[Vwoolf] Fwd: DNB re Bell, Significant form

[Dianne Hunter]

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2015-09-16



Bell,  (Arthur) Clive Heward  (1881-1964), art critic and writer, was born
on 16 September 1881 at East Shefford, Berkshire, the second son of William
Heward Bell (1849-1927), civil engineer, and his wife, Hannah Taylor Cory
(1850-1942). In the words of his son Quentin, he came from a 'family that
drew its wealth from Welsh mines and expended it upon the destruction of
wild animals'  (Q. Bell, Bloomsbury, 23). Their home, Cleeve House at Seend
in Wiltshire, was a Regency villa rebuilt as a mock Jacobean mansion and
decorated throughout with sporting trophies: growing up there filled Bell
with a lifelong horror of vulgarity and a disdain of philistinism. He was
educated at Marlborough College (1895-9), where he professed to have been
miserable, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered in the same
term (October 1899) as Thoby Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner,
and Leonard Woolf. The reading society which these freshmen founded in
their first year was always claimed by Bell to have laid the foundations of
the so-called Bloomsbury group. Like Thoby Stephen, he combined a love of
hunting and the outdoors with intellectual curiosity-and in his case an
early interest in visual art. Although thought by his fellow undergraduates
too worldly for membership of the select Cambridge Conversazione Society
(known as the Apostles), Bell anyway fell under the sway of that secret
brotherhood's presiding spirit, the philosopher G. E. Moore, whom he later
said was 'the dominant influence in all our lives'  (C. Bell, 28). Despite
obtaining only a second class in both parts of the historical tripos, he
was awarded an Earl of Derby studentship in 1902. He went to Paris in 1904,
ostensibly to pursue historical research, but in fact wasted his time
profitably acquainting himself with the work of the old masters and of
modern French painters, and acquiring a taste for cafe life and the company
of artists.

On his return to London, Bell was prominent in the group of friends who met
on Thursday evenings at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, the house shared by
the four children of Sir Leslie Stephen  (1832-1904), the eminent Victorian
man of letters and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography.
Following the early death of Thoby Stephen, Bell married, on 7 February
1907, Thoby's elder sister Vanessa (1879-1961) [see Bell,  Vanessa]. Clive
and Vanessa Bell had two sons: Julian Heward Bell  (1908-1937), a poet who
was killed in the Spanish Civil War, and Quentin Bell  (1910-1996), an
artist, teacher, and writer. The marriage ceased to exist in anything but
name before the First World War, partly because of Bell's flirtation with
his sister-in-law Virginia (1882-1941) [see Woolf,  (Adeline) Virginia] who
in 1912 married Leonard Woolf. Thereafter Bell was free to enjoy a
succession of love affairs, while remaining on the best of terms with
Vanessa, who from 1915 lived with her artistic collaborator, Duncan Grant.
Angelica Bell (1918-2012), whose father was Grant and who later married
David Garnett, was brought up as Clive Bell's daughter.

A chance meeting in 1910 with Roger Fry, in a railway carriage between
Cambridge and London, altered the whole tenor of Bell's life. Fry was
considerably older, and was already well known as an authority on the early
Italian Renaissance; but his new interest in contemporary French painting
coincided with Bell's. Bell was Fry's eager lieutenant in the organization
of the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in
London that autumn; for the second show, in 1912, he selected an 'English
Group'. His huge admiration for Cezanne-whom he called 'the Christopher
Columbus of a new continent of form'  (C. Bell, Art, 1914, 207)-was
advertised in the book for which he is chiefly remembered, Art, published
in 1914. Here he put forward his famous theory of 'significant form', the
proposition that the quality common to all works of art, from the
Byzantines to the cubists, consists of 'relations and combinations of lines
and colours'  (ibid., 8). The representational elements in a picture were,
he believed, irrelevant to aesthetic contemplation: in a much-quoted
passage he declared that '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'  (ibid., 25). There is much that is tautologous in
Bell's argument, and a good deal that is absurd-see, for instance, his
insistence that 'The bulk ... of those who flourished between the High
Renaissance and the contemporary movement may be divided into two classes,
virtuosi and dunces'  (ibid., 40)-and his central thesis has been widely
discounted; but it should be allowed that he is much less dogmatic than is
usually supposed. Art owed much to the writings of Fry, as well as to
Moore's Principia ethica (1903); it is best read, however, in the context
of its time, as a manifesto for post-impressionism. Bell's polemical style
was ideally suited to his demolition of canonical aesthetic values, and his
book had an enormously liberating effect on a generation of artists and
viewers.

Later Bell abandoned theory almost entirely, but he continued to wield
considerable influence as a critic, and his exhibition reviews for The
Nation and later the New Statesman between 1913 and 1944 were compulsory
reading for a wide audience. If he was rather too prone to denigrate
English art in favour of French, and was sometimes guilty of over-praising
his friends, he was surely right in 1920 to recognize Picasso and Matisse
as the two giants of the modern movement. He also encouraged younger
painters such as Ivon Hitchens and Victor Pasmore; but he never came to
terms with abstractionism, which his earlier writings had anticipated. His
books of criticism, mostly comprising articles for newspapers and
periodicals, included Pot-Boilers (1918), Since Cezanne (1922), Landmarks
in Nineteenth-Century Painting (1927), An Account of French Painting
(1931), and Enjoying Pictures (1934).

Bell was an unwavering pacifist in both world wars. He spent much of the
first at Garsington, the Oxfordshire home of Philip and Lady Ottoline
Morrell, where he undertook desultory employment as a farmworker. His
pamphlet Peace at Once (1915), in which he courageously argued for a
negotiated settlement with Germany, was seized by the police, became the
subject of a court case, and was destroyed. In a little-known essay
entitled On British Freedom (1923) he made a spirited attack on the modern
state's interference in matters of censorship, prohibition, and sexuality.
He returned to political themes in Civilization: an Essay (1928), in which
he characteristically upheld the superiority of spiritual values over
material needs. However, his belief that these could flourish under the
rule of dictators presaged his support for appeasement in the 1930s.
'Civilized' was Bell's highest term of praise, and he maintained that it
was best exemplified by the societies of Periclean Athens,
fifteenth-century Florence, and France during the grand siecle; but
Virginia Woolf maliciously remarked of his book that 'in the end it turns
out that civilization is a lunch party at No. 50 Gordon Square'  (Q. Bell,
Bloomsbury, 88).

During the 1920s Bell was frequently in Paris, often accompanied by his
mistress at that time, the stylish hostess, patron, and writer Mary
Hutchinson, nee Barnes (1889-1977). He relished his contact there with
artists-especially Picasso and Andre Derain, the leading exponent of
fauvism-musicians, and writers, and he was a witness at some of the great
set piece occasions of that decade, such as the famous party given to
celebrate the premiere of Diaghilev's production of Renard in 1922 at which
Stravinsky, Picasso, Proust, and James Joyce were among the guests. Between
the wars he was the best-informed English commentator on the Parisian
scene, which he brought alive in the pages of a number of journals,
including the New Republic in America and Vogue in Britain. He always
preferred the literature of France (particularly of the eighteenth century)
to that of his own country; and his sympathetic study Proust (1928) was the
first book in English on that author. Bell's Francophilia was sometimes a
joke to his friends-his speech and his letters were larded with French
phrases-and it was reported that he celebrated his appointment as a
chevalier of the Legion d'honneur in 1936 by addressing a bemused audience
at Oxford in French.

In 1939 Bell gave up his London home at 50 Gordon Square and based himself
at Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse which he shared with Vanessa Bell and
Duncan Grant. Thereafter he travelled regularly to France, where he renewed
his friendships with Picasso and Matisse; and in 1950 he was invited to
undertake a lecture tour of America. For the last twenty years of his life
his devoted companion was Barbara Bagenal, nee Hiles (1891-1984). In 1956
he published a collection of memoirs, Old Friends, which celebrated his
friendships with the leading figures of his time on both sides of the
channel, among them Walter Sickert, Maynard Keynes, T. S. Eliot, and Jean
Cocteau. It was Bell's immense enthusiasm and passionate engagement with
life that endeared him to his many friends. He was a noted host-to David
Garnett he seemed 'an almost perfect example of James Mill's Utilitarian
theory that a man cannot become rich without enriching his neighbours'
(Garnett, 24)-and a welcome guest at a variety of salons. More sociable
than most in his immediate circle, he never allowed his society to become
exclusive or dull; his comparative wealth (which meant that he never had to
earn a living) also ensured that it never lacked comfort. His talent for
gossip, however, often got him into trouble; so too did his barely
concealed snobbery. He was equally at home entertaining in London
restaurants as he was tramping through the Sussex countryside in threadbare
tweeds with his dog and a gun. But he was not without vanity, and his comic
habits included 'the anxious rearrangement of the thick carroty hair that
grew on only part of his cranium, and had a way of getting out of place,
much to his agitation'  (Partridge, 80). The portrait of him painted by
Virginia Woolf in her diaries, in which he is often likened to a flamboyant
and voluble parakeet, highlights his absurdities: and in the rehabilitation
of Bloomsbury which occurred after his death his reputation alone did not
flourish. Bell died at Fitzroy House Nursing Home, Fitzroy Square, London,
on 17 September 1964, from cancer, and was cremated four days later at the
West London crematorium.

James Beechey

Sources  C. Bell, Old friends (1956) + Q. Bell, Elders and betters (1995) +
J. Beechey, Clive Bell (2000) + Q. Bell, Bloomsbury (1968) + J. Russell,
Encounter, 23/6 (1964), 47-9 + D. Garnett, The flowers of the forest (1955)
+ F. Partridge, Memories (1981) + D. A. Laing, Clive Bell: an annotated
bibliography of the published writings (1983) + F. Spalding, Vanessa Bell
(1983) + DNB + b. cert. + m. cert. + d. cert. + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1964) +
personal knowledge (2004) + Marlborough College records + records, Trinity
Cam. + West London crematorium records
Archives King's Cam., corresp. + Trinity Cam., papers + U. Sussex, corresp.
| BL, letters to Harold Nicolson, RP 2553 [photocopies] + Charleston Trust,
Sussex, collection of pictures, books, etc. + King's Cam., letters to
Julian Bell; letters to John Maynard Keynes + Ransom HRC, Mary Hutchinson
MSS + Tate collection, corresp. with Vanessa Bell + U. Sussex, corresp.
with Leonard Woolf; letters to Virginia Woolf, incl. poems
Likenesses  photographs, 1907-69, Tate collection · H. Lamb, pencil, 1908,
Charleston Trust, Sussex · M. Beerbohm, pencil cartoon, c.1915, priv.
coll.; repro. in Bell, Old friends, jacket · P. Picasso, group portrait,
1919, Musee Picasso, Paris · V. Bell, group portrait, oils, 1924, City Art
Gallery, Leicester · R. Fry, oils, c.1924, NPG [see illus.] · Ramsey &
Muspratt, bromide print, 1932, NPG · B. Anrep, mosaic sculpture, 1933, NPG
· photographs, NPG
Wealth at death  £43,380: probate, 4 Dec 1964, CGPLA Eng. & Wales



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