Clive Bell

1
Clive Bells The Aesthetic Experience

• A Closer Look at Significant Form and the
  Aesthetic Point of View

2
What is Significant Form?

• Bell contends for the following
• While art is emotional, there is a peculiarly
  aesthetic emotion, quite different from the
  emotions of ordinary life, known as significant
  form.

3
What is Significant Form?

• Significant form is a unique quality resulting
  from combinations of lines, colors, and spatial
  elements
• 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 art (P4).

4
What is Significant Form?

• What does the word significant mean?
• Significant consists of the expression of the
  artists emotion, but the only emotion that Bell
  considers legitimate in art-the peculiarly
  aesthetic emotion-is aroused in by the vision of
  significant form.

5
Why this Aesthetic Emotion?

• 4. We dont know why these arouse aesthetic
  emotion. We can postulate that there is an
  unknown and mysterious laws whereby particular
  forms constitute significant form.

6
Significant Form

• Monroe Beardsley notes
• Clive Bells Objectivism (i.e., his conception
  of the work as an object in its own right) owed
  much to the influence of G.E. Moore, especially
  the latters theory of goodness as a simple,
  unanalyzable property, and his definition of the
  beautiful as that of which the admiring
  contemplation is good in itself Principia
  Ethica, pg. 201.

7
Significant Form

• Beardsleys definition of Clive Bells
  significant form
• Much of the extraordinarily valuable educational
  work of Clive Bell (see Art 1914 and Roger Fry
  (see Vision and Design 1920) consisted in
  helping people to look at paintings without
  predispositions and preconceptions, and without
  being distracted by irrelevant associations with
  the representational subject-matter. They made
  famous the term significant form, introduced by
  Bell as a name for the quality common to all good
  visual art-roughly, unified organizations with
  vitality of regional quality-and used it to focus
  attention on the work itself my bold
  Aesthetics From Classical Greece to the
  Present, 364.

8
Significant Form

• Melvin Rader puts it this way
• The significanceconsists of the expression of
  the artists emotion, but the only emotion that
  Bell considers legitimate in art-the peculiarly
  esthetic emotion-is aroused by the vision of
  significant form A Modern Book of Aesthetics,
  pg. 224-5.

9
Cynthia Freeland states

• Significant Form is a particular combination
  of lines and colours that stir our aesthetic
  emotions.. A critic can help other see form and
  feel the resulting emotions. These emotions are
  special and lofty Bell spoke of art as an
  exalted encounter with form on Arts cold white
  peaks and insisted that art should have nothing
  to do with life or politics
• But is it art? An Introduction to Art Theory,
  pg. 15

10
Significant Form

• Rader, a few lines down, observes
• In a little book on Proust (1928), he Bell
  that the supreme masterpieces of literature
  derive their splendor, their supernatural power,
  not from flashes of insight, nor yet from
  characterization, nor from an understanding of
  the human heart even, but from form-I use the
  word in its richest sense, I mean the thing that
  artists create, their expression. Whether you
  call it significant form or something else, the
  supreme quality in art is formal it has to do
  with order, sequence, movement, and shape
  Ibid., 225.

11
What should we look for hope to experience in
art?

• 5. What we hope to experience in art is what we
  seldom experience in life outside of art-the
  aesthetic thrill, rapture, or ecstasy.

12
Justification

• 6. Anchored in individual experience- experience
  of one characteristic type evoked by art from
  primitives to post- impressionists. While he
  cant give a formula for what evokes it, he
  believes that formal structures, not narrative,
  or sentimental matter, are its source.

13
Later Bell

• In his later writing Bell contends that
  significant form has an elusive quality.
• Form is significant iff it cant be further
  worked upon, redefined, simplified, and
  intensified by an artist or in an artwork.
  Natures forms are therefore not in the strong
  sense significant. It becomes significant only
  when an artist realizes its potentiality.

14
Problem of Circularity

• There is a circular problem to Bells definition
• Significant form is that to which aesthetic
  emotion is the response.
• When we ask what the aesthetic emotion is,
  however, we find that it is the emotion evoked by
  significant form.
• Remember, the aesthetic emotions is a response
  to formal properties only-in painting, it is the
  complex interrelations of shapes and colors
  organized into an aesthetic unity.

15
Concluding Observations

• Bell agrees the art is emotional but that there
  is a peculiarly aesthetic emotion that is
  distinct from ordinary emotions-that is directed
  to or related to significant form.
• Significant form is a unique quality resulting
  from certain combinations of lines, colors, and
  spatial elements.
• He does not offer any criteria for detecting
  significant form.
• Significant form is that to which aesthetic
  emotion is the response.
• Formal properties are related to aesthetic value.
• Works of art have their own intrinsic value.
• He rejects the antithesis between form and
  content they are one thing regarded from two
  different points of view.