Clive Bell (Arthur Clive Howard Bell) Biography

British art and literary critic, born at East Shefford, Bedfordshire, educated at Cambridge University. A central figure of the Bloomsbury Group, he married Vanessa Stephen, elder sister to V. Woolf, in 1907. At Cambridge, Bell became influenced by the moral philosophy of G. E. Moore with its emphasis on the importance of the enjoyment of conversation and beautiful objects, which Moore considered to be ‘the rational ultimate end of social progress’. Bell's concept of ‘Significant Form’—in which the form, rather than the subject, of a work of art was the origin of a specific aesthetic emotion—was explored in Art (1914); this theory was influenced by Roger Fry who, with Bell, stimulated public interest in the Post-Impressionists. Bell's other works include Poems (1921), Since Cezanne (1922), Civilization (1928), and Proust (1929). His memoirs, Old Friends: Personal Recollections (1956), contain interesting portraits of members of the Bloomsbury Group.