primitive." Of course there are bad primitives. For instance, I remember going, full of enthusiasm, to see one of the earliest Romanesque churches in Poitiers (Notre-Dame-la-Grande), and finding it as ill-proportioned, over-decorated, coarse, fat and heavy as any better class building by one of those highly civilised architects who flourished a thousand years earlier or eight hundred later. But such exceptions are rare. As a rule primitive art is good—and here again my hypothesis is helpful—for, as a rule, it is also free from descriptive qualities. In primitive art you will find no accurate representation; you will find only significant form.” 
“Rebuilt in the second half of the 11th century, in the period of High Romanesque, and inaugurated in 1086 by the future Pope Urban II.” Wikipedia

•	“Yet no other art moves us so profoundly. Whether we consider Sumerian sculpture or pre-dynastic Egyptian art, or archaic Greek, or the Wei and T'ang masterpieces,or those early Japanese works of which I had the luck to see a few superb examples (especially two wooden Bodhisattvas) at the Shepherd's Bush Exhibition in 1910, or  [Wei figure to the right from Bell’s illustrations]

•	Right:  Vanessa Bell in 1911.
•	“Vanessa Bell (née Stephen;1879 –  1961) was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf.”
Vanessa Bell, 1912 “Studland Beach”
is in a quiet bay in Dorset. The idea of the beach as a place for leisure activities was relatively new in 1912. It is a sign of their modernity that Vanessa Bell and her Bloomsbury Group friends holidayed there. This is one of several works by Bell from 1911–2 which show a debt to Matisse in their simplified design and bold coloring. Though an exercise in what …Clive Bell [her husband] and Roger Fry, called ‘significant form’ (emphasizing color, shape and line rather than subject matter), the picture retains some of the feel of a sunny day by the sea.”  Wall text, Tate Gallery, London 

•	1911 “Le Fenetre Bleue” by Henri Matisse
Vanessa Bell, (married Clive Bell, 1907) “Lytton Strachey Reading” 1913,
 next slide, “Abstract Painting,” 1914 

Piet Mondrian, Trees, c. 1912, oil on canvas, 37 X 27 7/8 inches.
Next:

•	Mondrian, Lozenge Composition
•	with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray, 1921 
Wassily Kandinsky, Kandinsky's first abstract watercolor, 1910.

•	Kandinsky, 
•	The Cow, 1910, 
Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Art
•	whether, coming nearer home, we consider the primitive Byzantine art of the sixth century and its primitive developments amongst the Western barbarians, or, turning far afield, we consider that mysterious and majestic art that flourished in Central and South America before the coming of the white men, in every case we observe three common characteristics—absence of representation, absence of technical swagger, sublimely impressive form. Nor is it hard to discover the connection between these three. Formal significance loses itself in preoccupation with exact representation and ostentatious cunning.
BYZANTINE MOSAIC, SIXTH CENTURY
S. Vitale, Ravenna, Next image closeup

•	Christ Pantocrator Deesis mosaic Hagia Sophia 12th century
EARLY PERUVIAN POT FROM THE NASCA VALLEY, Bell Illustration
Representation is irrelevant
•	“Let no one imagine that representation is bad in itself; a realistic form may be as significant, in its place as part of the design, as an abstract.  But if a representative form has value, it [is] as form, not as representation. The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant.” Art, 27.
Nothing from life
•	“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 exhaltation.”
•	“The pure mathematician rapt in his studies knows a state of mind which I take to be similar, if not identical….do we not perceive intellectually the rightness and necessity of the combination [of forms]”  27

The one kind of representation that is relevant to art.
•	To appreciate art we need bring only a sense of form and color, and sometimes knowledge of 3D space.
•	The latter is needed for appreciating most architectural forms.
•	Pictures insignificant as flat patterns are moving when seen as related planes.
•	This is one kind of representation that is relevant. [See Feldman’s article.]
PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA, Flagellation of Christ,  1440s460s.
Music
•	My own opinion about music is not worth having:  [Hume would say he is not a good judge here] the subtleties of harmony and rhythm escape me.
•	Sometimes my appreciation is pure however, and I can get that pure aesthetic emotion from music too, although less intense and long-lasting.
•	Yet, I understand music too little to be transported far into the world of pure aesthetic ecstasy.  
Sublime State of Mind
•	At moments (in which I have a clean palate) I appreciate pure musical form:  sounds combined according to mysterious laws with tremendous significance of its own.  
•	[And I achieve] an infinitely sublime state of mind [Kant]. 

The Metaphysical Hypothesis
•	“when we consider anything as an end in itself we become aware of that in it which is of greater moment than any qualities it may have acquired from keeping company with human beings. Instead of recognising its accidental and conditioned importance, we become aware of its essential reality, of the God in everything, of the universal in the particular, of the all-pervading rhythm. Call it by what name you will, the thing that I am talking about is that which lies behind the appearance of all things—that which gives to all things their individual significance, the thing in itself, the ultimate reality.”  Art 

Art and Religion
•	“art is the one religion that is always shaping its form to fit the spirit, the one religion that will never for long be fettered in dogmas.”  Art

•	“And when I speak of art as a manifestation of the religious spirit I do not mean that art expresses particular religious emotions, much less that it expresses anything theological. I have said that if art expresses anything, it expresses an emotion felt for pure form and that which gives pure form its extraordinary significance. So, when I speak of Christian art, I mean that this art was one product of that state of enthusiasm of which the Christian Church is another. So far was the new spirit from being a mere ebullition of Christian faith that we find manifestations of it in Mohammedan art; everyone who has seen a photograph of the Mosque of Omar at Jerusalem knows that.” 
Mosque of Omar, Jerusalem uilt in its current shape by the Ayyubid Sultan Al-Afdal ibn Salah ad-Din in 1193 CE

•	Joseph Lamb (American Beauty Rag, 1913) Ragtime Piano Legend 

•	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZAWp2CvYog

Rag-Time  
•	I am no devout lover of rag-time and turkey-trotting, but they too are manifestations. In those queer exasperated rhythms I find greater promise of a popular art than in revivals of folk-song and morris-dancing. At least they bear some relationship to the emotions of those who sing and dance them. In so far as they are significant they are good, but they are of no great significance. It is not in the souls of bunny-huggers that the new ferment is potent; they will not dance and sing the world out of its lethargy; not to them will the future owe that debt which I trust it will be quick to forget. 

•	There is nothing very wonderful or very novel about rag-time or tango, but to overlook any live form of expression is a mistake, and to attack it is sheer silliness. Tango and rag-time are kites sped by the breeze that fills the great sails of visual art. Not every man can keep a cutter, but every boy can buy a kite. In an age that is seeking new forms in which to express that emotion which can be expressed satisfactorily in form alone, the wise will look hopefully at any kind of dancing or singing that is at once unconventional and popular.

Edmund Burke Feldman   “A Formal Analysis”  1967  from  Varieties of Visual Experience 
Books

•	1967 Varieties of Visual Experience
•	1970 Becoming Human Through Art
•	1982  The Artist
•	1985  Thinking About Art
•	1994 Practical Art Criticism
•	1994  The Artist:  A Social History
•	1995  The Philosophy of Art Education

Formal analysis
•	In formal analysis we go “behind” description to discover relations. 
•	[he then describes Les Demoiselles by Picasso, giving a formal analysis] 
•	One figure seems to be falling:  certain physical and biological assumptions are shared by artist and viewer: little idea of depth.
•	Some of the drawing is crude, some believable. 
•	At one point the painting seems to depart from simple imitation of appearances as the goal of painting. [cf. Plato and Hegel]

Pablo Picasso. (Spanish, 1881-1973). Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Paris, June-July 1907. Oil on canvas, 8' x 7' 8" 

•	Peplos Kore, 530 BC, Greek

Studies 

Pablo Picasso. (Spanish, 1881-1973). Study for Les Demoiselles D'Avignon. Paris, early 1907. Oil on canvas, 7 1/2 x 8" (18.5 x 20.3 cm) 
Study 1907
Fang mask used for the ngil ceremony, an inquisitorial search for sorcerers. Wood, Gabon, 19th century. 

Viewer’s expectation
•	The idea of viewer's expectation is important in formal analysis.
•	The artist is aware of viewer conditioning.
•	Picasso knows we expect linear perspective, but he breaks up deep space. [cf. Goodman]
–	The foot vs. the still life, for example.
•	The expected logic of spatial representation is destroyed in this painting.
Formal analysis.
•	Formal analysis accumulates evidence for an interpretation of the work and a judgment.
–	The breakdown of spatial logic might imply that the work is unsuccessful.
–	But perhaps the logic of spatial representation irrelevant here.
–	Shallow space:  clues keep us close to surface.
•	We must move imaginatively to make sense of the face, and from left to right as we view the central figures (following the falling figure).
•	The figure on the right emphasizes the shape of openings.
Principle of Organization
•	Formal analysis moves from objective description of forms to statements of how we perceive them:  we seek a principle of organization, an idea.
–	It becomes difficult to defer interpretation.
–	[A basis for objectivity:  tried to be objective.]
Interpretation
•	Interpretation:  the process of expressing the meanings of a work the critic has analyzed [themes, and problems solved].
–	Interpretation comes before evaluation.
–	It is the most important part of criticism. [unlike Hume and Bell]
–	If we have thoroughly interpreted the work the evaluation may be omitted.
Relevance
•	Interpretation involves discovering meanings and stating the relevance of the meanings of the work to our lives and the human situation.  [this goes contrary to Bell].

Vehicle of ideas
•	Critics assume the art object is influenced by the value system of the artist: it is a vehicle of his ideas. [again contrary to Bell]
•	But, critics do not care whether the ideas are faithful to what the artist thinks. [like Bell]
•	Nonetheless, an artwork becomes charged with ideas which may be unconscious for the artist, but which we must discover.
Meaning
•	A principle of criticism:  the artist is not necessarily the best authority on the meaning of the work. [true?]  
•	The artist's views are material which require confirmation.

Art Criticism
•	Art criticism is not intended to be a substitute for aesthetic experience.
–	The unity of the qualities organizing themselves in our perception becomes the meaning of the work which we verbalize.
•	We direct our analysis to actual colors and shapes in the art object, not to our language about them.
Western vs. Non-Western
•	“We noticed earlier that Picasso used white lines to delineate forms in the central figure. It is a use of line we may have seen in ancient Greek vase painting. The faces of the two central figures also have the expressionless stare which is characteristic of archaic Greek female images. … [The central figures] embody the classical ideal of female beauty developed in the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world; they belong to Picasso’s own tradition (indeed, they look like Picasso!). By contrast, the other standing figures are derived from non-Western sources—African or Pre-Columbian.

•	Peplos Kore, 530 BC, Greek
Fall of Western Ethnocentrism.
•	Picasso has intentionally juxtaposed Western and non-Western racial types to express the fall of Western ethnocentrism. First, the classical beauty symbolized by the central figures is contrasted with the angular forms of the other standing figures; then they are synthesized in the hybrid figure at the lower right. … In the "fall" of the classical figures we see the decline of a culture in which beauty is the object of serene contemplation. The ideal of female passivity is displaced by ideals of female activity and magical aliveness.” (Feldman, 1992, pp. 496­-497)