Clive Bell Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.

Clive Bell
Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

Clive Bell
It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.

Clive Bell
The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate a work of art, we must bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions.

Clive Bell
I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

Clive Bell
All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

Clive Bell
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.

Clive Bell
What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? Only one answer seems possible— significant form. In each, lines and colors combined in a particular way; certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colors, these aesthetically moving forms, I call 'Significant Form'; and 'Significant Form' is the one quality common to all works of visual art.

Clive Bell
Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form.

Clive Bell
Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art.

Clive Bell
We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.

Clive Bell
The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.

Clive Bell
Let the artist have just enough to eat, and the tools of this trade: ask nothing of him. Materially make the life of the artist sufficiently miserable to be unattractive, and no-one will take to art save those in whom the divine daemon is absolute.

Clive Bell
It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colors, and the combination of those shapes, that we recognize the colorist. Color becomes significant only when it becomes form.

Clive Bell
It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.

Clive Bell
There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.

Clive Bell