Clive Bell’s “The Aesthetic Experience” A Closer Look at “Significant Form” and the Aesthetic Point of View

What is Significant Form? Bell contends for the following: 1.While art is emotional, there is a peculiarly aesthetic emotion, quite different from the emotions of ordinary life, known as “significant form.”

What is Significant Form? 2.Significant form is a unique quality resulting from combinations of lines, colors, and spatial elements: “…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 art (P4).”

What is Significant Form? 3.What does the word “significant” mean? “Significant” consists of the expression of the artist’s emotion, but the only emotion that Bell considers legitimate in art-the peculiarly aesthetic emotion-is aroused in by the vision of significant form.

Why this Aesthetic Emotion? 4.We don’t know why these arouse aesthetic emotion. We can postulate that there is an “unknown and mysterious laws’ whereby particular forms constitute “significant form.”

Significant Form: Monroe Beardsley notes: “Clive Bell’s Objectivism (i.e., his conception of the work as an object in its own right) owed much to the influence of G.E. Moore, especially the latter’s theory of goodness as a simple, unanalyzable property, and his definition of the “beautiful… as that of which the admiring contemplation is good in itself” [Principia Ethica, pg. 201].

Significant Form: Beardsley’s definition of Clive Bell’s “significant form”: Much of the extraordinarily valuable educational work of Clive Bell (see Art [1914] and Roger Fry (see Vision and Design [1920]) consisted in helping people to look at paintings without predispositions and preconceptions, and without being distracted by irrelevant associations with the representational subject-matter. They made famous the term “significant form,” introduced by Bell as a name for the quality common to all good visual art-roughly, unified organizations with vitality of regional quality-and used it to focus attention on the work itself [my bold]” [Aesthetics: From Classical Greece to the Present, 364].

Significant Form: Melvin Rader puts it this way: “The significance…consists of the expression of the artist’s emotion, but the only emotion that Bell considers legitimate in art-the peculiarly ‘esthetic’ emotion-is aroused by the vision of significant form” [A Modern Book of Aesthetics, pg ].

Cynthia Freeland states: “‘Significant Form’ is a particular combination of lines and colours that stir our aesthetic emotions.. A critic can help other see form and feel the resulting emotions. These emotions are special and lofty: Bell spoke of art as an exalted encounter with form on Art’s ‘cold white peaks’ and insisted that art should have nothing to do with life or politics” [But is it art?: An Introduction to Art Theory, pg. 15]

Significant Form: Rader, a few lines down, observes: “In a little book on Proust (1928), he [Bell] that ‘the supreme masterpieces’ of literature ‘derive their splendor, their supernatural power, not from flashes of insight, nor yet from characterization, nor from an understanding of the human heart even, but from form-I use the word in its richest sense, I mean the thing that artists create, their expression. Whether you call it ‘significant form or something else, the supreme quality in art is formal; it has to do with order, sequence, movement, and shape’” [Ibid., 225].

What should we look for & hope to experience in art? 5.What we hope to experience in art is what we seldom experience in life outside of art-the aesthetic thrill, rapture, or ecstasy.

Justification: 6.Anchored in individual experience- experience of one characteristic type evoked by art from primitives to post- impressionists. While he can’t give a formula for what evokes it, he believes that formal structures, not narrative, or sentimental matter, are its source.

Later Bell: 7.In his later writing Bell contends that “significant form” has an elusive quality. 8.Form is “significant” iff it can’t be further worked upon, redefined, simplified, and intensified by an artist or in an artwork. Nature’s forms are therefore not in the strong sense significant. It becomes significant only when an artist realizes its potentiality.

Problem of Circularity: There is a circular problem to Bell’s definition: –Significant form is that to which aesthetic emotion is the response. –When we ask what the aesthetic emotion is, however, we find that it is the emotion evoked by significant form. Remember, the aesthetic emotions is a response to formal properties only-in painting, it is the complex interrelations of shapes and colors organized into an aesthetic unity.

Concluding Observations: Bell agrees the art is emotional but that there is a peculiarly aesthetic emotion that is distinct from ordinary emotions-that is directed to or related to “significant form.” Significant form is a unique quality resulting from certain combinations of lines, colors, and spatial elements. He does not offer any criteria for detecting significant form. Significant form is that to which aesthetic emotion is the response. Formal properties are related to aesthetic value. Works of art have their own intrinsic value. He rejects the antithesis between form and content; they are one thing regarded from two different points of view.