Clive Bell : Art

Roger Fry, portrait of Clive Bell

Quotations from "Art" by Clive Bell. (1914)   (full text is found here )

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art. All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art. I do not mean, of course, that all works provoke the same emotion. On the contrary, every work produces a different emotion. But all these emotions are recognizably the same in kind; so far, at any rate, the best opinion is on my side. That there is a particular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual art, and that this emotion is provoked by every kind of visual art, by pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles, etc .. etc., is not disputed, I think, by anyone capable of feeling it. This emotion is called the aesthetic emotion; and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics. We shall have discovered the essential quality in a work of art, the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other classes of objects.

I've jumped to this third paragraph of "The Aesthetic Hypothesis" because the first sentence establishes the foundation for everything that follows: The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion."

The first two paragraphs, however, are more than just witty and amusing. They assert that not every  thoughtful person  has experienced the peculiar emotion that he calls "aesthetic". Some never have.  Perhaps that is an overstatement -- but it has been my experience that there is a wide range of sensitivity - even among serious collectors of art.   So for me -- this premise is reasonable. If we need to talk about a kind of experience shared by most humans,  we are talking more about psychology than aesthetics.

This may be elitist - but it is not  an elite defined by family background or education. There are many great examples of folk art, and in high-end European art, extraordinary artists like Giotto (13th Century) to Manzu (20th Century) have apparently come from the bottom of the social order.

What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cézanne? Only one answer seems possible--significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call "Significant Form"; and "Significant Form" is the one quality common to all works of visual art.

Why would Bell choose the word "significant" for the best kind of forms -- when he cares not what they might "signify", if anything?


He has not yet told us how we might distinguish when a form is  "significant" - other than to say that they are "aesthetically moving"   But he has told us that it is can be discovered among lines and colors --  not dictionaries of symbols or any other kind of explanatory texts. And he has offered a range of objects wider than what may have been expected a hundred years earlier --including Persian ceramics and Chinese weaving as well as European painting from Giotto to Cezanne. His notion of 'significant form' is appropriate for an encyclopedic kind of art museum, and includes things that others might call decorative art.


  And as noted above, he has also told us that only some people will be able to recognize it.


At this point it may be objected that I am making aesthetics a purely subjective business, since my only data are personal experiences of a particular emotion. It will be said that the objects that provoke this emotion vary with each individual, and that therefore a system of aesthetics can have no objective validity. It must be replied that any system of aesthetics which pretends to be based on some objective truth is so palpably ridiculous as not to be worth discussing. We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it. The objects that provoke aesthetic emotion vary with each individual. Aesthetic judgments are, as the saying goes, matters of taste; and about tastes, as everyone is proud to admit, there is no disputing. A good critic may be able to make me see in a picture that had left me cold things that I had overlooked, till at last, receiving the aesthetic emotion, I recognise it as a work of art. To be continually pointing out those parts, the sum, or rather the combination, of which unite to produce significant form, is the function of criticism. But it is useless for a critic to tell me that something is a work of art; he must make me feel it for myself. This he can do only by making me see; he must get at my emotions through my eyes. Unless he can make me see something that moves me, he cannot force my emotions. I have no right to consider anything a work of art to which I cannot react emotionally; and I have no right to look for the essential quality in anything that I have not _felt_ to be a work of art. The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience--that is to say, they must be subjective.

It would have been nice if Bell had given us an example of a piece of art criticism that assisted him in having an aesthetic experience.  Personally - I  can't recall that anything like that has ever happened to me -- in any of the arts. A critic can be very helpful in directing  attention toward things worth experiencing.  And a critic can  help readers make connections between that experience and the rest of human life, present and past.  But the aesthetic experience itself is too personal to be shared.




Yet, though all aesthetic theories must be based on aesthetic judgments, and ultimately all aesthetic judgments must be matters of personal taste, it would be rash to assert that no theory of aesthetics can have general validity. For, though A, B, C, D are the works that move me, and A, D, E, F the works that move you, it may well be that x is the only quality believed by either of us to be common to all the works in his list. We may all agree about aesthetics, and yet differ about particular works of art. We may differ as to the presence or absence of the quality x. My immediate object will be to show that significant form is the only quality common and peculiar to all the works of visual art that move me ; and I will ask those whose aesthetic experience does not tally with mine to see whether this quality is not also, in their judgment, common to all works that move them, and whether they can discover any other quality of which the same can be said.


We may note the repeated use of the word "move" that was first introduced in the previous paragraph.
An aesthetic judgment properly follows some kind of "movement" -- a  feeling of being carried from one place to another.  Whatever effort has been taken to engage the object under consideration, once that engagement has been made, the viewer is passively moved -- or not.

This notion would not apply when a judgment is made according to some preconceived list of qualities.  It would also not apply when judgment relies upon the recognition of the presence - or absence - of some appropriate or insightful idea.  Like Clive Bell, I would like to call those kinds of judgment non-aesthetic.

We may then  note the duality of the phrase "significant form".

"Significant"  suggests the recognition of something  important in the life of the viewer.

"Form" suggests some quality inherent in the perceivable surface of the object itself.

 Some may argue that everyone perceives an object in their own particular way,  so the "form" belongs to them rather than to the object.  This is a reasonable assertion.  If you believe it, however, you have no business reading, writing, or discussing art  criticism.

"Form" might also  suggest that this quality was intended by the person who worked that surface until it appeared.   Such an assertion would be problematic for those who apply the word "form" to natural objects like mountains or human bodies.  It would also be problematic for those who doubt that anyone, including the artist herself, has ever seen exactly the same  form that she once intended.

And the same might be said about a punch in the face. One boxer certainly intended to deliver the punch -- and the other boxer certainly received it -- but whether that reception exactly matched the intention -- who can say?

On the other hand, success in boxing depends upon knowing the intentions of the opponent - and  boxers, like artists, can sometimes be consistently successful.

Some effects in painting -- especially abstract painting -- are partially created by chance - like globs of paint that drip down a canvas.  But even then, some planning and preparation and final judgment (to keep or wipe out) has taken place.

Those artists who work more tightly  - especially in observational realism - know  a much closer relationship between cause and effect.  Beautifully rendered muscles across a back can never happen by chance.  Contrary to popular anecdote, a million monkeys at a million typewriters will never write even one speech by Shakespeare.  This is not to say that the artist's intention when finishing a piece is always or even ever identical to her intentions at the beginning.


Also at this point a query arises, irrelevant indeed, but hardly to be suppressed : “Why are we so profoundly moved by forms related in a particular way ? ” The question is extremely interesting, but irrelevant to aesthetics. In pure aesthetics we have only to consider our emotion and its object : for the purposes of aesthetics we have no right, neither is there any necessity, to pry behind the object into the state of mind of him who made it. Later, I shall attempt to answer the question ; for by so doing I may be able to develop my theory of the relation of art to life. I shall not, however, be under the delusion that I am rounding off my theory of aesthetics. For a discussion of aesthetics, it need be agreed only that forms arranged and combined, according to certain unknown and mysterious laws do move us in a particular way, and that it is the business of an artist so to combine and arrange them that they shall move us. These moving combinations and arrangements I have called, for the sake of convenience and for a reason that will appear later, “Significant Form.”



To answer why are  we so profoundly moved?" does not require us to answer  "what was the state of mind of him who made it?"  But Bell will continue to develop this connection.

Regarding those "forms arranged and combined according to certain unknown and mysterious laws": if  laws are unknown, perhaps the word "law" is not appropriate.

I'd also like to note that Bell has not yet  suggested that the piece as a whole might be thought of a single, unitary form.  I wonder if he ever will.


A third interruption has to be met.

Are you forgetting about colour ? ” some- one inquires. Certainly not ; my term “significant form” included combinations of lines and of colours. The distinction between form and colour is an unreal one ; you cannot conceive a colourless line or a colourless space ; neither can you conceive a formless relation of colours. In a black and white drawing the spaces are all white and all are bounded by black lines ; in most oil paintings the spaces are multi-coloured and so are the boundaries ; you cannot imagine a boundary line without any content, or a content without a boundary line. Therefore, when I speak of significant form, I mean a combination of lines and colours (counting white and black as colours) that moves me aesthetically.

OK




Some people may be surprised at my not having called this “ beauty.” Of course, to those who define beauty as “ combinations of lines and colours that provoke aesthetic emotion,” I willingly concede the right of substituting their word for mine. But most of us, however strict we may be, are apt to apply the epithet “ beautiful ” to objects that do not provoke that peculiar emotion produced by works of art. Everyone, I suspect, has called a butterfly or a flower beautiful. Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture ? Surely, it is not what I call an aesthetic emotion that most of us feel, generally, for natural beauty. I shall suggest, later, that some people may, occasionally, see in nature what we see in art, and feel for her an aesthetic emotion ; but I am satisfied that, as a rule, most people feel a very different kind of emotion for birds and flowers and the wings of butterflies from that which they feel for pictures, pots, temples and statues. Why these beautiful things do not move us as works of art move is another, and not an aesthetic, question. For our immediate purpose we have to discover only what quality is common to objects that do move us as works of art. In the last part of this chapter, when I try to answer the question — “ Why are we so profoundly moved by some combinations of lines and colours ? ” I shall hope to offer an acceptable explanation of why we are less profoundly moved by others.


I strongly agree here as well -- though I suspect that many, if not most, people would not distinguish the emotion they feel when viewing a flower from the emotion they feel from  viewing a beautiful painting of it.

Most people are just not very interested in art or their reactions to it -- though, in that case, they should exclude themselves from discussions of aesthetics.  This might even include some famous  philosophers like Kant.



Since we call a quality that does not raise the characteristic aesthetic emotion “ Beauty,” it would be misleading to call by the same name the quality that does. To make “beauty” the object of the aesthetic emotion, we must give to the word an over-strict and unfamiliar definition. Everyone sometimes uses “ beauty ” in an unaesthetic sense ; most people habitually do so. To everyone, except perhaps here and there an occasional aesthete, the commonest sense of the word is unaesthetic. Of its grosser abuse, patent in our chatter about “ beautiful huntin’ ” and “ beautiful shootin’,’’ I need not take account ; it would be open to the precious to reply that they never do so abuse it. Besides, here there is no danger of confusion between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic use ; but when we speak of a beautiful woman there is. When an ordinary man speaks of a beautiful woman he certainly does not mean only that she moves him aesthetically ; but when an artist calls a withered old hag beautiful he may sometimes mean what he means when he calls a battered torso beautiful. The ordinary man, if he be also a man of taste, will call the battered torso beautiful, but he will not call a withered hag beautiful because, in the matter of women, it is not to the aesthetic quality that the hag may possess, but to some other quality that he assigns the epithet. Indeed, most of us never dream of going for aesthetic emotions to human beings, from whom we ask something very different. This “something,” when we find it in a young woman, we are apt to call “ beauty.” We live in a nice age. With the man-in-the-street “ beautiful ” is more often than not synonymous with “ desirable ” ; the word does not necessarily connote any aesthetic reaction whatever, and I am tempted to believe that in the minds of many the sexual flavour of the word is stronger than the aesthetic. I have noticed a consistency in those to whom the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful woman, and the next most beautiful thing a picture of one. The confusion between aesthetic and sensual beauty is not in their case so great as might be supposed. Perhaps there is none ; for perhaps they have never had an aesthetic emotion to confuse with their other emotions. The art that they call “ beautiful ” is generally closely related to the women. A beautiful picture is a photograph of a pretty girl ; beautiful music, the music that provokes emotions similar to those provoked by young ladies in musical farces ; and beautiful poetry, the poetry that recalls the same emotions felt, twenty years earlier, for the rector’s daughter. Clearlv the word “ beautv ” is used to connote the objects of quite distinguishable emotions, and that is a reason for not employing a term which would land me inevitably in confusions and misunderstandings with my readers.


A reasonable request - though I'm not sure that sexual desire can be absent from any moment of  consciousness in our primate brains.

On the other hand, with those who judge it more exact to call these combinations and arrangements of form that provoke our aesthetic emotions, not “significant form,” but “significant relations of form,” and then try to make the best of two worlds, the aesthetic and the meta- physical, by calling these relations “ rhythm,” I have no quarrel whatever. Having made it clear that by “ significant form ” I mean arrangements and combinations that move us in a particular way, I willingly join hands with those who prefer to give a different name to the same thing.


I wonder to whom this paragraph  was directed.


The hypothesis that significant form is the essential quality in a work of art has at least one merit denied to many more famous and more striking — it does help to explain things. We are all familiar with pictures that interest us and excite our admiration, but do not move us as works of art. To this class belongs what I call “ Descriptive Painting ” — that is, painting in which forms are used not as objects of emotion, but as means of suggesting emotion or conveying information. Portraits of psychological and historical value, topographical works, pictures that tell stories and suggest situations, illustrations of all sorts, belong to this class. That we all recognise the distinction is clear, for who has not said that such and such a drawing was excellent as illustration, but as a work of art worthless? Of course many descriptive pictures possess, amongst other qualities, formal significance, and are therefore works of art : but many more do not. They interest us ; they may move us too in a hundred different ways, but they do not move us aesthetically. According to my hypothesis they are not works of art. They 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.


The distinction between description and formal significance is difficult  because the same piece usually has some degree of both.  It will be especially problematic for those who do not live or die by the latter.

William Powell Frith, The Railway Station, 1862

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 master piece, 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. “ 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. 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, pictures of this sort are becoming otiose. 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. Had the imperial academicians of Nero, instead of manufacturing incredibly loathsome imitations of the antique, recorded in fresco and mosaic the manners and fashions of their day, their stuff, though artistic rubbish, would now be an historical gold-mine. If only they had been Friths instead of being Alma Tademas ! But photography has made impossible any such transmutation of modern rubbish. Therefore it must be confessed that 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. Still, they are not unpleasant, which is more than can be said for that kind of descriptive painting of which “ The Doctor” is the most flagrant example.



At last ! We're given an example  -- and a  wonderful one it is.

I'm currently reading Thackery's "Vanity Fair", published twelve years before this painting was made, so I'm especially fascinated  by it's slice of busy life in Victorian London.

Bell  asserts that : " Forms and the relations of forms were for Frith not objects of emotion, but means of suggesting emotion and conveying ideas." -- which seems to say that the forms do not produce an emotion in the viewer, but instead, they indicate an emotion being felt by the characters being portrayed.

I'm sure that was true when the viewer was Clive Bell himself -- and it may well be true for me if I ever get  to view the actual painting -- but it's a stretch to assert that "no one has experienced before it one half- second of aesthetic rapture".  It was quite a popular sensation back when it was painted - and I'm doubting that it was only appealing because it could " recount anecdotes, suggest ideas, and indicate the manners and customs of an age"

 Renoir

Veronese

I would suggest that "aesthetic rapture" is conditioned by experience.  When I was about twelve,  I was ecstatic over Rossini's "William Tell Overture".  I'd wave my arms,  jump around,  and spin the record  over and over.  Now -- after listening to a lot more music of many different kinds, I still find an excerpt to be fun,  but do not wish to hear all eleven minutes. Similarly, "Paddington  Station" would likely be a lot more thrilling for those who had never seen  "Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette" by Renoir or "Wedding at Cana" by Veronese.


It does appear from reproductions that the  the  upper half of Frith's painting was designed and executed by someone else -- as indeed it was.  So if we're attending to the form as a whole, that would be a problem. It also appears that the arrangement of the figures has only been taken far enough to make them fit nicely -- so it's rather turgid  compared to the formal fluidity achieved by Renoir and Veronese.

Pompeii

Tangentially, I wonder what Bell was referring to when he mentions the "loathsome" imitations of the antique executed by the artists of ancient Rome in the time of Nero ( First century A.D.)

The above falls short of Mantegna's imitations -- but "loathsome" seems too strong a word.

Sir Luke Fildes, "The Doctor", 1891

 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; it is worse than nugatory be- cause 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. 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.


If this kind of painting was as mainstream today as it was back in 1914,  perhaps I would join Clive Bell in hating it. It is now categorically excluded from contemporary art.

With a family pedigree of social activism, Sir Fildes was an early social realist.  This painting celebrates the work of a physician -- and why shouldn't it be celebrated ?  Anyone who has ever needed a smart, dedicated doctor would probably appreciate it.  I can't figure how Bell picked up any sense of "complacency"

It's a painting I would like to see in a doctor's office -- though maybe not so much in an art museum.  It feels a bit lumberous and heavy handed

I kind of agree that "art is above morals ...art is moral because, as I hope to show presently, works of art are immediate means to good."    I feel well served by the art that pleases me -- regardless of its original intended application.  (so, gasp,  I really like some Nazi sculpture)

But on the other hand -- as Clive Bell has made perfectly clear -- an aesthetic experience is personal -- and what is good for one person is not necessarily good for the community.   So a painting is  not necessarily moral just because someone had a rapturous aesthetic experience with it.

Luigi Russolo, The Revolt, 1911

Severini,

 Simultaneity of Centrifugal and Centripetal Groups 

(Woman at a Window), 1914

Albert Besnard,  Intimate Fantasy, 1901

 The works of those enterprising young men, the Italian Futurists, are notable examples of descriptive painting. Like the Royal Academicians, they use form, not to provoke aesthetic emotions, but to convey information and ideas. Indeed, the published theories of the Futurists prove that their pictures ought to have nothing whatever to do with art. Their social and political theories are respectable, but I would suggest to young Italian painters that it is possible to become a Futurist in thought and action and  yet remain an artist, if one has the luck to be born one. To associate art with politics is always a mistake. Futurist pictures are descriptive because they aim at presenting in line and colour the chaos of the mind at a particular moment ; their forms are not intended to promote aesthetic emotion but to convey information. These forms, by the way, whatever may be the nature of the ideas they suggest, are themselves anything but revolutionary. In such Futurist pictures as I have seen — perhaps I should except some by Severini — the drawing, whenever it becomes representative as it frequently does, is found to be in that soft and common convention brought into fashion by Besnard some thirty years ago, and much affected by Beaux- Art students ever since. As works of art, the Futurist pictures are negligible; but they are not to be judged as works of art. A good Futurist picture would succeed as a good piece of psychology succeeds ; it would reveal, through line and colour, the complexities of an interesting state of mind. If Futurist pictures seem to fail, we must seek an explanation, not in a lack of artistic qualities that they never were intended to possess, but rather in the minds the states of which they are intended to reveal. 





I don't know which Futurist paintings Bell had in mind -- so I picked two myself, one of them by Severini whom Bell prefers.

I have to salute Bell for telling  us that "as works of art, the Futurist paintings are negligible" even if the best ones "reveal the complexitities of an interesting state of mind"

That phrase precisely contradicts the  art theory now promulgated by institutions of contemporary art.

And I have to salute him for offering an example of non-art that is definitely not as sentimental as "The Doctor"

I'm not sure, however,  that I will  judge the Futurist painters so harshly if I ever get to see an exhibition of them.

West facade, Notre-Dame-la-Grande, Poitiers

 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-pro- portioned, 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. 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,


Like myself,  Clive Bell needs to share his aesthetic judgment concerning just about  everything he's ever seen.  And, yes, " ill-proportioned, over-decorated, coarse, fat and heavy " does seem to apply to the facade of  that Romanesque church in Poitiers.

But I would hardly group the  sculpture from  pre-dynastic Egypt and Sumeria with the Buddhist art of the Wei and Tang dynasties.  I have yet to see anything at the  Oriental Institute of Chicago that reaches the level of the Tang Dynasty Bodhisattvas at the Art Institute.

I would also not say that any of the above is "free from descriptive qualities" --- rather, it only describes what is needed for some kind of worship.

Ku K'ai-chih 

[footnote:  The existence of the Ku K'ai-chih makes it clear that the art of this period (fifth to eighth centuries), was a typical primitive movement. To call the great vital art of the Liang, Chen, Wei, and Tang dynasties a development out of the exquisitely refined and exhausted art of the Han decadence—from which Ku K'ai-chih is a delicate straggler—is to call Romanesque sculpture a development out of Praxiteles. Between the two some thing has happened to refill the stream of art. What had happened in China was the spiritual and emotional revolution that followed the onset of Buddhism.]


Bell has  defended himself against my skepticism expressed above -- but I''m still not convinced that art from the Wei and Tang dynasties is somehow less refined and more primitive than what preceded it.

 Ku K'ai-chih was apparently a big deal in London art circles after the British army looted his work from the Imperial Palace during the Boxer Rebellion.  I don't find the above image to be over-refined -- but neither do I find it especially compelling.  The British Museum should send it back to Beijing.



..... 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 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.

Venus de Brassempouy,  25,000 bc

Bison, Altamira caves

[footnote:  This is not to say that exact representation is bad in itself. It is indifferent. A perfectly represented form may be significant, only it is fatal to sacrifice significance to representation. The quarrel between significance and illusion seems to be as old as art itself, and I have little doubt that what makes most palaeolithic art so bad is a preoccupation with exact representation. Evidently palaeolithic draughtsmen had no sense of the significance of form. Their art resembles that of the more capable and sincere Royal Academicians: it is a little higher than that of Sir Edward Poynter and a little lower than that of the late Lord Leighton. That this is no paradox let the cave-drawings of Altamira, or such works as the sketches of horses found at Bruniquel and now in the British Museum, bear witness. If the ivory head of a girl from the Grotte du Pape, Brassempouy (Musée St. Germain) and the ivory torso found at the same place (Collection St. Cric), be, indeed, palaeolithic, then there were good palaeolithic artists who created and did not imitate form. Neolithic art is, of course, a very different matter.]




Bell  has surprisingly given a thumbs down to the cave paintings from Altamira - which I far prefer to the ivory head shown above.

If  "Palaeolithic draughtsmen had no sense of the significance of form" , then neither do I.


I would say that it is the job of the artist to manipulate  form to make a representation feel significant.

Bell seems to say that her job is to make a significant form despite whatever it may represent.


Naturally, it is said that if there is little representation and less saltimbancery in primitive art, that is because the primitives were unable to catch a likeness or cut intellectual capers. The contention is beside the point. There is truth in it, no doubt, though, were I a critic whose reputation depended on a power of impressing the public with a semblance of knowledge, I should be more cautious about urging it than such people generally are. For to suppose that the Byzantine masters wanted skill, or could not have created an illusion had they wished to do so, seems to imply ignorance of the amazingly dexterous realism of the notoriously bad works of that age. Very often, I fear, the misrepresentation of the primitives must be attributed to what the critics call, "wilful distortion." Be that as it may, the point is that, either from want of skill or want of will, primitives neither create illusions, nor make display of extravagant accomplishment, but concentrate their energies on the one thing needful—the creation of form. Thus have they created the finest works of art that we possess.

Yet nowhere prior to the twentieth century,  do we have any record of artists being directed or celebrated for concentrating their energies on just the creation of form.




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. 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 exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life. The pure mathematician rapt in his studies knows a state of mind which I take to be similar, if not identical. He feels an emotion for his speculations which arises from no perceived relation between them and the lives of men, but springs, inhuman or super-human, from the heart of an abstract science. I wonder, sometimes, whether the appreciators of art and of mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied. Before we feel an aesthetic emotion for a combination of forms, do we not perceive intellectually the rightness and necessity of the combination? If we do, it would explain the fact that passing rapidly through a room we recognise a picture to be good, although we cannot say that it has provoked much emotion. We seem to have recognised intellectually the rightness of its forms without staying to fix our attention, and collect, as it were, their emotional significance. If this were so, it would be permissible to inquire whether it was the forms themselves or our perception of their rightness and necessity that caused aesthetic emotion. But I do not think I need linger to discuss the matter here. I have been inquiring why certain combinations of forms move us; I should not have travelled by other roads had I enquired, instead, why certain combinations are perceived to be right and necessary, and why our perception of their rightness and necessity is moving. What I have to say is this: the rapt philosopher, and he who contemplates a work of art, inhabit a world with an intense and peculiar significance of its own; that significance is unrelated to the significance of life. In this world the emotions of life find no place. It is a world with emotions of its own.



 I agree that when:

 "passing rapidly through a room we recognize a picture to be good, although we cannot say that it has provoked much emotion. We seem to have recognized intellectually the rightness of its forms without staying to fix our attention, and collect, as it were, their emotional significance."


I do that quick judging when visiting a large collection of things at a museum or art fair.  A glance of one or two seconds will suffice to decide whether I will pay it any more attention.

But that passing glance could hardly be called  an aesthetic experience ------ and I would not do it unless there was an opportunity to stop and take a longer look..




To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space. That bit of knowledge, I admit, is essential to the appreciation of many great works, since many of the most moving forms ever created are in three dimensions. To see a cube or a rhomboid as a flat pattern is to lower its significance, and a sense of three-dimensional space is essential to the full appreciation of most architectural forms. Pictures which would be insignificant if we saw them as flat patterns are profoundly moving because, in fact, we see them as related planes. If the representation of three-dimensional space is to be called "representation," then I agree that there is one kind of representation which is not irrelevant. Also, I agree that along with our feeling for line and colour we must bring with us our knowledge of space if we are to make the most of every kind of form. Nevertheless, there are magnificent designs to an appreciation of which this knowledge is not necessary: so, though it is not irrelevant to the appreciation of some works of art it is not essential to the appreciation of all. What we must say is that the representation of three-dimensional space is neither irrelevant nor essential to all art, and that every other sort of representation is irrelevant.

Bell wrote this when he was 33.

I wonder if he would have still ignored the importance of experience when he was sixty.




That there is an irrelevant representative or descriptive element in many great works of art is not in the least surprising. Why it is not surprising I shall try to show elsewhere. Representation is not of necessity baneful, and highly realistic forms may be extremely significant. Very often, however, representation is a sign of weakness in an artist. A painter too feeble to create forms that provoke more than a little aesthetic emotion will try to eke that little out by suggesting the emotions of life. To evoke the emotions of life he must use representation. Thus a man will paint an execution, and, fearing to miss with his first barrel of significant form, will try to hit with his second by raising an emotion of fear or pity. But if in the artist an inclination to play upon the emotions of life is often the sign of a flickering inspiration, in the spectator a tendency to seek, behind form, the emotions of life is a sign of defective sensibility always. It means that his aesthetic emotions are weak or, at any rate, imperfect. Before a work of art people who feel little or no emotion for pure form find themselves at a loss. They are deaf men at a concert. They know that they are in the presence of something great, but they lack the power of apprehending it. They know that they ought to feel for it a tremendous emotion, but it happens that the particular kind of emotion it can raise is one that they can feel hardly or not at all. And so they read into the forms of the work those facts and ideas for which they are capable of feeling emotion, and feel for them the emotions that they can feel — the ordinary emotions of life. When confronted by a picture, instinctively they refer back its forms to the world from which they came. They treat created form as though it were imitated form, a picture as though it were a photo- graph. Instead of going out on the stream of art into a new world of aesthetic experience, they turn a sharp corner and come straight home to the world of human interests. For them the significance of a work of art depends on what they bring to it ; no new thing is added to their lives, only the oid material is stirred. A good work of visual art carries a person who is capable of appreciating it out of life into ecstasy : to use art as a means to the emotions of life is to use a telescope for reading the news. You will notice that people who cannot feel pure aesthetic emotions remember pictures by their subjects ; whereas people who can, as often as not, have no idea what the subject of a picture is. They have never noticed the representative element, and so when they discuss pictures they talk about the shapes of forms and the relations and quantities of colours. Often they can tell by the quality of a single line whether or no a man is a good artist. They are concerned only with lines and colours, their relations and quantities and qualities ; but from these they win an emotion more profound and far more sublime than any that can be given by the description of facts and ideas.


This seems to be a rhetorical response to an oft-heard argument that incompetence accounts for those artists who do not make highly realistic representations.  Bell has turned that assertion on it's head.

By the way -- isn't it about time that Bell offered us at least one example of a highly realistic representation that also has significant forms ?





This last sentence has a very confident ring — over-confident, some may think. Perhaps I shall be able to justify it, and make my meaning clearer too, if I give an account of my own feelings about music. I am not really musical. I do not understand music well. I find musical form exceedingly difficult to apprehend, and I am sure that the profounder subtleties of harmony and rhythm more often than not escape me. The form of a musical composition must be simple indeed if I am to grasp it honestly. My opinion about music is not worth having. Yet, sometimes, at a concert, though my appreciation of the music is limited and humble, it is pure. Sometimes, though I have a poor understanding, I have a clean palate. Consequently, when I am feeling bright and clear and intent, at the beginning of a concert for instance, when something that I can grasp is being played, I get from music that pure aesthetic emotion that I get from visual art. It is less intense, and the rapture is evanescent ; I understand music too ill for music to transport me far into the world of pure aesthetic ecstasy. But at moments I do appreciate music as pure musical form, as sounds combined according to the laws of a mysterious necessity, as pure art with a tremendous significance of its own and no relation whatever to the significance of life ; and in those moments I lose myself in that infinitely sublime state of mind to which pure visual form transports me. How inferior is my normal state of mind at a concert. Tired or perplexed, I let slip my sense of form, my aesthetic emotion collapses, and I begin weaving into the harmonies, that I cannot grasp, the ideas of life. Incapable of feeling the austere emotions of art, I begin to read into the musical forms human emotions of terror and mystery, love and hate, and spend the minutes, pleasantly enough, in a world of turbid and inferior feeling. At such times, were the grossest pieces of onomatopoeic representation — the song of a bird, the galloping of horses, the cries of children, or the laughing of demons — to be introduced into the symphony, I should not be offended. Very likely I should be pleased ; they would afford new points of departure for new trains of romantic feeling or heroic thought. I know very well what has happened. I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life. I have been cutting blocks with a razor. I have tumbled from the superb peaks of aesthetic exaltation to the snug foothills of warm humanity. It is a jolly country. No one need be ashamed of enjoying himself there. Only no one who has ever been on the heights can help feeling a little crestfallen in the cosy valleys And let no one imagine, because he has made merry in the warm tilth and quaint nooks of romance, that he can even guess at the austere and thrilling raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white peaks of art.


"Cold white peaks of art" ?

This is getting a bit silly.


About music most people are as willing to be humble as I am. If they cannot grasp musical form and win from it a pure aesthetic emotion, they confess that they understand music imperfectly or not at all. They recognise quite clearly that there is a difference between the feeling of the musician for pure music and that of the cheerful concert-goer for what music suggests. The latter enjoys his own emotions, as he has every right to do, and recognises their inferiority. Unfortunately, people are apt to be less modest about their powers of appreciating visual art. Everyone is inclined to believe that out of pictures, at any rate, he can get all that there is to be got ; every one is ready to cry “humbug” and “ impostor ” at those who say that more can be had. The good faith of people who feel pure aesthetic emotions is called in question by those who have never felt anything of the sort. It is the prevalence of the representative element, I suppose, that makes the man in the street so sure that he knows a good picture when he sees one. For I have noticed that in matters of architecture, pottery, textiles, etc., ignorance and ineptitude are more willing to defer to the opinions of those who have been blest with peculiar sensibility. It is a pity that cultivated and intelligent men and women cannot be induced to believe that a great gift of aesthetic appreciation is at least as rare in visual as in musical art. A comparison of my own experience in both has enabled me to discriminate very clearly between pure and impure appreciation. Is it too much to ask that others should be as honest about their feelings for pictures as I have been about mine for music ? For I am certain that most of those who visit galleries do feel very much what I feel at concerts. They have their moments of pure ecstasy ; but the moments are short and unsure Soon they fall back into the world of human interests and feel emotions, good no doubt, but inferior. I do not dream of saying that what they get from art is bad or nugatory ; I say that they do not get the best that art can give. I do not say that they cannot understand art ; rather I say that they cannot understand the state of mind of those who understand it best. I do not say that art means nothing or little to them ; I say they miss its full significance. I do not suggest for one moment that their appreciation of art is a thing to be ashamed of ; the majority of the charming and intelligent people with whom I am acquainted appreciate visual art impurely ; and, by the way, the appreciation of almost all great writers has been impure. But provided that there be some fraction of pure aesthetic emotion, even a mixed and minor appreciation of art is, I am sure, one of the most valuable things in the world — so valuable, indeed, that in my giddier moments I have been tempted to believe that art might prove the world’s salvation.

The quest for purity is always reductive and often destructive.  It  defines an orthodoxy.  It seeks to limit rather than expand knowledge and experience.  It's especially appealing to young people and they should be firmly cautioned against it.

However -- I do agree that in the best paintings --- as in the best music --- something seems to be above and beyond what ever can be comprehended - perhaps even by the artist herself -- who may have conceived it's final form in a  flash of inspiration.

Sumerian, 6500-6000 B.C.

Yet, though the echoes and shadows of art enrich the life of the plains, her spirit dwells on the mountains. To him who woos, but woos impurely, she returns enriched what is brought. Like the sun, she warms the good seed in good soil and causes it to bring forth good fruit. But only to the perfect lover does she give a new strange gift — a gift beyond all price. Imperfect lovers bring to art and take away the ideas and emotions of their own age and civilisation. In twelfth-century Europe a man might have been greatly moved by a Romanesque church and found nothing in a T’ang picture. To a man of a later age, Greek sculpture meant much and Mexican nothing, for only to the former could he bring a crowd of associated ideas to be the objects of familiar emotions. But the perfect lover, he who can feel the profound significance of form, is raised above the accidents of time and place. To him the problems of archaeology, history, and hagiography are impertinent. If the forms of a work are significant its provenance is irrelevant. Before the grandeur of those Sumerian figures in the Louvre he is carried on the same flood of emotion to the same aesthetic ecstasy as, more than four thousand years ago, the Chaldean lover was carried. It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.


I would not call myself the "perfect lover" --  but neither am I limited to the products of my own age and civilization.  Many other kinds of things speak to me - whether I'm familiar with much of their original context or not.

Is it possible that humans have a humanity in common, regardless of time and place ?   I feel much closer to many far distant artists than I do to the people who live next door -- and even more distant from the scholar class of contemporary academia,

By  the way -- I'm just guessing that the Sumerian figure from the  Louvre, shown above,  is what Bell was referring to.  It looks awkward and goofy -- which seems to be the kind of thing that he finds significant.


footnote:

 Mr. Roger Fry permits me to make use of an interesting story that will illustrate my view. When Mr. Okakura, the Government editor of The Temple Treasures of Japan , first came to Europe, he found no difficulty in appreciating the pictures of those who from want of will or want of skill did not create illusions but concentrated their energies on the creation of form. He understood immediately the Byzantine masters and the French and Italian Primitives. In the Renaissance painters, on the other hand, with their descriptive pre-occupations, their literary and anecdotal interests, he could see nothing but vulgarity and muddle. The universal and essential quality of art, significant form, was missing, or rather had dwindled to a shallow stream, overlaid and hidden beneath weeds, so the universal response, aesthetic emotion, was not evoked. It was not till he came on to Henri-Matisse that he again found himself in the familiar world of pure art. Similarly, sensitive Europeans who stands charged with the power to provoke aesthetic emotion in anyone capable of feeling it. The ideas of men go buzz and die like gnats ; men change their institutions and their customs as they change their coats; the intellectual triumphs of one age are the follies of another ; only great art remains stable and unobscure. Great art remains stable and unobscure because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place, because its kingdom is not of this world. To those who have and hold a sense of the significance of form what does it matter whether the forms that move them were created in Paris the day before yesterday or in Babylon fifty centuries ago ? The forms of art are inexhaustible ; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy. respond immediately to the significant forms of great Oriental art, are left cold by the trivial pieces of anecdote and social criticism so lovingly cherished by Chinese dilettanti. It would be easy to multiply instances did not decency forbid the labouring of so obvious a truth.


And yet ---- Rodin had a great influence on the Japanese sculptors of that time (early twentieth century)

Rodin exemplifies that conflation of formal power and dense descriptive detail concerning which Bell has yet to show any interest.

II AESTHETICS AND POST- IMPRESSIONISM 

By the light of my aesthetic hypothesis I can read more clearly than before the history of art ; also I can see in that history the place of the contemporary movement. As I shall have a great deal to say about the contemporary movement, perhaps I shall do well to seize this moment, when the aesthetic hypothesis is fresh in my mind and, I hope, in the minds of my readers, for an examination of the movement in relation to the hypothesis. For anyone of my generation to write a book about art that said no- thing of the movement dubbed in this country Post-Impressionist would be a piece of pure affectation. I shall have a great deal to say about it, and therefore I wish to see at the earliest possible opportunity how Post-Impressionism stands with regard to my theory of aesthetics. The survey will give me occasion for stating some of the things that Post-Impressionism is and some that it is not. I shall have to raise points that will be dealt with at greater length elsewhere. Here I shall have a chance of raising them, and at least suggesting a solution.


 Primitives produce art because they must ; they have no other motive than a passionate desire to express their sense of form. Untempted, or incompetent, to create illusions, to the creation of form they devote themselves entirely. Presently, however, the artist is joined by a patron and a public, and soon there grows up a demand for “ speaking likenesses.” While the gross herd still clamours for likeness, the choicer spirits begin to affect an admiration for cleverness and skill. The end is in sight. In Europe we watch art sinking, by slow degrees, from the thrilling design of Ravenna to the tedious portraiture of Holland, while the grand proportion of Romanesque and Norman architecture becomes Gothic juggling in stone and glass. Before the late noon of the Renaissance art was almost extinct. Only nice illusionists and masters of craft abounded. That was the moment for a Post-Impressionist revival.

The first sentence  of the second  paragraph is nonsense -- and the broad characterizations that follow aren't much better.  There are some boring mosaics from Byzantine  Ravenna just as there are some great portraits from 17th Century Holland.


 For various reasons there was no revolution. The tradition of art remained comatose. Here and there a genius appeared and wrestled with the coils of convention and created significant form. For instance, the art of Nicolas Poussin, Claude, El Greco, Chardin, Ingres, and Renoir, to name a few, moves us as that of Giotto and Cezanne moves. The bulk, however, of those who flourished between the high Renaissance and the contemporary movement may be divided into two classes, virtuosi and dunces. The clever fellows, the minor masters, who might have been artists if painting had not absorbed all their energies, were throughout that period for ever setting themselves technical acrostics and solving them. The dunces continued to elaborate chromophotographs, and continue.

 I wonder what  famous artists he would call mere virtuosi or dunces ?


 The fact that significant form was the only common quality in the works that moved me, and that in the works that moved me most and seemed most to move the most sensitive people — in primitive art, that is to say — it was almost the only quality, had led me to my hypothesis before ever I became familiar with the works of Cezanne and his followers. Cezanne carried me off my feet before ever I noticed that his strongest characteristic was an insistence on the supremacy of significant form. When I noticed this, my admiration for Cezanne and some of his followers confirmed me in my aesthetic theories. Naturally I had found no difficulty in liking them since I found in them exactly what I liked in everything else that moved me.

If Cezanne is the only Post-Impressionist Bell will discuss-- why not just give him all the credit? And I do wish he would provide the example of a specific piece or two.

Meanwhile -- what about the Impressionists?  Were they somehow headed in a direction that  needed correction by those who followed?

 There is no mystery about Post-Impressionism; a good Post-Impressionist picture is good for precisely the same reasons that any other picture is good. The essential quality in art is permanent. Post-Impressionism, therefore, implies no violent break with the past. It is merely a deliberate rejection of certain hampering traditions of modern growth. It does deny that art need ever take orders from the past ; but that is not a badge of Post-Impressionism, it is the commonest mark of vitality. Even to speak of Post-Impressionism as a movement may lead to misconceptions ; the habit of speaking of movements at all is rather misleading. The stream of art has never run utterly dry : it flows through the ages, now broad now narrow, now deep now shallow, now rapid now sluggish : its colour is changing always. But who can set a mark against the exact point of change ? In the earlier nineteenth century the stream ran very low. In the days of the Impressionists, against whom the contemporary movement is in some ways a reaction, it had already become copious. Any attempt to dam and imprison this river, to choose out a particular school or movement and say : “ Here art begins and there it ends,” is a pernicious absurdity. That way Academization lies. At this moment there are not above half a dozen good painters alive who do not derive, to some extent, from Cezanne, and belong, in some sense, to the Post-Impressionist movement ; but to- morrow a great painter may arise who will create significant form by means superficially opposed to those of Cezanne. Superficially, I say, because, essentially, all good art is of the same movement : there are only two kinds of art, good and bad. Nevertheless, the division of the stream into reaches, distinguished by differences of manner, is intelligible and, to historians at any rate, useful The reaches also differ from each other in volume ; one period of art is distinguished from another by its fertility. For a few fortunate years or decades the output of considerable art is great. Suddenly it ceases ; or slowly it dwindles : a movement has exhausted itself. How far a movement is  made by the fortuitous synchronisation of a number of good artists, and how far the artists are helped to the creation of significant form by the pervasion of some underlying spirit of the age, is a question that can never be decided beyond cavil. But however the credit is to be apportioned — and I suspect it should be divided about equally — we are justified, I think, looking at the history of art as a whole, in regarding such periods of fertility as distinct parts of that whole. Primarily, it is as a period of fertility in good art and artists that I admire the Post-Impressionist movement. Also, I believe that the principles which underlie and inspire that movement are more likely to encourage artists to give of their best, and to foster a good tradition, than any of which modern history bears record. But my interest in this movement, and my admiration for much of the art it has produced, does not blind me to the greatness of the products of other movements ; neither, I hope, will it blind me to the greatness of any new creation of form even though that novelty may seem to imply a reaction against the tradition of Cezanne.


 Like all sound revolutions, Post-Impressionism is nothing more than a return to first principles. Into a world where the painter was expected to be either a photographer or an acrobat burst the Post-Impressionist, claiming that, above all things, he should be an artist. Never mind, said he, about representation or accomplishment — mind about creating significant form, mind about art. Creating a work of art is so tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure for catching a likeness or displaying address. Every sacrifice made to representation is something stolen from art. Far from being the insolent kind of revolution it is vulgarly supposed to be, Post-Impressionism is, in fact, a return, not indeed to any particular tradition of painting, but to the great tradition of visual art. It sets before every artist the ideal set before themselves by the primitives, an ideal which, since the twelfth cen- tury, has been cherished only by exceptional men of genius. Post-Impressionism is nothing but the reassertion of the first commandment of art — Thou shalt create form. By this assertion it shakes hands across the ages with the Byzantine primitives and with every vital movement that has struggled into existence since the arts began.


Amid all this cant and blather -- the "first commandment of art" does ring true for me:  "Thou shalt create form".

It ought to be inscribed above the door of every art school and studio -- especially my own.

It's so easy to lose focus on form when attending to recognizability - and form is what brings a piece to life.



 Post-Impressionism is not a matter of technique. Certainly Cezanne invented a  technique, admirably suited to his purpose, which has been adopted and elaborated, more or less, by the majority of his followers. The important thing about a picture, how-ever, is not how it is painted, but whether it provokes aesthetic emotion. As I have said, essentially, a good Post-Impressionist picture resembles all other good works of art, and only differs from some, superficially, by a conscious and deliberate rejection of those technical and sentimental irrelevancies that have been imposed on painting by a bad tradition. This becomes obvious when one visits an exhibition such as the Salon d' Automne or Les Independents , where there are hundreds of pictures in the Post-Impressionist manner, many of which are quite worthless .

footnote:

 [Anyone who has visited the very latest French exhibitions will have seen scores of what are called “Cubist” pictures. These afford an excellent illustration of my thesis. Of a hundred cubist pictures three or four will have artistic value. Thirty years ago the same might have been said of “ Impressionist pictures ; forty years before that of romantic pictures in the manner of Delacroix. The explanation is simple, — the vast majority of those who paint pictures have neither originality nor any considerable talent. Left to themselves they would probably produce the kind of painful absurdity which in England is known as an “Academy picture.” But a student who has no original gift may yet be anything but a fool, and many students understand that the ordinary cultivated picture-goer knows an “ Academy picture ” at a glance and knows that it is bad. Is it fair to condemn  severely a young painter for trying to give his picture a factitious interest, or even for trying to conceal beneath striking wrappers the essential mediocrity of his wares? If not heroically sincere he is surely not inhumanly base.




 These, one realizes, are bad in precisely the same way as any other picture is bad ; their forms are insignificant and compel no aesthetic reaction. In truth, it was an unfortunate necessity that obliged us to speak of “ Post-Impressionist pictures,” and now, I think, the moment is at hand when we shall be able to return to the older and more adequate nomenclature, and speak of good pictures and bad. Only we must not forget that the movement of which Cezanne is the earliest manifestation, and which has borne so amazing a crop of good art, owes something, though not everything, to the liberating and revolutionary doctrines of Post-Impressionism . The silliest things said about Post- Impressionist pictures are said by people severely a young painter for trying to give his picture a factitious interest, or even for trying to conceal beneath striking wrappers the essential mediocrity of his wares? If not heroically sincere he is surely not inhumanly base. Besides, he has to imitate someone, and he likes to be in the fashion. And, after all, a bad cubist picture is no worse than any other bad picture. If anyone is to be blamed, it should be the spectator who cannot distinguish between good cubist pictures and bad. Blame alike the fools who think that because a picture is cubist it must be worthless, and their idiotic enemies who think it must be marvellous. People of sensibility can see that there is as much difference between Picasso and a Montmartre sensationalist as there is between Ingres and the Pre- sident of the Royal Academy. who regard Post-Impressionism as an isolated movement, whereas, in fact, it takes its place as part of one of those huge slopes into which we can divide the history of art and the spiritual history of mankind. In my enthusiastic moments I am tempted to hope that it is the first stage in a new slope to which it will stand in the same relation as sixth-century Byzantine art stands to the old. In that case we shall compare Post- Impressionism with that vital spirit which, towards the end of the fifth century, flickered into life amidst the ruins of Graeco-Roman realism. Post-Impressionism, or, let us say the Contemporary Movement, has a future ; but when that future is present Cezanne and Matisse will no longer be called Post- Impressionists. They will certainly be called great artists, just as Giotto and Masaccio are called great artists ; they will be called the masters of a movement ; but whether that movement is destined to be more than a movement, to be something as vast as the slope that lies between Cezanne and the masters of S. Vitale, is a matter of much less certainty than enthusiasts care to suppose. Post-Impressionism is accused of being a negative and destructive creed. In art no creed is healthy that is anything else. You  cannot give men genius ; you can only give them freedom — freedom from superstition. Post-Impressionism can no more make good artists than good laws can make good men. Doubtless, with its increasing popularity, an annually increasing horde of nincompoops will employ the so-called “Post-Impressionist technique ” for presenting insignificant pat- terns and recounting foolish anecdotes. Their pictures will be dubbed “Post-Impressionist,” but only by gross injustice will they be excluded from Burlington House. Post- Impressionism is no specific against human folly and incompetence. All it can do for painters is to bring before them the claims of art. To the man of genius and to the student of talent it can say : “ Don’t waste your time and energy on things that don’t matter : concentrate on what does : concentrate on the creation of significant form.” Only thus can either give the best that is in him. Formerly because both felt bound to strike a compromise between art and what the public had been taught to expect, the work of one was grievously disfigured, that of the other ruined. Tradition ordered the painter to be photographer, acrobat, archaeologist and litterateur : Post-Impressionism invites him to become an artist. 


Bell refers to a "post-impressionist creed" but does not articulate it beyond the last sentence shown above:  "become an artist".

That also appears to be  the predominant creed of  art schools in the 21st Century  -- like the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  It emphasizes being an artist rather than the value of the thing made.

That seems goofy and exploitative to me -- but apparently it does work for some young artists.

THE METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESIS

 For the present I have said enough about the aesthetic problem and about Post-Impressionism ; I want now to consider that metaphysical question — “ Why do certain arrangements and combinations of form move us so strangely?” For aesthetics it suffices that they do move us ; to all further inquisition of the tedious and stupid it can be replied that, however queer these things may be, they are no queerer than anything else in this incredibly queer universe. But to those for whom my theory seems to open a vista of possibilities I willingly offer, for what they are worth, my fancies.

It seems to me possible, though by no means certain, that created form moves us so profoundly because it expresses the emotion of its creator. Perhaps the lines and colours of a work of art convey to us something that the artist felt. If this be so, it will explain that curious but undeniable fact, to which 1 have already referred, that what I call material beauty ( e.g . the wing of a butterfly) does not move most of us in at all the same way as a work of art moves us. It is beautiful form, but it is not significant form. It moves us, but it does not move us aesthetically. It is tempting to explain the difference between “ significant form ” and “beauty” — that is to say, the difference between form that provokes our aesthetic emotions and form that does not — by saying that significant form conveys to us an emotion felt by its creator and that beauty conveys nothing.

For what, then, does the artist feel the emotion that he is supposed to express? Sometimes it certainly comes to him through material beauty. The contemplation of natural objects is often the immediate cause of the artist’s emotion. Are we to suppose, then, that the artist feels, or sometimes feels, for material beauty what we feel for a work of art ? Can it be that sometimes for the artist material beauty is somehow significant — that is, capable of provoking aesthetic emotion ? And if the form that provokes aesthetic emotion be form that expresses something, can it be that material beauty is to him expressive ? Does he feel something behind it as we imagine that we feel some- thing behind the forms of a work of art ? Are we to suppose that the emotion which the artist expresses is an aesthetic emotion felt for something the significance of which commonly escapes our coarser sensibilities ? All these are questions about which I had sooner speculate than dogmatise.

Let us hear what the artists have got to say for themselves. We readily believe them when they tell us that, in fact, they do not create works of art in order to provoke our aesthetic emotions, but because only thus can they materialise a particular kind of feeling. What, precisely, this feeling is they find it hard to say. One account of the matter, given me by a very good artist, is that what he tries to express in a picture is “a passionate apprehension of form.” I have set myself to discover what is meant by “a passionate apprehension of form,” and, after much talking and more listening, I have arrived at the following result. Occasionally when an artist — a real artist — looks at objects (the contents of a room, for instance) he perceives them as pure forms in certain relations to each other, and feels emotion for them as such. These are his moments of inspiration : follows the desire to express what has been felt. The emotion that the artist felt in his moment of inspiration he did not feel for objects seen as means, but for objects seen as pure forms — that is, as ends in themselves. He did not feel emotion for a chair as a means to physical well-being, nor as an object associated with the intimate life of a family, nor as the place where someone sat saying things unforgettable, nor yet as a thing bound to the lives of hundreds of men and women, dead or alive, by a hundred subtle ties ; doubtless an artist does often feel emotions such as these for the things that he sees, but in the moment of aesthetic vision he sees objects, not as means shrouded in associations, but as pure forms. It is for, or at any rate through, pure form that he feels his inspired emotion.

Now to see objects as pure forms is to see them as ends in themselves. For though, of course, forms are related to each other as parts of a whole, they are related on terms of equality ; they are not a means to any- thing except emotion. But for objects seen as ends in themselves, do we not feel a pro- founder and a more thrilling emotion than ever we felt for them as means? All of us, I imagine, do, from time to time, get a vision of material objects as pure forms. We see things as ends in themselves, that is to say ; and at such moments it seems possible, and even probable, that we see them with the eye of an artist. Who has not, once at least in his life, had a sudden vision of landscape as pure form ? For once, instead of seeing it as fields and cottages, he has felt it as lines and colours. In that moment has he not won from material beauty a thrill indistinguishable from that which art gives ? And, if this be so, is it not clear that he has won from material beauty the thrill that, generally, art alone can give, because he has contrived to see it as a pure formal combination of lines and colours ? May we go on to say that, having seen it as pure form, having freed it from all casual and adventitious interest, from all that it may have acquired from its commerce with human beings, from all its significance as a means, he has felt its significance as an end in itself?

What is the significance of anything as an end in itself? What is that which is left when we have stripped a thing of all its associations, of all its significance as a means ? What is left to provoke our emotion ? What but that which philosophers used to call “ the thing in itself” and now call “ultimate reality ” ? Shall I be altogether fantastic in suggesting, what some of the profoundest thinkers have believed, that the significance of the thing in itself is the significance of Reality? Is it possible that the answer to my question, “ Why are we so profoundly moved by certain combinations of lines and colours ? ” should be, “ Because artists can express in combinations of lines and colours an emotion felt for reality which reveals itself through line and colour ” ?

If this suggestion were accepted it would follow that “ significant form ” was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality. There would be good reason for supposing that the emotions which artists feel in their moments of inspiration, that others feel in the rare moments when they see objects artistically, and that many of us feel when we contemplate works of art, are the same in kind. All would be emotions felt for reality revealing itself through pure form. It is certain that this emotion can be expressed only in pure form. It is certain that most of us can come at it only through pure form. But is pure form the only channel through which anyone can come at this mysterious emotion ? That is a disturbing and a most distasteful question, for at this point I thought I saw my way to can- celling out the word “ reality,” and saying that all are emotions felt for pure form which may or may not have something be- hind it. To me it would be most satisfactory to say that the reason why some forms move us aesthetically, and others do not, is that some have been so purified that we can feel them aesthetically and that others are so clogged with unaesthetic matter (e.g. associations) that only the sensibility of an artist can perceive their pure, formal significance. I should be charmed to believe that it is as certain that everyone must come at reality through form as that everyone must express his sense of it in form. But is that so ? What kind of form is that from which the musician draws the emotion that he expresses in abstract harmonies ? Whence come the emotions of the architect and the potter ? I know that the artist’s emotion can be ex- pressed only in form ; I know that only by Form can my aesthetic emotions be called into play ; but can I be sure that it is always by form that an artist’s emotion is provoked ? Back to reality.

Those who incline to believe that the artist’s emotion is felt for reality will readily  admit that visual artists — with whom alone we are concerned — come at reality generally through material form. But don’t they come at it sometimes through imagined form ? And ought we not to add that sometimes the sense of reality comes we know not whence ? The best account I know of this state of being rapt in a mysterious sense of reality is the one that Dante gives : (Purgatorio, Canto 17)



 “ O immaginativa, che ne rube
tal volta si di fuor, ch’ uom non s’accorge
 perche d’intorno suonin mille tube

 chi move te, se il senso non ti porge ?
 Movti lume, che nel ciel s’informa,
 per se, o per voler che giu lo scorge.

De l'empiezza di lei che mutò forma
ne l'uccel ch'a cantar più si diletta,
ne l'imagine mia apparve l'orma;


e qui fu la mia mente sì
dentro da sé, che di fuor non
cosa che fosse allor da lei ricetta.






O thou, Imagination, that dost steal us
So from without sometimes, that man perceives not,
Although around may sound a thousand trumpets,


Who moveth thee, if sense impel thee not?
Moves thee a light, which in the heaven takes form,
By self, or by a will that downward guides it.

Of her impiety, who changed her form
Into the bird that most delights in singing,
In my imagining appeared the trace;




Certainly, in those moments of exaltation that art can give, it is easy to believe that we have been possessed by an emotion that comes from the world of reality. Those who take this view will have to say that there is in all things the stuff out of which art is made — reality; artists, even, can  grasp it only when they have reduced things to their purest condition of being — to pure form — unless they be of those who come at it mysteriously unaided by externals ; only in pure form can a sense of it be expressed. On this hypothesis the peculiarity of the artist would seem to be that he possesses the power of surely and frequently seizing reality (generally behind pure form), and the power of expressing his sense of it, in pure form always. But many people, though they feel the tremendous significance of form, feel also a cautious dislike for big words ; and “ reality ” is a very big one. These pre-fer to say that what the artist surprises behind form, or seizes by sheer force of imagination, is the all-pervading rhythm that informs all things; and I have said that J. will never quarrel with that blessed word “ rhythm.” The ultimate object of the artist’s emotion will remain for ever uncertain. But, unless we assume that all artists are liars, I think we must suppose that they do feel an emotion which they can express in form — and form alone. And note well this further point ; artists try to express emotion, not to make statements about its ultimate  immediate object. Naturally, if an artist’s emotion comes to him from, or through, the perception of forms and formal relations, he will be apt to express it in forms derived from those through which it came ; but he will not be bound by his vision. He will be bound by his emotion. Not what he saw, but only what he felt will necessarily condition his design. Whether the connection between the forms of a created work and the forms of the visible universe be patent or obscure, whether it exist or whether it does not, is a matter of no consequence whatever. No one ever doubted that a Sung pot or a Romanesque church was as much an expression of emotion as any picture that ever was painted. What was the object of the potter’s emotion ? What of the builder’s ? Was it some imagined form, the synthesis of a hundred different visions of natural things ; or was it some conception of reality, unrelated to sensual experience, remote al together from the physical universe ? These are questions beyond all conjecture. In any case, the form in which he expresses his emotion bears no memorial of any external form that may have provoked it. Expression is no wise bound by the forms or emotions or ideas of life. We cannot know exactly what the artist feels. We only know what he creates. If reality be the goal of his  emotion, the roads to reality are several. Some artists come at it through the appearance of things, some by a recollection of appearance, and some by sheer force of imagination. To the question — “Why are we so profoundly moved by certain combinations of forms ? ” I am unwilling to return a positive answer. I am not obliged to, for it is not an aesthetic question. I do suggest, however, that it is because they express an emotion that the artist has felt, though I hesitate to make any pronouncement about the nature or object of that emotion. If my suggestion be accepted, criticism will be armed with a new weapon ; and the nature of this weapon is worth a moment’s consideration. Going behind his emotion and its object, the critic will be able to surprise that which gives form its signficance. He will be able to explain why some forms are significant and some are not; and thus he will be able to push all his judgments a step further back. Let me give one example. Of copies of pictures there are two classes ; one class contains some works of art, the other none. A literal copy is seldom reckoned even by its owner a work of art. It leaves us cold ; its forms are not significant. Yet if it were an absolutely exact copy, clearly it would be as moving as the original, and a photographic reproduction of a drawing often is — almost. Evidently, it is impossible to imitate a work of art exactly ; and the differences between the copy and the original, minute though they may be, exist and are felt immediately. So far the critic is on sure and by this time familiar ground. The copy does not move him, because its forms are not identical with those of the original ; and just what made the original moving is what does not appear in the copy.

But what if the copy does move us as much as the original?

Photographic copies of drawings may differ from the original in surface  texture -- but that difference may not be enough to diminish aesthetic affect.

The difference between a sculpture and a small, flat, photograph of it can be distinguished by anyone - even the blind.  But  photographs of sculpture have often affected me in a quite positive way -- and may well  present the original form better than the poorly lit original itself.   (and sculpture is usually poorly lit - even in art museums) .

( Here is my tribute to a great photographer of sculpture )

Every bronze sculpture is a copy -- very rarely executed by the artist himself.

Back when Bell was writing this,  art museums displayed plaster casts of great sculpture. Regretfully, that practice has been discontinued.







 But why is it impossible to make an absolutely exact copy ? The explanation seems to be that the actual lines and colours and spaces in a work of art are caused by something in the mind of the artist which is not present in the mind of the imitator. The hand not only obeys the mind, it is impotent to make lines and colours in a particular way without the direction of a particular state of mind. The two visible objects, the original and the copy, differ because that which ordered the work of art does not preside at the manufacture of the copy. That which orders the work of art is, I suggest, the emotion which empowers artists to create significant form. The good copy, the copy  that moves us, is always the work of one who is possessed by this mysterious emotion. Good copies are never attempts at exact imitation ; on examination we find always enormous differences between them and their originals : they are the work of men or women who do not copy but can translate the art of others into their own language.





 The power of creating significant form depends, not on hawklike vision, but on some curious mental and emotional power. Even to copy a picture one needs, not to see as a trained observer, but to feel as an artist. To make the spectator feel, it seems that the creator must feel too. What is this that imitated forms lack and created forms possess ? What is this mysterious thing that dominates the artist in the creation of forms ? What is it that lurks behind forms and seems to be conveyed by them to us ? What is it that distinguishes the creator from the copyist ? What can it be but emotion ? Is it not because the artist’s forms express a particular kind of emotion that they are significant ? — because they fit and envelop it, that they are coherent ? — because they communicate it, that they exalt us to ecstasy ?  

This suggests that the emotion felt by the artist is independent of the form that conveys it.

I would suggest that the emotion did not exist until the form was made - and subsequently - it only exists as the form is viewed.



One word of warning is necessary. Let no one imagine that the expression of emotion is the outward and visible sign of a work of art. The characteristic of a work of art is its power of provoking aesthetic emotion ; the expression of emotion is possibly what gives it that power. It is useless to go to a picture gallery in search of expression ; you must go in search of significant form. When you have been moved by form, you may begin to consider what makes it moving. If my theory be correct, rightness of form is invariably a consequence of rightness of emotion. Right form, I suggest, is ordered and conditioned by a particular kind of emotion ; but whether my theory be true or false, the form remains right, if the forms are satisfactory, the state of mind that ordained them must have been aesthetically right. If the forms are wrong, it does not follow that the state of mind was wrong ; between the moment of inspiration and the finished work of art there is room for many a slip. Feeble or defective emotion is at best only one explanation of unsatisfactory form. Therefore, when the critic comes across satisfactory form he need not bother about the feelings of the artist ; for him to feel the aesthetic significance of the artist’s forms suffices. If the artist’s state of mind be important, he may be sure that it was right because the forms are right. But when the critic attempts to account for the unsatisfactoriness of forms he may consider the state of mind of the artist. He cannot be sure that because the forms are wrong the state of mind was wrong ; because right forms imply right feeling, wrong forms do not necessarily imply wrong feeling ; but if he has got to explain the wrongness of form, here is a possibility he cannot overlook. He will have left the firm land of aesthetics to travel in an unstable element ; in criticism one catches at any straw. There is no harm in that, provided the critic never forgets that, whatever ingenious theories he may put forward, they can be nothing more than attempts to explain the one central fact — that some forms move us aesthetically and others do not. 

That final sentence defines an aesthetic approach to art that was prevalent in the art institutions of his day -- and I share it.

In today's  institutions, the central fact is that somebody else once was moved.




 This discussion has brought me close to a question that is neither aesthetic nor meta- physical but impinges on both. It is the question of the artistic problem, and it is really a technical question. I have suggested that the task of the artist is either to create significant form or to express a sense of reality — whichever way you prefer to put it. But it is certain that few artists, if any, can sit down or stand up just to create nothing more definite than significant form, just to express nothing more definite than a sense of reality. Artists must canalise their emotion, they must concentrate their energies on some definite problem. The man who sets out with the whole world before him is unlikely to get anywhere. In that fact lies the explanation of the absolute necessity for artistic conventions. That is why it is easier to write good verse than good prose, why it is more difficult to write good blank verse than good rhyming couplets. That is the explanation of the sonnet, the ballade, and the rondeau ; severe limitations concentrate and intensify the artist’s energies. 

Since Bell did not even attempt to seriously practice an art, he had nothing to contribute to this discussion except ideology.



 It would be almost impossible for an artist who set himself a task no more definite than that of creating, without conditions or limitations material or intellectual, significant form ever so to concentrate his energies as to achieve his object. His objective would lack precision and therefore his efforts would lack intention. He would almost certainly be vague and listless at his work. It would seem always possible to pull the thing round by a happy fluke, it would rarely be absolutely clear that things were going wrong. The effort would be feeble and the result would be feeble. That is the danger of aestheticism for the artist. The man who feels that he has got nothing to do but to make something beautiful hardly knows where to begin or where to end, or why he should set about one thing more than another. The artist has got to feel the necessity of making his work of art “ right.” It will be “ right ” when it expresses his emotion for reality or is capable of provoking aesthetic emotion in others, whichever way you care to look at it. But most artists have got to canalise their emotion and concentrate their energies on some more definite and more maniable problem than that of making something that shall be aesthetically “ right.” They need a problem that will become the focus of their vast emotions and vague energies, and when that problem is solved their work will be “ right.”

"Right ” for the spectator means aesthetically satisfying ; for the artist at work it means the complete realisation of a conception, the perfect solution of a problem. The mistake that the vulgar make is to suppose that “ right ” means the solution of one particular problem. The vulgar are apt to suppose that the problem which all visual and literary artists set themselves is to make something lifelike. Now, all artistic problems — and their possible variety is infinite — must  be the foci of one particular kind of emotion, that specific artistic emotion which I believe to be an emotion felt for reality, generally perceived through form : but the nature of the focus is immaterial. It is almost, though not quite, true to say that one problem is as good as another. Indeed all problems are, in themselves, equally good, though, owing to human infirmity, there are two which tend to turn out badly. One, as we have seen, is the pure aesthetic problem ; the other is the problem of accurate representation.

 The vulgar imagine that there is but one focus, that “ right ” means always the realisation of an accurate conception of life. They cannot understand that the immediate problem of the artist may be to express himself within a square or a circle or a cube, to balance certain harmonies, to reconcile certain dissonances, to achieve certain rhythms, or to conquer certain difficulties of medium, just as well as to catch a likeness. This error is at the root of the silly criticism that Mr. Shaw has made it fashionable to print. In the plays of Shakespeare there are details of psychology and portraiture so realistic as to astonish and enchant the multitude, but the conception, the thing that Shakespeare set himself to realise, was not a faithful presentation of life. The creation of Illusion was not the artistic problem that Shakespeare used as a channel for his artistic emotion and a focus for his energies. The world of Shakespeare’s plays is by no means so life- like as the world of Mr. Galsworthy’s, and therefore those who imagine that the artistic problem must always be the achieving of a correspondence between printed words or painted forms and the world as they know it are right in judging the plays of Shakespeare inferior to those of Mr. Galsworthy. As a matter of fact, the achievement of verisimilitude, far from being the only possible problem, disputes with the achievement of beauty the honour of being the worst possible. It is so easy to be lifelike, that an attempt to be nothing more will never bring into play the highest emotional and intellectual powers of the artist. Just as the aesthetic problem is too vague, so the representative problem is too simple.


"Vulgar" refers to class identity --  I'd prefer the term "non-aesthetic"

 Every artist must choose his own problem. He may take it from wherever he likes, provided he can make it the focus of those artistic emotions he has got to express and the stimulant of those energies he will need ART to express them. What we have got to remember is that the problem — in a picture it is generally the subject — is of no consequence in itself. It is merely one of the artist’s means of expression or creation. In any particular case one problem may be better than another, as a means, just as one canvas or one brand of colours may be ; that will depend upon the temperament of the artist, and we may leave it to him. For us the problem has no value ; for the artist it is the working test of absolute “rightness.” It is the gauge that measures the pressure of steam ; the artist stokes his fires to set the little handle spinning ; he knows that his machine will not move until he has got his pointer to the mark ; he works up to it and through it ; but it does not drive the engine.

 What, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter? No more than this, I think. The contemplation of pure form leads to a state of extraordinary exaltation and complete detachment from the concerns of life : of so much, speaking for myself, I am sure. It is tempting to suppose that the emotion which exalts has been transmitted through the forms we contemplate by the artist who created them. If this be so, the transmitted emotion, whatever it may be, must be of such a kind that it can be expressed in any sort of form — in pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, textiles etc. Now the emotion that artists express comes to some of them, so they tell us, from the apprehension of the formal significance of material things ; and the formal significance of any material thing is the significance of that thing considered as an end in itself. But if an object considered as an end in itself moves us more profoundly (i.e. has greater significance) than the same object considered as a means to practical ends or as a thing related to human interests—and this undoubtedly is the case—we can only suppose that 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. And if a more or less unconscious apprehension of this latent reality of material things be, indeed, the cause of that strange emotion, a passion to express which is the inspiration of many artists, it seems reasonable to suppose that those who, unaided by material objects, experience the same emotion have come by another road to the same country.

Presumably Bell is referring to one or more of his artist friends when he writes : "Now the emotion that artists express comes to some of them, so they tell us, from the apprehension of the formal significance of material things.. "

I wish he would identify who those friends were. Such a statement might well apply to their observable practice of portraying things in the world around them.  Not every artist works that way.

To put it more generally, I would say that artists are trying to create -- and viewers  are trying to share -- a moment of exultation.  If it's not exultation,  I don't want to share it - and apparently neither does Bell.

 How artists get to their mountain tops is incomprehensible. -- but  the specifics of their elevated views are endlessly fascinating -- at least to me.  That's where  Bell and I apparently differ.



That is the metaphysical hypothesis. Are we to swallow it whole, accept a part of it, or reject it altogether ? Each must decide for himself. I insist only on the rightness of my aesthetic hypothesis. And of one other thing am I sure. Be they artists or lovers of art, mystics or mathematicians, those who achieve ecstasy are those who have freed themselves from the arrogance of humanity. He who would feel the significance of art must make himself humble before it. Those who find the chief im- portance of art or of philosophy in its relation to conduct or its practical utility — those who cannot value things as ends in themselves or, at any rate, as direct means to emotion — will never get from anything the best that it can give. Whatever the world of aesthetic contemplation may be, it is not the world of human business and passion ; in it the chatter and tumult of material existence is unheard, or heard only as the echo of some more ultimate harmony.

Just as Bell would separate the vulgar from the elite - he would separate the "world of human business and passion" from "aesthetic contemplation".

On the contrary, I think they are inter-dependent and  thoroughly conflated.   They need each other.

**************

II. ART AND LIFE

I.  ART AND RELIGION

If in my first chapter I had been at pains to show that art owed nothing to life the title of my second would invite a charge of inconsistency. The danger would be slight, however; for though art owed nothing to life, life might well owe something to art. The weather is admirably independent of human hopes and fears, yet few of us are so sublimely detached as to be indifferent to the weather. Art does affect the lives of men; it moves to ecstasy, thus giving colour and moment to what might be otherwise a rather grey and trivial affair. Art for some makes life worth living. Also, art is affected by life; for to create art there must be men with hands and a sense of form and colour and three-dimensional space and the power to feel and the passion to create. Therefore art has a great deal to do with life—with emotional life. That it is a means to a state of exaltation is unanimously agreed, and that it comes from the spiritual depths of man's nature is hardly contested. The appreciation of art is certainly a means to ecstasy, and the creation probably the expression of an ecstatic state of mind. Art is, in fact, a necessity to and a product of the spiritual life.

  If "art owes nothing to life",  how  can it  be "the product of the spiritual life" ?

 Religion, as I understand it, is an expression of the individual's sense of the emotional significance of the universe; I should not be surprised to find that art was an expression of the same thing. Anyway, both seem to express emotions different from and transcending the emotions of life. 

I guess that's Bell's answer to my question: he allows for no interaction between worldly life and spiritual life. His notion of  religious life is exemplified by an anchorite living on air in a desert.

Though I doubt that even  many anchorites would  agree that they are seeking to express their sense of the emotional significance of the universe.  Aren't they usually trying to elevate themselves into some higher realm of consciousness ?

 Art and religion belong to the same world. Both are bodies in which men try to capture and keep alive their shyest and most ethereal conceptions. The kingdom of neither is of this world. Rightly, therefore, do we regard art and religion as twin manifestations of the spirit; wrongly do some speak of art as a manifestation of religion.


Bell has given art and religion the same mission -- but that mission applies much more to himself than to religions or arts as they have been widely practiced.


This chapter has almost nothing to do with art or aesthetics so I'm not going to copy and paste it. It predictably concludes as follows:

 To be sure, many descriptive paintings are manifestos and expositions of religious dogmas: a very proper use for descriptive painting too. Certainly the blot on many good pictures is the descriptive element introduced for the sake of edification and instruction. But in so far as a picture is a work of art, it has no more to do with dogmas or doctrines, facts or theories, than with the interests and emotions of daily life. II

To my way of thinking, the visual arts are one expression of religious life;   doctrines and written dogmas are another.  Religious professionals are usually much more focused on the latter -- but fortunately that has not always been the case.

II.  ART AND HISTORY

To criticize a work of art historically is to play the science-besotted fool. No more disastrous theory ever issued from the brain of a charlatan than that of evolution in art. Giotto did not creep, a grub, that Titian might flaunt, a butterfly. To think of a man's art as leading on to the art of someone else is to misunderstand it. To praise or abuse or be interested in a work of art because it leads or does not lead to another work of art is to treat it as though it were not a work of art. The connection of one work of art with another may have everything to do with history: it has nothing to do with appreciation. So soon as we begin to consider a work as anything else than an end in itself we leave the world of art. Though the development of painting from Giotto to Titian may be interesting historically, it cannot affect the value of any particular picture: aesthetically, it is of no consequence whatever. Every work of art must be judged on its own merits ---Therefore, be sure that, in my next chapter, I am not going to make aesthetic judgments in the light of history; I am going to read history in the light of aesthetic judgments.


Again, this chapter only tangentially relates to art or aesthetics, so I'm not going to examine it.

I do enjoy, however, the above paragraph that attacks so much of what is written about art  as it emphasizes influence  (which can be demonstrated by analysis) over aesthetic value (which cannot).

III    ART AND ETHICS

 Between me and the pleasant places of history remains, however, one ugly barrier. I cannot dabble and paddle in the pools and shallows of the past until I have answered a question so absurd that the nicest people never tire of asking it: "What is the moral justification of art?" Of course they are right who insist that the creation of art must be justified on ethical grounds: all human activities must be so justified. It is the philosopher's privilege to call upon the artist to show that what he is about is either good in itself or a means to good. It is the artist's duty to reply: "Art is good because it exalts to a state of ecstasy better far than anything a benumbed moralist can even guess at; so shut up." Philosophically he is quite right; only, philosophy is not so simple as that. Let us try to answer philosophically.

Thanks to  G.E. Moore's 'Principia  Ethica", Bell was an enthusiastic proponent of analytic philosophy.  Does this chapter exemplify the logic of its approach to questions of goodness ?  Probably - but I'm afraid that the above response is sufficient for me --  so I will not examine the chapter any further.

**************

III    THE  CHRISTIAN SLOPE

San Vitale, Ravenna

THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN ART

What do I mean by a slope? That I hope to make clear in the course of this chapter and the next. But, as readers may expect something to go on with, I will explain immediately that, though I recognise the continuity of the stream of art, I believe that it is possible and proper to divide that stream into slopes and movements. About the exact line of division there can be no certainty. It is easy to say that in the passage of a great river from the hills to the sea, the depth, the width, the colour, the temperature, and the velocity of the waters are bound to change; to fix precisely the point of change is another matter. If I try to picture for myself the whole history of art from earliest times in all parts of the world I am unable, of course, to see it as a single thread. The stuff of which it is made is unchangeable, it is always water that flows down the river, but there is more than one channel: for instance, there is European art and Oriental. To me the universal history of art has the look of a map in which several streams descend from the same range of mountains to the same sea. They start from different altitudes but all descend at last to one level. Thus, I should say that the slope at the head of which stand the Buddhist masterpieces of the Wei, Liang, and T'ang dynasties begins a great deal higher than the slope at the head of which are the Greek primitives of the seventh century, and higher than that of which early Sumerian sculpture is the head; but when we have to consider contemporary Japanese art, Greco-Roman and Roman sculpture, and late Assyrian, we see that all have found the same sea-level of nasty naturalism.


A rather pessimistic view where everything starts good and ends bad -- just like mortal flesh.

A contrary view might hold that the past looks good because over the centuries, the best things have been identified, preserved, and promulgated. Many of the best things of our age may remain in relative obscurity - and eventually be destroyed before being recognized.




By a slope, then, I mean that which lies between a great primitive morning, when men create art because they must, and that darkest hour when men confound imitation with art. These slopes can be subdivided into movements. The downward course of a slope is not smooth and even, but broken and full of accidents. Indeed the procession of art does not so much resemble a river as a road from the mountains to the plain. That road is a sequence of ups and downs. An up and a down together form a movement. Sometimes the apex of one movement seems to reach as high as the apex of the movement that preceded it, but always its base carries us farther down the slope. Also, in the history of art the summit of one movement seems always to spring erect from the trough of its predecessor. The upward stroke is vertical, the downward an inclined plane. For instance, from Duccio to Giotto is a step up, sharp and shallow. From Giotto to Lionardo is a long and, at times, almost imperceptible fall. Duccio is a fine decadent of that Basilian movement which half survived the Latin conquest and came to an exquisite end under the earlier Palaeologi. The peak of that movement rises high above Giotto, though Duccio near its base is below him. Giotto's art is definitely inferior to the very finest Byzantine of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and Giotto is the crest of a new movement destined and doomed inevitably to sink to depths undreamed of by Duccio.


Was Bell saying these things just to turn conventional opinion on its head? If he really thought that Giotto was "infinitely inferior" to some examples of 11th and 12th Century Byzantine art  why didn't he specify any ?   I think he's just trying to get attention by pushing some buttons.

Ilissus

All that was spiritual in Greek civilization was sick before the sack of Corinth, and all that was alive in Greek art had died many years earlier. That it had died before the death of Alexander let his tomb at Constantinople be my witness. Before they set the last stone of the Parthenon it was ailing: the big marbles in the British Museum are the last significant examples of Greek art; the frieze, of course, proves nothing, being mere artisan work. But the man who made what one may as well call "The Theseus" and "The Ilissus," the man whom one may as well call Phidias, crowns the last vital movement in the Hellenic slope. He is a genius, but he is no oddity: he falls quite naturally into his place as the master of the early decadence; he is the man in whom runs rich and fast but a little coarsened the stream of inspiration that gave life to archaic Greek sculpture. He is the Giotto—but an inferior Giotto—of the slope that starts from the eighth century b.c.—so inferior to the sixth century a.d.—to peter out in the bogs of Hellenistic and Roman rubbish. Whence sprang that Hellenic impulse? As yet we cannot tell. Probably, from the ruins of some venerable Mediterranean civility, against the complex materialism of which it was, in its beginnings, I dare say, a reaction. The story of its prime can be read in fragments of archaic sculpture scattered throughout Europe, and studied in the National Museum at Athens, where certain statues of athletes, dating from about 600, reveal the excellences and defects of Greek art at its best. Of its early decline in the fifth century Phidias is the second-rate Giotto; the copies of his famous contemporaries and immediate predecessors are too loathsome to be at all just; Praxiteles, in the fourth century, the age of accomplished prettiness, is the Correggio, or whatever delightful trifler your feeling for art and chronology may suggest. Fifth and fourth century architecture forbid us to forget the greatness of the Greeks in the golden age of their intellectual and political history. The descent from sensitive, though always rather finikin, drawing through the tasteful and accomplished to the feebly forcible may be followed in the pots and vases of the sixth, fifth, fourth, and third centuries. In the long sands and flats of Roman realism the stream of Greek inspiration is lost for ever.

I've never seen it in person  -- but "Ilissus" does  appear to be a great sculpture as shown in the above photograph.  But how can one love it without admiring its relaxed and powerful masculinity ?

Most of the above generalizations do not reflect the experiences that I have had with certain Roman portraits or Greek vases.  To make a sweeping statement about cultural change is to ignore the exceptions --- but exceptions are often, if not mostly,  what aesthetes  like to look at.  Art museums are full of them.

Eventually Bell will get around to telling us that sixth Century Byzantine art, like the mosaics at San Vitale shown above, is the peak from which all other Christian art descends.

I've seen those mosaics and I love them!  But I strongly question the eye of someone who sees everything that came later as somehow inferior . He also  "holds it superior, not only to anything that was to come, but also to the very finest achievement of the greatest ages of Egypt, Crete, and Greece" 

Why do I continue to pay any attention to this writer at all ?

Here is the only excuse I can offer.  Perhaps he wrote this chapter while sitting in San Vitale and staring up at the mosaics. An aesthetic experience that is fresh in the brain is so much more compelling than the distant memory of anything else.


Otherwise, one can only attribute this statement to the need to upset his readers. Narrative drama is the distinguishing characteristic of Christian art which must tell a story that pertains to the destiny of mankind and each and every human. The San Vitale mosaic shown above tells no story at all -- it is just a glamorous presentation of the emperor and empress.

GREATNESS AND DECLINE

I've also skipped most of this section.  Bell's narration of art history is too ideological to interest me.

He does, however, put an interesting twist on the Renaissance fascination with perspective and human anatomy.  He suggests that this fascination got  artists excited enough to make good art.  So it wasn't the perspective or accurate anatomy that made their work any better -- it was the energy of their excitement over something new that drove them to create significant forms.

THE CLASSICAL RENAISSANCE AND ITS DISEASES

The Renaissance was a re-birth of other things besides a taste for round limbs and the science of representing them; we begin to hear again of two diseases, endemic in imperial Rome, from which a lively and vigorous society keeps itself tolerably free—Rarity-hunting and Expertise. These parasites can get no hold on a healthy body; it is on dead and dying matter that they batten and grow fat. The passion to possess what is scarce, and nothing else, is a disease that develops as civilisation grows old and dogs it to the grave: it is saprophytic. The rarity-hunter may be called a "collector" if by "collector" you do not mean one who buys what pleases or moves him. Certainly, such an one is unworthy of the name; he lacks the true magpie instinct. To the true collector the intrinsic value of a work of art is irrelevant; the reasons for which he prizes a picture are those for which a philatelist prizes a postage-stamp. To him the question "Does this move me?" is ludicrous: the question "Is it beautiful?"—otiose. Though by the very tasteful collector of stamps or works of art beauty is allowed to be a fair jewel in the crown of rarity, he would have us understand from the first that the value it gives is purely adventitious and depends for its existence on rarity. No rarity, no beauty. As for the profounder aesthetic significance, if a man were to believe in its existence he would cease to be a collector. The question to be asked is—"Is this rare?" Suppose the answer favourable, there remains another—"Is it genuine?" If the work of any particular artist is not rare, if the supply meets the demand, it stands to reason that the work is of no great consequence. For good art is art that fetches good prices, and good prices come of a limited supply. But though it be notorious that the work of Velasquez is comparatively scarce and therefore good, it has yet to be decided whether the particular picture offered at fifty thousand is really the work of Velasquez.



A fine rant -- with which I also agree -- though  I doubt that much of the past would be preserved if it weren't for the rarity hunters


Enter the Expert, whom I would distinguish from the archaeologist and the critic. The archaeologist is a man with a foolish and dangerous curiosity about the past: I am a bit of an archaeologist myself. Archaeology is dangerous because it may easily overcloud one's aesthetic sensibility. The archaeologist may, at any moment, begin to value a work of art not because it is good, but because it is old or interesting. Though that is less vulgar than valuing it because it is rare and precious it is equally fatal to aesthetic appreciation. But so long as I recognise the futility of my science, so long as I recognise that I cannot appreciate a work of art the better because I know when and where it was made, so long as I recognise that, in fact, I am at a certain disadvantage in judging a sixth-century mosaic compared with a person of equal sensibility who knows and cares nothing about Romans and Byzantines, so long as I recognise that art criticism and archaeology are two different things, I hope I may be allowed to dabble unrebuked in my favourite hobby: I hope I am harmless. 

Another fine rant. Though  there is more to the experience of art than making  aesthetic judgments -- and why feel guilty about it ?



Art criticism, in the present state of society, seems to me a respectable and possibly a useful occupation. The prejudice against critics, like most prejudices, lives on fear and ignorance. It is quite unnecessary and rather provincial, for, in fact, critics are not very formidable. They are suspected of all sorts of high-handed practices—making and breaking reputations, running up and down, booming and exploiting—of which I should hardly think them capable. Popular opinion notwithstanding, I doubt whether critics are either omnipotent or utterly depraved. Indeed, I believe that some of them are not only blameless but even lovable characters. Those sinister but flattering insinuations and open charges of corruption fade woefully when one considers how little the critic of contemporary art can hope to get for "writing up" pictures that sell for twenty or thirty guineas apiece. The expert, to be sure, is exposed to some temptation, since a few of his words, judiciously placed, may promote a canvas from the twenty to the twenty thousand mark; but, as everyone knows, the morality of the expert is above suspicion. Useless as the occupation of the critic may be, it is probably honest; and, after all, is it more useless than all other occupations, save only those of creating art, producing food, drink, and tobacco, and bearing beautiful children? 

Too bad Bell could not talk about art criticism is a serious way.

If the collector asks me, as a critic, for my opinion of the Velasquez he is about to buy, I will tell him honestly what I think of it, as a work of art. I will tell him whether it moves me much or little, and I will try to point out those qualities and relations of line and colour in which it seems to me to excel or fall short. I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic. But all conjectures as to the authenticity of a work based on its formal significance, or even on its technical perfection, are extremely hazardous. It is always possible that someone else was the master's match as artist and craftsman, and of that someone's work there may be an overwhelming supply. The critic may sell the collector a common pup instead of the one uncatalogued specimen of Pseudo-kuniskos; and therefore the wary collector sends for someone who can furnish him with the sort of evidence of the authenticity of his picture that would satisfy a special juryman and confound a purchasing dealer. At artistic evidence he laughs noisily in half-crown periodicals and five-guinea tomes. Documentary evidence is what he prefers; but, failing that, he will put up with a cunning concoction of dates and watermarks, cabalistic signatures, craquelure, patina, chemical properties of paint and medium, paper and canvas, all sorts of collateral evidence, historical and biographical, and racy tricks of brush or pen. It is to adduce and discuss this sort of evidence that the Collector calls in the Expert. 

It's even more hazardous to assume that a critic's eye is better than your own -- but I would allow for the possibility that eventually you may come to the conviction that it was true.  Don't we allow for relative expertise in most fields of endeavor ?  Why would art criticism be an exception ?


Anyone whom chance or misfortune has led into the haunts of collectors and experts will admit that I have not exaggerated the horror of the diseases that we have inherited from the Classical Renaissance. He will have heard the value of a picture made to depend on the interpretation of a letter. He will have heard the picture discussed from every point of view except that of one who feels its significance. By whom was it made? For whom was it made? When was it made? Where was it made? Is it all the work of one hand? Who paid for it? How much did he pay? Through what collections has it passed? What are the names of the figures portrayed? What are their histories? What the style and cut of their coats, breeches, and beards? How much will it fetch at Christie's? All these are questions to moot; and mooted they will be, by the hour. But in expert conclaves who has ever heard more than a perfunctory and silly comment on the aesthetic qualities of a masterpiece?


No --  it's not "anyone" who will be dismayed by the common attitudes of collectors -- just idealistic aesthetes like Bell.


I will not describe in any detail the end of the slope, from the beginning of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. The seventeenth century is rich in individual geniuses; but they are individual. The level of art is very low. The big names of El Greco, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Vermeer, Rubens, Jordaens, Poussin, and Claude, Wren and Bernini (as architects) stand out; had they lived in the eleventh century they might all have been lost in a crowd of anonymous equals. Rembrandt, indeed, perhaps the greatest genius of them all, is a typical ruin of his age. For, except in a few of his later works, his sense of form and design is utterly lost in a mess of rhetoric, romance, and chiaroscuro. It is difficult to forgive the seventeenth century for what it made of Rembrandt's genius. One great advantage over its predecessor it did enjoy: the seventeenth century had ceased to believe sincerely in the ideas of the Classical Renaissance. Painters could not devote themselves to suggesting the irrelevant emotions of life because they did not feel them.[20] For lack of human emotion they were driven back on art. They talked a great deal about Magnanimity and Nobility, but they thought more of Composition. For instance, in the best works of Nicolas Poussin, the greatest artist of the age, you will notice that the human figure is treated as a shape cut out of coloured paper to be pinned on as the composition directs. That is the right way to treat the human figure; the mistake lay in making these shapes retain the characteristic gestures of Classical rhetoric. In much the same way Claude treats temples and palaces, trees, mountains, harbours and lakes, as you may see in his superb pictures at the National Gallery. There they hang, beside the Turners, that all the world may see the difference between a great artist and an after-dinner poet. Turner was so much excited by his observations and his sentiments that he set them all down without even trying to co-ordinate them in a work of art: clearly he could not have done so in any case. That was a cheap and spiteful thought that prompted the clause wherein it is decreed that his pictures shall hang for ever beside those of Claude. He wished to call attention to a difference and he has succeeded beyond his expectations: curses, like hens, come home to roost.


In the eighteenth century, with its dearth of genius, we perceive more clearly that we are on the flats. Chardin is the one great artist. Painters are, for the most part, upholsterers to the nobility and gentry. Some fashion handsome furniture for the dining-room, others elegant knick-knacks for the boudoir; many are kept constantly busy delineating for the respect of future generations his lordship, or her ladyship's family. The painting of the eighteenth century is brilliant illustration still touched with art. For instance, in Watteau, Canaletto, Crome, Cotman, and Guardi there is some art, some brilliance, and a great deal of charming illustration. In Tiepolo there is hardly anything but brilliance; only when one sees his work beside that of Mr. Sargent does one realise the presence of other qualities. In Hogarth there is hardly anything but illustration; one realises the presence of other qualities only by remembering the work of the Hon. John Collier. Beside the upholsterers who work for the aristocracy there is another class supported by the connoisseurs. There are the conscientious bores, whose modest aim it is to paint and draw correctly in the manner of Raffael and Michelangelo. Their first object is to stick to the rules, their second to show some cleverness in doing so. One need not bother about them.


Perhaps these shots-from-the-hip are not worth copying -- but at least they challenge conventional opinion.

I would not say that Turner suffers by proximity to Claude -- but I would say that Tiepolo benefits from  proximity to Sargent -- though the greatness of Tiepolo hardly requires proximity to anything

And I don't recall ever seeing those two English landscape painters, John Crome and John Cotman.  For whatever  reason, wealthy Americans did  not collect them.

IV   ALID EX ALEO

That beauty is the one essential quality in a work of art is a doctrine that has been too insistently associated with the name of Whistler, who is neither its first nor its last, nor its most capable, exponent—but only of his age the most conspicuous. To read Whistler's Ten o'Clock will do no one any harm, or much good. It is neither very brilliant nor at all profound, but it is in the right direction. Whistler is not to be compared with the great controversialists any more than he is to be compared with the great artists. To set The Gentle Art beside The Dissertation on the Letters of Phalaris, Gibbon's Vindication, or the polemics of Voltaire, would be as unjust as to hang "Cremorne Gardens" in the Arena Chapel. Whistler was not even cock of the Late Victorian walk; both Oscar Wilde and Mr. Bernard Shaw were his masters in the art of controversy. But amongst Londoners of the "eighties" he is a bright figure, as much alone almost in his knowledge of what art is, as in his power of creating it: and it is this that gives a peculiar point and poignance to all his quips and quarrels. There is dignity in his impudence. He is using his rather obvious cleverness to fight for something dearer than vanity. He is a lonely artist, standing up and hitting below the belt for art. To the critics, painters, and substantial men of his age he was hateful because he was an artist; and because he knew that their idols were humbugs he was disquieting. Not only did he have to suffer the grossness and malice of the most insensitive pack of butchers that ever scrambled into the seat of authority; he had also to know that not one of them could by any means be made to understand one word that he spoke in seriousness. Overhaul the English art criticism of that time, from the cloudy rhetoric of Ruskin to the journalese of "'Arry," and you will hardly find a sentence that gives ground for supposing that the writer has so much as guessed what art is. "As we have hinted, the series does not represent any Venice that we much care to remember; for who wants to remember the degradation of what has been noble, the foulness of what has been fair?"—"'Arry" in the Times. No doubt it is becoming in an artist to leave all criticism unanswered; it would be foolishness in a schoolboy to resent stuff of this sort. Whistler replied; and in his replies to ignorance and insensibility, seasoned with malice, he is said to have been ill-mannered and caddish. He was; but in these respects he was by no means a match for his most reputable enemies. And ill-mannered, ill-tempered, and almost alone, he was defending art, while they were flattering all that was vilest in Victorianism.

Some backhanded compliments to Whistler who apparently has earned a place in the history of "the aesthetic conscience" - despite his shortcomings.

A stronger backhand is delivered to the  Pre-Raphaelites:  " We have a right to rejoice in the Pre-Raffaelite movement as an instance of England's unquestioned supremacy in independence and unconventionality of thought. Depression begins when we have to admit that the revolt led to nothing but a great many bad pictures and a little thin sentiment."------- The fact is, the Pre-Raffaelites were not artists, but archaeologists who tried to make intelligent curiosity do the work of impassioned contemplation. As artists they do not differ essentially from the ruck of Victorian painters. They will reproduce the florid ornament of late Gothic as slavishly as the steady Academician reproduces the pimples on an orange; and if they do attempt to simplify—some of them have noticed the simplification of the primitives—they do so in the spirit, not of an artist, but of the "sedulous ape."      

And here's  a nice condescending characterization of English academic painting:   "accurate representation of what the grocer thinks he sees was the central dogma of Victorian art. "

There is also a positive reference to  Charles Conder, whose painting I have never seen.


Here is Bell's discussion of Impressionism:


But a sketch of the Christian slope may well end with the Impressionists, for Impressionist theory is a blind alley. Its only logical development would be an art-machine—a machine for establishing values correctly, and determining what the eye sees scientifically, thereby making the production of art a mechanical certainty. Such a machine, I am told, was invented by an Englishman. Now if the praying-machine be admittedly the last shift of senile religion, the value-finding machine may fairly be taken for the psychopomp of art. Art has passed from the primitive creation of significant form to the highly civilised statement of scientific fact. I think the machine, which is the intelligent and respectable end, should be preserved, if still it exists, at South Kensington or in the Louvre, along with the earlier monuments of the Christian slope. As for that uninteresting and disreputable end, official nineteenth-century art, it can be studied in a hundred public galleries and in annual exhibitions all over the world. It is the mouldy and therefore the obvious end. The spirit that came to birth with the triumph of art over Graeco-Roman realism dies with the ousting of art by the picture of commerce.

But if the Impressionists, with their scientific equipment, their astonishing technique, and their intellectualism, mark the end of one era, do they not rumour the coming of another? Certainly to-day there is stress in the cryptic laboratory of Time. A great thing is dead; but, as that sagacious Roman noted:

"haud igitur penitus pereunt quaecumque videntur, quando alid ex alio reficit natura nec ullam rem gigni patitur nisi morte adiuta aliena."

And do not the Impressionists, with their power of creating works of art that stand on their own feet, bear in their arms a new age? For if the venial sin of Impressionism is a grotesque theory and its justification a glorious practice, its historical importance consists in its having taught people to seek the significance of art in the work itself, instead of hunting for it in the emotions and interests of the outer world.



Current art museum ideology has the Impressionists as harbingers of the Modern World.  Bell is close to that with his "bear in their arms a new age"  -- marking the end of the "Christian slope".

*********************

IV  - THE MOVEMENT

THE DEBT TO CEZANNE

Cezanne

 Maison devant la Sainte-Victoire près de Gardanne

 (House in Provence), 1885-1890

Above is the picture chosen for the online edition which I am reading.  The original painting now hangs in the Indianapolis Museum of Art -- which I have visited many times.

Regretfully, I do no remember it at all!  (though I will never forget its small room full of Turner watercolors)

As seen in reproduction, it's a wonderful image that gives me such a strong sense of place -- a  place where I would like to be.  I can feel the strong, fresh breeze of its pictorial energy.


That with the maturity of Cézanne a new movement came to birth will hardly be disputed by anyone who has managed to survive the "nineties"; that this movement is the beginning of a new slope is a possibility worth discussing, but about which no decided opinion can yet be held. In so far as one man can be said to inspire a whole age, Cézanne inspires the contemporary movement: he stands a little apart, however, because he is too big to take a place in any scheme of historical development; he is one of those figures that dominate an age and are not to be fitted into any of the neat little pigeon-holes so thoughtfully prepared for us by evolutionists. He passed through the greater part of life unnoticed, and came near creeping out of it undiscovered. No one seems to have guessed at what was happening. It is easy now to see how much we owe to him, and how little he owed to anyone; for us it is easy to see what Gaugin and Van Gogh borrowed—in 1890, the year in which the latter died, it was not so. They were sharp eyes, indeed, that discerned before the dawn of the new century that Cézanne had founded a movement.


And I still don't see anything of Cezanne in the other two artists.  All that they share is being outside academic pictorialism.

Bell expands upon that idea with: "Cézanne discovered methods and forms which have revealed a vista of possibilities to the end of which no man can see; on the instrument that he invented thousands of artists yet unborn may play their own tunes."

There are many painters, especially in the Russian/Soviet school, who do seem to play Cezanne's instrument.  But there are many elsewhere who apparently do  not.




That movement is still young. But I think it would be safe to say that already it has produced as much good art as its predecessor. Cézanne, of course, created far greater things than any Impressionist painter; and Gaugin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Rousseau, Picasso, de Vlaminck, Derain, Herbin, Marchand, Marquet, Bonnard, Duncan Grant, Maillol, Lewis, Kandinsky, Brancuzi, von Anrep, Roger Fry, Friesz, Goncharova, L'Hôte, are Rolands for the Olivers of any other artistic period.They are not all great artists, but they all are artists. If the Impressionists raised the proportion of works of art in the general pictorial output from about one in five hundred thousand to one in a hundred thousand, the Post-Impressionists (for after all it is sensible to call the group of vital artists who immediately follow the Impressionists by that name) have raised the average again. To-day, I daresay, it stands as high as one in ten thousand. Indeed, it is this that has led some people to see in the new movement the dawn of a new age; for nothing is more characteristic of a "primitive" movement than the frequent and widespread production of genuine art. Another hopeful straw at which the sanguine catch is the admirable power of development possessed by the new inspiration. As a rule, the recognition of a movement as a movement is its death. As soon as the pontiffs discovered Impressionism, some twenty years after its patent manifestation, they academized it. They set their faces against any sort of development and drove into revolt or artistic suicide every student with an ounce of vitality in him. Before the inspiration of Cézanne had time to grow stale, it was caught up by such men as Matisse and Picasso; by them it was moulded into forms that suited their different temperaments, and already it shows signs of taking fresh shape to express the sensibility of a younger generation.



Here are the artists from Bell's list with whom I am least familiar :

Auguste Herbin, 1907

Jean Marchand

Albert Marquet , 1912

 (really like this one)

Duncan Grant, 1912

Roger Fry,  1912

Wyndham Lewis, 1912

Boris Von Anrep, 1928

Othon Friesz, 1907

Natalia Goncharova, 1907

Andre L'hote, 1912

(actually, I am familiar with Lhote,

but was confused by the different punctuation in his name)

 Cézanne saw what the great Impressionists could not see, that though they were still painting exquisite pictures their theories had led art into a cul de sac. So while he was working away in his corner of Provence, shut off completely from the aestheticism of Paris, from Baudelairism and Whistlerism, Cézanne was always looking for something to replace the bad science of Claude Monet. And somewhere about 1880 he found it. At Aix-en-Provence came to him a revelation that has set a gulf between the nineteenth century and the twentieth: for, gazing at the familiar landscape, Cézanne came to understand it, not as a mode of light, nor yet as a player in the game of human life, but as an end in itself and an object of intense emotion. Every great artist has seen landscape as an end in itself—as pure form, that is to say; Cézanne has made a generation of artists feel that compared with its significance as an end in itself all else about a landscape is negligible. From that time forward Cézanne set himself to create forms that would express the emotion that he felt for what he had learnt to see. Science became as irrelevant as subject. Everything can be seen as pure form, and behind pure form lurks the mysterious significance that thrills to ecstasy. The rest of Cézanne's life is a continuous effort to capture and express the significance of form.

Daubigny, Evening on the Oise, 1863

Bell does not mention the Barbizon painters like Daubigny at all  -- but they give me an emotion that    though less fierce and more soft and dreamy - is no  less  intense than what I get from  my favorite pieces by Cezanne.


Was not Daubigny's life also "a continuous effort to capture and express the significance of form."

It appears that Bell only responds to  a certain kind of significance -- and  he will not attempt to describe it.


It was because Cézanne could come at reality only through what he saw that he never invented purely abstract forms. Few great artists have depended more on the model. Every picture carried him a little further towards his goal—complete expression; and because it was not the making of pictures but the expression of his sense of the significance of form that he cared about, he lost interest in his work so soon as he had made it express as much as he had grasped. His own pictures were for Cézanne nothing but rungs in a ladder at the top of which would be complete expression. The whole of his later life was a climbing towards an ideal. For him every picture was a means, a step, a stick, a hold, a stepping-stone—something he was ready to discard as soon as it had served his purpose. He had no use for his own pictures. To him they were experiments. He tossed them into bushes, or left them in the open fields to be stumbling-blocks for a future race of luckless critics.


Did Cezanne really carelessly abandon his paintings when he was finished working on  them? Didn't he eventually have a dealer, Ambrose Vollard, who mounted exhibitions of his work ?

Cézanne is a type of the perfect artist; he is the perfect antithesis of the professional picture-maker, or poem-maker, or music-maker. He created forms because only by so doing could he accomplish the end of his existence—the expression of his sense of the significance of form. When we are talking about aesthetics, very properly we brush all this aside, and consider only the object and its emotional effect on us; but when we are trying to explain the emotional effectiveness of pictures we turn naturally to the minds of the men who made them, and find in the story of Cézanne an inexhaustible spring of suggestion. His life was a constant effort to create forms that would express what he felt in the moment of inspiration. The notion of uninspired art, of a formula for making pictures, would have appeared to him preposterous. The real business of his life was not to make pictures, but to work out his own salvation. Fortunately for us he could only do this by painting. Any two pictures by Cézanne are bound to differ profoundly. He never dreamed of repeating himself. He could not stand still. That is why a whole generation of otherwise dissimilar artists have drawn inspiration from his work. That is why it implies no disparagement of any living artist when I say that the prime characteristic of the new movement is its derivation from Cézanne.

This appears to be a  romantic exaggeration.

******************

II SIMPLIFICATION AND DESIGN

At the risk of becoming a bore I repeat that there is something ludicrous about hunting for characteristics in the art of to-day or of yesterday, or of any particular period. In art the only important distinction is the distinction between good art and bad. That this pot was made in Mesopotamia about 4000 b.c., and that picture in Paris about 1913 a.d., is of very little consequence.


"the distinction between good art and bad"  may be of very little consequence  as  well - if made by someone whose discernment is problematic.

But if I do respect that discernment -- I also want to hear whatever other distinctions they would like to make.

Aesthetics has not  - and should not --  be limited to thumbs up / thumbs  down.

Fortunately, Bell then proceeds to ignore his above dictum.



The period in which we find ourselves in the year 1913 begins with the maturity of Cézanne (about 1885). It therefore overlaps the Impressionist movement, which certainly had life in it till the end of the nineteenth century. Whether Post-Impressionism will peter out as Impressionism has done, or whether it is the first flowering of a new artistic vitality with centuries of development before it, is, I have admitted, a matter of conjecture. What seems to me certain is that those who shall be able to contemplate our age as something complete, as a period in the history of art, will not so much as know of the existence of the artisans still amongst us who create illusions and chaffer and quarrel in the tradition of the Victorians. When they think of the early twentieth-century painters they will think only of the artists who tried to create form—the artisans who tried to create illusions will be forgotten. They will think of the men who looked to the present, not of those who looked to the past; and, therefore, it is of them alone that I shall think when I attempt to describe the contemporary movement.

As Bell has already observed, both form and illusion have been preferred at various times in the past.

 It is likely the future will be no different.





Already I have suggested two characteristics of the movement; I have said that in their choice of forms and colours most vital contemporary artists are, more or less, influenced by Cézanne, and that Cézanne has inspired them with the resolution to free their art from literary and scientific irrelevancies. Most people, asked to mention a third, would promptly answer, I suspect—Simplification. To instance simplification as a peculiarity of the art of any particular age seems queer, since simplification is essential to all art. Without it art cannot exist; for art is the creation of significant form, and simplification is the liberating of what is significant from what is not. Yet to such depths had art sunk in the nineteenth century, that in the eyes of the rabble the greatest crime of Whistler and the Impressionists was their by no means drastic simplification. And we are not yet clear of the Victorian slough. The spent dip stinks on into the dawn. You have only to look at almost any modern building to see masses of elaboration and detail that form no part of any real design and serve no useful purpose. Nothing stands in greater need of simplification than architecture, and nowhere is simplification more dreaded and detested than amongst architects. Walk the streets of London; everywhere you will see huge blocks of ready-made decoration, pilasters and porticoes, friezes and façades, hoisted on cranes to hang from ferro-concrete walls. Public buildings have become public laughing-stocks. They are as senseless as slag-heaps, and far less beautiful. Only where economy has banished the architect do we see masonry of any merit. The engineers, who have at least a scientific problem to solve, create, in factories and railway-bridges, our most creditable monuments. They at least are not ashamed of their construction, or, at any rate, they are not allowed to smother it in beauty at thirty shillings a foot. We shall have no more architecture in Europe till architects understand that all these tawdry excrescences have got to be simplified away, till they make up their minds to express themselves in the materials of the age—steel, concrete, and glass—and to create in these admirable media vast, simple, and significant forms.


There are many ugly buildings in Chicago that are simple slabs of concrete and glass - while there  are a few beautiful structures that are quite ornate  (mostly thanks to Louis Sullivan)

Ornamentation is not the problem ----  simplification is not the solution.

Fortunately,  once  again, Bell then proceeds to contradict his severe ideology:



- to understand exactly what is meant by simplification we must go deeper into the mysteries. It is easy to say eliminate irrelevant details. What details are not irrelevant? In a work of art nothing is relevant but what contributes to formal significance. Therefore all informatory matter is irrelevant and should be eliminated. But what most painters have to express can only be expressed in designs so complex and subtle that without some clue they would be almost unintelligible. For instance, there are many designs that can only be grasped by a spectator who looks at them from a particular point of view. Not every picture is as good seen upside down as upside up. To be sure, very sensitive people can always discover from the design itself how it should be viewed, and, without much difficulty, will place correctly a piece of lace or embroidery in which there is no informatory clue to guide them. Nevertheless, when an artist makes an intricate design it is tempting and, indeed, reasonable, for him to wish to provide a clue; and to do so he has only to work into his design some familiar object, a tree or a figure, and the business is done. Having established a number of extremely subtle relations between highly complex forms, he may ask himself whether anyone else will be able to appreciate them. Shall he not give a hint as to the nature of his organisation, and ease the way for our aesthetic emotions? If he give to his forms so much of the appearance of the forms of ordinary life that we shall at once refer them back to something we have already seen, shall we not grasp more easily their aesthetic relations in his design? Enter by the back-door representation in the quality of a clue to the nature of design. I have no objection to its presence. Only, if the representative element is not to ruin the picture as a work of art, it must be fused into the design. It must do double duty; as well as giving information, it must create aesthetic emotion. It must be simplified into significant form.


So the only reason to include a representational detail, like a tree for example, is to help the insensitive viewer know which side of the painting should hang at the top.  In which case, that tree should be simplified as much as possible so it does not interfere with the significant form.

This is getting  bit goofy.


Let us make no mistake about this. To help the spectator to appreciate our design we have introduced into our picture a representative or cognitive element. This element has nothing whatever to do with art. The recognition of a correspondence between the forms of a work of art and the familiar forms of life cannot possibly provoke aesthetic emotion. Only significant form can do that. Of course realistic forms may be aesthetically significant, and out of them an artist may create a superb work of art, but it is with their aesthetic and not with their cognitive value that we shall then be concerned. We shall treat them as though they were not representative of anything. The cognitive or representative element in a work of art can be useful as a means to the perception of formal relations and in no other way. It is valuable to the spectator, but it is of no value to the work of art; or rather it is valuable to the work of art as an ear-trumpet is valuable to one who would converse with the deaf: the speaker could do as well without it, the listener could not. The representative element may help the spectator; it can do the picture no good and it may do harm. It may ruin the design; that is to say, it may deprive the picture of its value as a whole; and it is as a whole, as an organisation of forms, that a work of art provokes the most tremendous emotions.


According to Bell,  the conflation of representation and design may fascinate some  - but the true aesthete ignores the representational aspect entirely



From the point of view of the spectator the Post-Impressionists have been particularly happy in their simplification. As we know, a design can be composed just as well of realistic forms as of invented; but a fine design composed of realistic forms runs a great risk of being aesthetically underrated. We are so immediately struck by the representative element that the formal significance passes us by. It is very hard at first sight to appreciate the design of a picture by a highly realistic artist—Ingres, for instance; our aesthetic emotions are overlaid by our human curiosity. We do not see the figures as forms, because we immediately think of them as people. On the other hand, a design composed of purely imaginary forms, without any cognitive clue (say a Persian carpet), if it be at all elaborate and intricate, is apt to non-plus the less sensitive spectators. Post-Impressionists, by employing forms sufficiently distorted to disconcert and baffle human interest and curiosity yet sufficiently representative to call immediate attention to the nature of the design, have found a short way to our aesthetic emotions. This does not make Post-Impressionist pictures better or worse than others; it makes them more easily appreciable as works of art. Probably it will always be difficult for the mass of men to consider pictures as works of art, but it will be less difficult for them so to consider Post-Impressionist than realistic pictures; while, if they ceased to consider objects unprovided with representative clues (e.g. some oriental textiles) as historical monuments, they would find it very difficult to consider them at all.


So formal quality is more accessible in post-impressionist painting than in Ingres because the representation is less finely detailed ?

 Melancholia

The Knight, Death, and the Devil

St. Jerome in his study

To assure his design, the artist makes it his first care to simplify. But mere simplification, the elimination of detail, is not enough. The informatory forms that remain have got to be made significant. The representative element, if it is not to injure the design, must become a part of it; besides giving information it has got to provoke aesthetic emotion. That is where symbolism fails. The symbolist eliminates, but does not assimilate. His symbols, as a rule, are not significant forms, but formal intelligencers. They are not integral parts of a plastic conception, but intellectual abbreviations. They are not informed by the artist's emotion, they are invented by his intellect. They are dead matter in a living organism. They are rigid and tight because they are not traversed by the rhythm of the design. The explanatory legends that illustrators used to produce from the mouths of their characters are not more foreign to visual art than the symbolic forms with which many able draughtsmen have ruined their designs. In the famous "Melancholia," and, to some extent, in a few other engravings—"St. Eustace," for instance, and "The Virgin and Child" (B. 34. British Museum),—Dürer has managed to convert a mass of detail into tolerably significant form; but in the greater part of his work (e.g. "The Knight," "St. Jerome") fine conception is hopelessly ruined by a mass of undigested symbolism. Every form in a work of art has, then, to be made aesthetically significant; also every form has to be made a part of a significant whole. For, as generally happens, the value of the parts combined into a whole is far greater than the value of the sum of the parts. This organisation of forms into a significant whole is called Design; and an insistence—an exaggerated insistence some will say—on design is the fourth characteristic of the Contemporary Movement. This insistence, this conviction that a work should not be good on the whole, but as a whole, is, no doubt, in part a reaction from the rather too easy virtue of some of the Impressionists, who were content to cover their canvases with charming forms and colours, not caring overmuch whether or how they were co-ordinated. Certainly this was a weakness in Impressionism—though by no means in all the Impressionist masters—for it is certain that the profoundest emotions are provoked by significant combinations of significant forms. Also, it seems certain that only in these organised combinations can the artist express himself completely.


It's good that Bell has offered some specific examples here - though I thought this chapter was going to talk about Post  Impressionists.

I  feel a  "mass of undigested symbolism in St Jerome -- but not in the other two Durer prints. It's cluttered -- but does seem appropriate for a scholar's study.

The pictorial energy of "Melancholia" appears to be  collapsing inward -- while in "The Knight" it reaches upward and outward.  It may be that that introspective feelings of boredom and frustration are more significant to Bell than feelings of heroic resignation.





It seems that an artist creates a good design when, having been possessed by a real emotional conception, he is able to hold and translate it. We all agree, I think, that till the artist has had his moment of emotional vision there can be no very considerable work of art; but, the vision seen and felt, it still remains uncertain whether he has the force to hold and the skill to translate it. Of course the vast majority of pictures fail in design because they correspond to no emotional vision; but the interesting failures are those in which the vision came but was incompletely grasped. The painters who have failed for want of technical skill to set down what they have felt and mastered could be counted on the fingers of one hand—if, indeed, there are any to be counted. But on all sides we see interesting pictures in which the holes in the artist's conception are obvious. The vision was once perfect, but it cannot be recaptured. The rapture will not return. The supreme creative power is wanting. There are holes, and they have to be filled with putty. Putty we all know when we see it—when we feel it. It is dead matter—literal transcriptions from nature, intellectual machinery, forms that correspond with nothing that was apprehended emotionally, forms unfired with the rhythm that thrilled through the first vision of a significant whole.



There's no putty in any of those Durer prints..  St. Jerome might feel cluttered with finely rendered objects -- but all of them feel alive.


Design is the organisation of forms: drawing is the shaping of the forms themselves. Clearly there is a point at which the two commingle, but that is a matter of no present importance. When I say that drawing is bad, I mean that I am not moved by the contours of the forms that make up the work of art. The causes of bad drawing and bad design I believe to be similar. A form is badly drawn when it does not correspond with a part of an emotional conception. The shape of every form in a work of art should be imposed on the artist by his inspiration. The hand of the artist, I believe, must be guided by the necessity of expressing something he has felt not only intensely but definitely. The artist must know what he is about, and what he is about must be, if I am right, the translation into material form of something that he felt in a spasm of ecstasy. Therefore, shapes that merely fill gaps will be ill-drawn. Forms that are not dictated by any emotional necessity, forms that state facts, forms that are the consequences of a theory of draughtsmanship, imitations of natural objects or of the forms of other works of art, forms that exist merely to fill spaces—padding in fact,—all these are worthless. Good drawing must be inspired, it must be the natural manifestation of that thrill which accompanies the passionate apprehension of form.


I do agree with the above discussion of drawing.  Forms that only state facts are aesthetically dead.





Insistence on design is perhaps the most obvious characteristic of the movement. To all are familiar those circumambient black lines that are intended to give definition to forms and to reveal the construction of the picture. For almost all the younger artists,—Bonnard is an obvious exception—affect that architectural method of design which indeed has generally been preferred by European artists. The difference between "architectural design" and what I call "imposed design" will be obvious to anyone who compares a picture by Cézanne with a picture by Whistler. Better still, compare any first-rate Florentine of the fourteenth or fifteenth century with any Sung picture. Here are two methods of achieving the same end, equally good, so far as I can judge, and as different as possible. We feel towards a picture by Cézanne or Masaccio or Giotto as we feel towards a Romanesque church; the design seems to spring upwards, mass piles itself on mass, forms balance each other masonrywise: there is a sense of strain, and of strength to meet it. Turn to a Chinese picture; the forms seem to be pinned to the silk or to be hung from above. There is no sense of thrust or strain; rather there is the feeling of some creeper, with roots we know not where, that hangs itself in exquisite festoons along the wall. Though architectural design is a permanent characteristic of Western art, of four periods I think it would be fairly accurate to say that it is a characteristic so dominant as to be distinctive; and they are Byzantine VIth Century, Byzantine IX-XIIIth Century, Florentine XIVth and XVth Century, and the Contemporary Movement.


An interesting contrast between Chinese and  European drawing -- though I wish he had provided some examples.

To say that the artists of the movement insist on design is not to deny that some of them are exceptionally fine colourists. Cézanne is one of the greatest colourists that ever lived; Henri-Matisse is a great colourist. Yet all, or nearly all, use colour as a mode of form. They design in colour, that is in coloured shapes. Very few fall into the error of regarding colour as an end in itself, and of trying to think of it as something different from form. Colour in itself has little or no significance. The mere juxtaposition of tones moves us hardly at all. As colourists themselves are fond of saying, "It is the quantities that count." It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colours, and the combinations of those shapes, that we recognise the colourist. Colour becomes significant only when it becomes form. It is a virtue in contemporary artists that they have set their faces against the practice of juxtaposing pretty patches of colour without much considering their formal relations, and that they attempt so to organise tones as to raise form to its highest significance. But it is not surprising that a generation of exceptionally sweet and attractive but rather formless colourists should be shocked by the obtrusion of those black lines that seem to do violence to their darling. They are irritated by pictures in which there is to be no accidental charm of soft lapses and lucky chiaroscuro. They do not admire the austere determination of these young men to make their work independent and self-supporting and unbeholden to adventitious dainties. They cannot understand this passion for works that are admirable as wholes, this fierce insistence on design, this willingness to leave bare the construction if by so doing the spectator may be helped to a conception of the plan. Critics of the Impressionist age are vexed by the naked bones and muscles of Post-Impressionist pictures. But, for my own part, even though these young artists insisted on a bareness and baldness exceeding anything we have yet seen, I should be far from blaming a band of ascetics who in an age of unorganised prettiness insisted on the paramount importance of design.

But when have not some artists insisted on a vitality of design?  It's hardly unique to the Post Impressionists - except in contrast to certain Academy painters.

THE PATHETIC FALLACY

Many of those who are enthusiastic about the movement, were they asked what they considered its most important characteristic, would reply, I imagine, "The expression of a new and peculiar point of view." "Post-Impressionism," I have heard people say, "is an expression of the ideas and feelings of that spiritual renaissance which is now growing into a lusty revolution." With this I cannot, of course, agree. If art expresses anything, it expresses some profound and general emotion common, or at least possible, to all ages, and peculiar to none. But if these sympathetic people mean, as I believe they do, that the art of the new movement is a manifestation of something different from—they will say larger than—itself, of a spiritual revolution in fact, I will not oppose them. Art is as good an index to the spiritual state of this age as of another; and in the effort of artists to free painting from the clinging conventions of the near past, and to use it as a means only to the most sublime emotions, we may read signs of an age possessed of a new sense of values and eager to turn that possession to account. It is impossible to visit a good modern exhibition without feeling that we are back in a world not altogether unworthy to be compared with that which produced primitive art. Here are men who take art seriously. Perhaps they take life seriously too, but if so, that is only because there are things in life (aesthetic ecstasy, for instance) worth taking seriously. In life, they can distinguish between the wood and the few fine trees. As for art, they know that it is something more important than a criticism of life; they will not pretend that it is a traffic in amenities; they know that it is a spiritual necessity. They are not making handsome furniture, nor pretty knick-knacks, nor tasteful souvenirs; they are creating forms that stir our most wonderful emotions.

And so it turns out that Bell  has nothing specific to say about how Post Impressionism differs from any other kind of good art.

His doctrine of significant form allows him to say nothing about art works other than some have it and some don't.

He ends this section with a parable of a man who had been born  again into a new religion - just as someone might discover a new life from viewing some Post Impressionist art:

His life became a miracle and an ecstasy. As a lover awakes, he awoke to a day full of consequence and delight. He had learnt to feel; and, because to feel a man must live, it was good to be alive. I know an erudite and intelligent man, a man whose arid life had been little better than one long cold in the head, for whom that madman, Van Gogh, did nothing less.

What good is significant form ?  This is the closest that Bell will come  to an answer.  As such, it would have to be considered less good than the many religious faiths that give new lives to many more people.


Of course there are some good artists alive who owe nothing to Cézanne. Fortunately two of Cézanne's contemporaries, Degas and Renoir, are still at work. Also there are a few who belong to the older movement, e.g. Mr. Walter Sickert, M. Simon Bussy, M. Vuillard, Mr. J.W. Morrice. I should be as unwilling to omit these names from a history of twentieth century art as to include them in a chapter devoted to the contemporary movement.


Here are the ones unfamiliar to me:

Simon Bussy

Walter Sickert

J.W. Morrice

****************


THE FUTURE

 SOCIETY AND ART

In the previous section Bell located significant form outside history -- now he will locate it outside of all social institutions, including educational:

 The one good thing Society can do for the artist is to leave him alone. Give him liberty. The more completely the artist is freed from the pressure of public taste and opinion, from the hope of rewards and the menace of morals, from the fear of absolute starvation or punishment, and from the prospect of wealth or popular consideration, the better for him and the better for art, and therefore the better for everyone. Liberate the artist : here is something that those powerful and important people who are always assuring us that they would do any- thing for art can do. They might begin the work of encouragement by disestablishing and disendowing art ; by withdrawing doles from art schools, and confiscating the moneys misused by the Royal Academy. The case of the schools is urgent. Art schools do nothing but harm, because they must do something. Art is not to be learned ; at any rate it is not to be taught. All that the drawing-master can teach is the craft of imitation. In schools there must be a criterion of excellence and that criterion cannot be an artistic one ; the drawing-master sets up the only criterion he is capable of using — fidelity to the model. No master can make a student into an artist ; but all can, and most do, turn into impostors, maniacs, criminals, or just cretins, the unfortunate boys and girls who had been made artists by nature. It is not the master’s fault and he ought not to be blamed. He is there to bring all his pupils to a certain standard of efficiency appreciable by inspectors and by the general public, and the only quality of which such can judge is verisimilitude.

Today's art schools have no criterion for excellence and do not teach "the craft of imitation".  They may not be the best investment in a young person's life -- but Bell would no longer find them harmful to art and artists, would he ?

As a  counter argument, one may note how many of the post impressionists had a "craft of imitation" education: Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse  etc. 

Bell himself had no interest in making art --- but his friend and colleague, Roger Fry did.  Wikipedia tells us that Fry "went to Paris and then Italy to study art"  Why would he have taken the trouble to travel if not to find instruction and see the art on  display in public spaces ?


The money that the State at present devotes to the discouragement of Art had better, I dare say, be given to the rich. It would be tempting to save it for the purchase of works of art, but perhaps that can lead to nothing but mischief. It is unthinkable that any Government should ever buy what is best in the work of its own age ; it is a question how far purchase by the State even of fine old pictures is a benefit to art. It is not a question that need be discussed ; for though a State may have amongst its employees men who can recognize a fine work of art, provided it be sufficiently old, a modern State will be careful to thwart and stultify their dangerously good taste. State-acquisition of fine ancient art might or might not be a means to good — I daresay it would be ; but the purchase of third-rate old masters and objets d.' art can benefit no one except the dealers

The purist abhors all the junk that public money buys --- the pragmatist enjoys whatever good things are made accessible.

Purism is a debilitating mental disease.







Art and Religion are very much alike, and in the East, where they understand these things, there has always been a notion that religion should be an amateur affair. The pungis of India are beggars. Let artists all over the world be beggars too. Art and Religion are not professions : they are not occupations for which men can be paid. The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity. They do not produce to live — they live to produce. There is no place for them in a social system based on the theory that what men desire is prolonged and pleasant existence. You cannot fit them into the machine, you must make them extraneous to it. You must make pariahs of them, since they are not a part of society but the salt of the earth. In saying that the mass of mankind will never be capable of making delicate aesthetic judgments, I have said no more than the obvious truth. A sure sensibility in visual art is at least as rare as a good ear for music. No one imagines that all are equally capable of judging music, or that a perfect ear can be acquired by study : only fools imagine that the power of nice discrimination in other arts is not a peculiar gift. Nevertheless there is no reason why the vast majority should not become very much more sensitive to art than it is; the ear can be trained to a point. But for the better appreciation, as for the freer creation, of art more liberty is needed. Ninety-nine out of every hundred  people who visit picture galleries need to be delivered from that “ museum atmosphere ” which envelops works of art and asphyxiates beholders. They, the ninety-nine, should be encouraged to approach works of art courageously and to judge them on their merits. Often they are more sensitive to form and colour than they suppose. I have seen people show a nice taste in cottons and calicoes, and things not recognised as “ Art ” by the custodians of museums, who would not hesitate to assert of any picture by Andrea del Sarto that it must be more beautiful than any picture by a child or a savage. In dealing with objects that are not expected to imitate natural forms or to resemble standard masterpieces they give free rein to their native sensibility. It is only in the presence of a catalogue that complete inhibition sets in. Traditional reverence is what lies heaviest on spectators and creators, and museums are too apt to become conventicles of tradition. Society can do something for itself and for art by blowing out of the museums and galleries the dust of erudition and the stale incense of hero-worship. Let us try to remember that art is not something to  be come at by dint of study ; let us try to think of it as something to be enjoyed as one enjoys being in love. The first thing to be done is to free the aesthetic emotions from the tyranny of erudition.

Perhaps if Bell had not been  born wealthy,  he would not suggest that artists be poor beggars.

Better to say that making art is for those who can afford to do so.

I do agree, however, that "The first thing to be done is to free the aesthetic emotions from the tyranny of erudition."

Looking at art needs to be done first hand. Thinking and reading about is a different kind of activity -- and one should never  assume that academic status is commensurate with any kind of expertise -- other than the social skills required to achieve that status.



 The value of the greatest art consists not in its power of becoming a part of common existence but in its power of taking us out of it.

Isn't that what popular  entertainment attempts to do ?




 Culture is far more dangerous than Philistinism because it is more intelligent and more pliant. It has a specious air of being on the side of the artist. It has the charm of its acquired taste, and it can corrupt because it can speak with an authority unknown in Philistia. Because it pretends to care about art, artists are not indifferent to its judgments. Culture imposes on people who would snap their fingers at vulgarity. With culture itself, even in the low sense in which I have been using the word, we need not pick a quarrel, but we must try to free the artist and the public too from the influence of cultivated opinion. The liberation will not be complete until those who have already learned to despise the opinion of the lower middle* classes learn also to neglect the standards and the disapproval of people who are forced by their emotional limitations to regard art as an elegant amenity.



Times have changed.  Cultural authorities no longer present their goods as "elegant amenities".  Now they are presented as corrective or progressive insights -- which makes "elegant amenities" sound so much wiser.

The least that the State can do is to protect people who have something to say that may cause a riot. What will not cause a riot is probably not worth saying. At present, to agitate for an increase of liberty is the best that any ordinary person can do for the advancement of art. 


Bell the Jacobin!   Change is  unavoidable.  Riots and revolutions destroy art and artists.

 Now, though no religion can escape the binding weeds of dogma, there is one that throws them off more easily and light-heartedly than any other. That religion is art ; for art is a religion. It is an expression of and a means to states of mind as holy as any that men are capable of experiencing ; and it is towards art that modern minds turn, not only for the most perfect expression of transcendent emotion, but for an inspiration by which to live. From the beginning art has existed as a religion concurrent with all other religions. Obviously there can be no essential antagonism between it and them. Genuine art and genuine religion are different manifestations of one spirit, so are sham art and sham religion. 

I like the notion that art coexists rather than serves  religious institutions.   It's fanciful in that artists are hired and fired by priests. It's real in that forms come only from the minds and hands of artists,

I also like the idea that bad art is summoned by bad religion -- though there are counter examples.  (think of Botticelli and Savonarola)




For thousands of years men have expressed in art their ultra-human emotions  and have found in it that food by which the spirit lives. Art is the most universal and the most permanent of all forms of religious expression, because the significance of formal combinations can be appreciated as well by one race and one age as by another, and because that significance is as independent as mathematical truth of human vicissitudes. On the whole, no other vehicle of emotion and no other means to ecstasy has served man so well. In art any flood of spiritual exaltation finds a channel ready to nurse and lead it : and when art fails it is for lack of emotion, not for lack of formal adaptability. There never was a religion so adaptable and catholic as art. And now that the young movement begins to cast about for a home in which to preserve itself and live, what more natural than that it should turn to the one religion of unlimited forms and frequent revolutions ? For 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. It is a religion without a priesthood ; and it is well that the new spirit should not be committed to the hands of priests. The new spirit is in the hands of the artists ; that is well. Artists, as a rule,  are the last to organise themselves into official castes, and such castes, when organised, rarely impose on the choicer spirits. Rebellious painters are a good deal commoner than rebellious clergymen. On compromise which is the bane of all religion — since men cannot serve two masters — almost all the sects of Europe live and grow fat. Artists have been more willing to go lean. By compromise the priests have succeeded marvellously in keeping their vessel intact. The fine contempt for the vessel manifested by the original artists of each new movement is almost as salutary as their sublime belief in the spirit. To us, looking at the history of art, the periods of abjection and compromise may appear unconscionably long, but by comparison with those of other religions they are surprisingly short. Sooner or later a true artist arises, and often by his unaided strength succeeds in so re- shaping the vessel that it shall contain perfectly the spirit. Religion which is an affair of emotional conviction should have nothing to do with intellectual beliefs. We have an emotional conviction that some things are better than others, that some states of mind are good and that others are not ; we have a strong emotional conviction that a good world ought to be preferred to a bad ; but there is no proving these things. Few things of importance can be proved ; important things have to be felt and expressed. That is why people with things of importance to say tend to write poems rather than moral treatises. I make my critics a present of that stick. The original sin of dogmatists is that they are not content to feel and express but must needs invent an intellectual concept to stand target for their emotion. From the nature of their emotions they infer an object the existence of which they find themselves obliged to prove by an elaborately disingenuous metaphysic. The consequence is inevitable ; religion comes to mean, not the feeling of an emotion, but adherence to a creed. Instead of being a matter of emo- tional conviction it becomes a matter of intellectual propositions. And here, very properly, the sceptic steps in and riddles the ad hoc metaphysic of the dogmatist with unanswerable objections. No Cambridge Rationalist can presume to deny that I feel a certain emotion, but the moment I attempt to prove the existence of its object I lay myself open to a bad four hours. No one, however, wishes to deny the  existence of the immediate object of aesthetic emotion — combinations of lines and colours. For my suggestion that there may be a remote object I shall probably get into trouble. But if my metaphysical notions are demolished in a paragraph, that will not matter in the least. No metaphysical notions about art matter. All that matter are the aesthetic emotion and its immediate object.


This is a nice panegyric for art as the best religion --  and it does  seem to serve that function for me.   Museums are my cathedrals,  galleries are my parish churches,  studios are my monastic retreats.

Some kind of dogma does seem unavoidable, however.  Bell has his pure significant form, while I have my own impure, possibly insignificant, life-energized, and ultimately incomprehensible kind of  form.  To borrow a dogma from Lao-Tse, whatever can be said about it is wrong.


Art remains an undogmatic religion. You are invited to feel an emotion, not to acquiesce in a theory. Art, then, may satisfy the religious need of an age grown too acute for dogmatic religion, but to do so art must enlarge its sphere of influence. There must be more popular art, more of that art which is un- important to the universe but important to the individual : for art can be second-rate yet genuine. Also, art must become less exclusively professional. That will not be achieved by bribing the best artists to debase themselves, but by enabling everyone to create such art as he can. It is probable that most are capable of expressing themselves, to some extent, in form ; it is certain that in so doing they can find an extraordinary happiness. Those who have absolutely nothing to express and absolutely no power of expression are God’s failures ; they should be kindly treated along with the hopelessly idiotic and the hydrocephalous. Of the majority it is certainly true that they have some vague but profound emotions, also it is certain that only in formal expression can they realise them. To caper
and shout is to express oneself, yet is it comfortless ; but introduce the idea of formality, and in dance and song you may find satisfying delight. Form is the talisman. By form the vague, uneasy, and
unearthly emotions are transmuted into something definite, logical, and above the earth. Making useful objects is dreary work, but making them according to the mysterious laws of formal expression is half way to happiness. If art is to do the work of religion, it must somehow be brought within reach of the people who need religion, and an obvious means of achieving this is to introduce into useful work the thrill of creation.


It's not just the hydro-cephalic who can't make art -- because it's not just a matter of having nothing to express.  There is also a concern for making things of value.  Some people believe that they can  do more important things than  merely expressing themselves -- and who can argue with that?

Even as art therapy,  art requires the feedback of the therapist.

It's been my experience at the art club, that the most of the people who want to make art require the critical feedback of an instructor.  Which is not a bad thing.

 There are two kinds of formal expression open to all—dancing and singing. Certainly it is in dance and song that ordinary people come nearest to the joy of creation. In no age can there be more than a few first-rate artists, but in any there might be millions of genuine ones; and once it is understood that art which is unfit for public exhibition may yet be created for private pleasure no one will feel shame at being called an amateur. 


Bell has not spoken of the distinction between "first-rate"   and "genuine" -- which, for  him, would depend upon deciding which  kind of emotions are the most important.  

And he can't  do that, can he ?

BTW - how is dancing a pre-choreographed  dance or singing a pre-written song any more self expressive than copying a pre-composed painting ?

It is here that I shall fall foul of certain excellent men and women who are attempting to "bring art into the lives of the people" by dragging parties of school children and factory girls through the National Gallery and the British Museum. Who is not familiar with those little flocks of victims clattering and shuffling through the galleries, inspissating the gloom of the museum atmosphere? What is being done to their native sensibilities by the earnest bear-leader with his (or her) catalogue of dates and names and appropriate comments? What have all these tags of mythology and history, these pedagogic raptures and peripatetic ecstasies, to do with genuine emotion? In the guise of what grisly and incomprehensible charlatan is art being presented to the people? The only possible effect of personally conducted visits must be to confirm the victims in their suspicion that art is something infinitely remote, infinitely venerable, and infinitely dreary. They come away with a respectful but permanent horror of that old sphinx who sits in Trafalgar Square propounding riddles that are not worth answering, tended by the cultured and nourished by the rich.

When I was first taken to  museum (of any kind)  my primary emotion was one of  wonder -- and  why would such a feeling not be considered  genuine ?  (actually -  that's still  the first emotion I  get from a new exhibit at an art museum or gallery)

Great  art works are  indeed way above the minds of children.  But the same could be said for most of what children encounter.  Better that -- than only exposing them to things dumbed down to the level of their experience.  Yuck!

To those who busy themselves about bringing art into the lives of the people, I would also say—Do not dabble in revivals. The very word smacks of the vault. Revivals look back; art is concerned with the present. People will not be tempted to create by being taught to imitate. Except that they are charming, revivals of morris-dancing and folk-singing are little better than Arts and Crafts in the open. The dust of the museum is upon them. They may turn boys and girls into nimble virtuosi; they will not make them artists. Because no two ages express their sense of form in precisely the same way all attempts to recreate the forms of another age must sacrifice emotional expression to imitative address. Old-world merry-making can no more satisfy sharp spiritual hunger than careful craftsmanship or half hours with our "Art Treasures." Passionate creation and ecstatic contemplation, these alone will satisfy men in search of a religion.

Wasn't Bell just telling us that significant  form is timeless ?  Can't contemporary people get strong emotions  from things made hundreds or even thousands of years ago?  I do --  and  presumably so do the crowds for special exhibits of Monet and Van Gogh.  They have long been the most popular shows at Chicago's  Art Institute.

So, let the people try to create form for themselves. Probably they will make a mess of it; that will not matter. The important thing is to have live art and live sensibility; the copious production of bad art is a waste of time, but, so long as it is not encouraged to the detriment of good, nothing worse. Let everyone make himself an amateur, and lose the notion that art is something that lives in the museums understood by the learned alone. By practising an art it is possible that people will acquire sensibility; if they acquire the sensibility to appreciate, even to some extent, the greatest art they will have found the new religion for which they have been looking. I do not dream of anything that would burden or lighten the catalogues of ecclesiastical historians. But if it be true that modern men can find little comfort in dogmatic religion, and if it be true that this age, in reaction from the materialism of the nineteenth century, is becoming conscious of its spiritual need and longs for satisfaction, then it seems reasonable to advise them to seek in art what they want and art can give. Art will not fail them; but it may be that the majority must always lack the sensibility that can take from art what art offers.

Perhaps to balance his elitism, Bell proposes that everyone be encouraged to "create form for themselves" -- as if  encouragement from above was needed and effective.

That will be very sad for the majority; it will not matter much to art. For those who can feel the significance of form, art can never be less than a religion. In art these find what other religious natures found and still find, I doubt not, in impassioned prayer and worship. They find that emotional confidence, that assurance of absolute good, which makes of life a momentous and harmonious whole. Because the aesthetic emotions are outside and above life, it is possible to take refuge in them from life. He who has once lost himself in an "O Altitudo" will not be tempted to over-estimate the fussy excitements of action. He who can withdraw into the world of ecstasy will know what to think of circumstance. He who goes daily into the world of aesthetic emotion returns to the world of human affairs equipped to face it courageously and even a little contemptuously. And if by comparison with aesthetic rapture he finds most human passion trivial, he need not on that account become unsympathetic or inhuman. For practical purposes, even, it is possible that the religion of art will serve a man better than the religion of humanity. He may learn in another world to doubt the extreme importance of this, but if that doubt dims his enthusiasm for some things that are truly excellent it will dispel his illusions about many that are not. What he loses in philanthropy he may gain in magnanimity; and because his religion does not begin with an injunction to love all men, it will not end, perhaps, in persuading him to hate most of them.

In the final paragraph, Bell sums  up his answer to "what good is it?" :    "that assurance of absolute good, which makes of life a momentous and harmonious whole."  So if a painting feels disturbing and makes one feel that goodness is fugitive or problematic, then something has gone wrong in either the production or the reception. 

 Bell wants art that lifts us above the grind and sorrows of daily life and delivers us into an aesthetic paradise.  I like that kind  -- but aren't there other kinds as well ?

He appears closer to the Christian legacy than I am. 

*******************

MY CONCLUSION

What quality is common to "Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cézanne?"

These are all things that interest art historians and may end up as or in an art museum. Perhaps each object  has its own unique historical circumstance to explain how eventually it got there.   That would appear to be the case regarding much of the contemporary art that came after this book was written  (1913)--  beginning with Duchamps'   "Fountain" (1917).  (Thierry  de Duve's account of its recognition is discussed here .)

For Clive Bell, however,  it is something about the arrangement of lines and colors  (or lumps and holes).

Contrary to all the major art theories that followed -- I agree with him.  I go to the art museum to see the kinds of things listed above  --   not because I have any special understanding of their context or intended meanings,  or any confidence in the curators who put them on display.  But just because I love to immerse myself in their unique formal worlds. It's not every Persian bowl or Chinese  carpet that can summon and then hold my attention.  It's  only a few pieces from what is already a highly selective collection.

Clive Bell and  I are aesthetes.  We seek the kind of visual pleasure that artworks can provide. We also grew up around encyclopedic art museums, so we're used to enjoying things that may also appear strange, unfamiliar, and maybe even threatening to us.

 He observed that sometimes lines and colors don't provide that pleasure,  even if they skillfully and convincingly  reproduce a visual field. And he noted  that his enjoyment was not a sentimental response to someone or something in particular.   He concluded that representations and associations are irrelevant.

I agree with all that -- but only in selecting what I want to view more deeply.

I seek, find, and enjoy associations in all the art I like.  It feels like sharing  a moment of awareness with someone.  Not just any moment - but  one of the very best moments in their life.  And not just with anyone - but with people who are exceptionally strong, smart, sensitive, and positive. (at least while creating that moment).

Has my vision been corrupted by sentimentality ?  Without it, perhaps I could have enjoyed the high, pure, mountain peaks of aesthetic ecstasy that Bell writes about.  I'll never know because I'm not motivated to go in that direction.  For one thing, I'm already enjoying my experiences with art-- and for another, I don't trust Bell's.   How could anyone  who has seen the masterpieces of the Renaissance rate them all below the mosaics at San Vitale? I fear his vision has been corrupted by ideology.

Did  Bell limit his experience by intentionally ignoring the possible associations suggested by the works he views?   The aesthetic experience is too personal for me to say anything about his or anyone else's.  I can say, however, that his thumbs up / thumbs down approach severely limits his writing.  . He cannot talk about how one  genuine art work is better than another.  He cannot talk about the interaction of form with meaning,  history, or contemporary life.  All he can present is what may be deduced from his purist ideology.

As one who wishes  that contemporary art curators were concerned less with concept and more with form,  this foundational text of formalism  is more than a little embarrassing.

*********************

On this website , 

 Christopher Dowling of the Open University (UK) 

summarizes the history of formalism

up through the end of the 20th Century.

So what are we to take from Bell’s account? His claims that our interactions with certain artworks yield an emotion peculiar to the aesthetic, and not experienced in our everyday emotional lives, is rightly met with consternation. It is unclear why we should recognise such a reaction to be of a different kind (let alone a more valuable kind) to those experienced in other contexts such as to discount many of our reactions to ostensible aesthetic objects as genuine aesthetic responses. Few are prompted by Bell’s account to accept this determination of the aesthetic nor does it seem to satisfactorily capture all that we should want to in this area.

Apparently nothing that might be called an artwork has ever given Professor Dowling an "emotion peculiar  to the aesthetic".   Probably there are many others who are also obsessed with other kinds of things  (especially science, sports, and auto mechanics) who would  agree with him.

Clive Bell speaks of a "pure" aesthetic emotion, unpolluted by other memories or desires. I've never had one of those -- and  doubt that many have - including Clive Bell.

But all  those who seek out and collect various kinds of art (including musical records, novels, paintings) probably have been driven  by a specific kind of emotion that is peculiar to whatever can entwine desires and memory with an intensity of  formal relationships.




As a case in point (perhaps a contentious one but there are any number of related examples), consider Duchamp’s Fountain (1917). In line with much of the criticism referred to in Part 1, the problem is that because Bell identifies aesthetic value (as he construes it) with “art-hood” itself, Artistic Formalism has nothing to say about a urinal that purports to be anti-aesthetic and yet art. Increasingly, artworks are recognised as such and valued for reasons other than the presence (or precisely because of their lack) of aesthetic properties, or exhibited beauty. The practice continues, the works are criticised and valued, and formalists of this kind can do very little but stamp their feet. The death of Artistic Formalism is apparently heralded by the departure of practice from theory.


A theory of art no more needs to account for "Fountain" than a theory of science needs to account for Scientology.

That thunderous sound you hear is me stamping my feet.   There's no rational way for me - or anyone else  - to support any aesthetic preference.   Even a resort to institutional authority rests  upon nothing more credible than a willingness to submit to it. 

And actually -- if you allow your own aesthetic judgment to be contingent on the judgment of others - then you are no longer qualified to discuss it.

 Zangwill identifies Extreme Formalism as the view that all aesthetic properties of an artwork are formal (and narrowly determined), and Anti-Formalism as the view that no aesthetic properties of an artwork are formal (all are broadly determined by history of production as well as narrow non-aesthetic properties). His own view is a Moderate Formalism, holding that some aesthetic properties of an artwork are formal, others are not.

An aesthetic judgment is only a small part of the art experience. Usually, I don't feel compelled to make one at all - other than to vote with my feet to either maintain involvement or move on.

But regarding aesthetic judgment, the only aesthetic property that concerns me is formal: the intensity of  inter-connectedness.  I think Clive Bell would agree with that -- even if we disagree about everything else.






Aestheticism: Deep Formalism and the Emergence of Modernist Aesthetics 

written by an Israeli philosopher, Michalle Gall, 

appears to continue the discussion into the 21st century

but it's rather pricey.

.