Art
Clive Bell
Mass Market Paperback
(Capricorn Books, March 15, 1958)
From the Back of the Book: The Classic Book which pulled Critical Theory of the Arts our the the 19th Century into the 20th. "Art" by Clive Bell (born 1881) - Author of 'Since Cezanne,' 'Proust,' 'Landmarks in the 19th Century Paiting,' 'Civilization,'and 'An Account of French Painting' Clive Bell was the bright particular star of the Bloomsbury Group of the Twenties, and, with Roger Fry, and Herbert Read, a member of the most influential groupl of English Grirical theoriticians of art in the 20th century. He was, in addition, a superb prose stylist, writin with urbanity and wicked wit of the artisitic virtues and vices of his contemporaries and of all artists from the Old Stone Age to the present. His chief contribution to modern theories of beauty and style was the concept of Significant Form, first adumbrated in "Art" in 1913, and which, as recently re-evalutated and expanded by Susan Langer, has become a cornerstone of a great deal more than theories of art; it has, for example, revolutionized the study of symbolic form and construction in all lof the arts, and has played an imporant role in the development of modern logic and epistemology.