Clive Bell (1881-1964), who is often mentioned along with his older colleague Roger Fry (1866-1934), is the standard example of a “formalist.” Both were associated with the first exhibitions in England of “post-impressionist” painters (a movement that Fry named) in the period before WWI, so they stand at the very beginning of modernism in art. The selections on the handout are drawn from the first chapter of Bell’s book Art, which was published just before WWI. The section between “The Aesthetic Hypothesis” and “The Metaphysical Hypothesis” concerned post-impressionism; you can find it, along with the rest of the book, in the text browser on the Moodle site for the course.
• As you read, think critically about Bell’s arguments for the existence of “aesthetic emotion”—that is, try to get a sense of what he has in mind and then ask yourself whether he is right.
• You should do the same for “significant form” but there is more to be done with it since he has more to say about its character.
• Think about the relation between the two ideas, especially Bell’s claim (p. 7 of the handout, p. 17 of the book) that descriptive pictures without formal significance “leave untouched our aesthetic emotions because it is not their forms but the ideas or information suggested or conveyed by their forms that affect us.” (William Powell Frith’s painting of Paddington station, which Bell goes on to speak of, is titled “The Railway Station”; you can find a detailed reproduction on ARTstor. The painting titled “The Doctor” that Bell mentions is probably one by Luke Fildes; Wikipedia has a good reproduction.)
• The second selection comes from the end of the chapter. Bell’s “metaphysical hypothesis” is stated in the next-to-last paragraph, and it is certainly worth thinking about. But some of the Bell’s remarks before it about artistic problems fill out his view of representational art; and what he says at the beginning of the selection (pp. 15-16 of the handout) suggests ways in which he would both agree and disagree with Croce.