Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism

Mark Hussey, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Review by Mitchell Alcrim, Cambridge, Mass. 

Even to the most avid reader of books about Bloomsbury, Clive Bell remains a somewhat elusive figure. As Mark Hussey tells us in his preface to Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism, although most readers know that he was a well-respected art critic, many may be unaware that his groundbreaking book Art, first published in 1914, remained in print for 50 years, or that he was a committed pacifist, profoundly engaged with the world around him. Over the years, Bell has emerged variously as a detached aesthete, an inveterate womanizer, or a jaunty country gentleman. (Hussey, ix-x) Hussey gives us a much more nuanced, complex portrait of Clive Bell, celebrating his accomplishments without obscuring the less appealing aspects of his character. 

Born in 1881 in Wiltshire to a family grown wealthy in the coal mining industry, Clive was an outsider from the outset. While sharing his family’s love of the hunt and the sporting life, Clive learned early that his unique sensibility to art and poetry set him apart from the rest of his family. (4-6) Arriving at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1899, Clive formed a close friendship with Thoby Stephen, a bond sealed through their mutual love of hunting and nature, a commitment to tolerance, a disdain for religion, and perhaps most importantly for Clive, an interest in art. Thoby, in a letter to his sister, Virginia, described Clive as ‘astonishing’ and went on to write that he was ‘a sort of mixture between Shelley and a sporting country squire’. (9) Interestingly, neither of these two key figures in the creation of Bloomsbury was a member of the secret Conversazione Society, known as the Apostles. Thoby demonstrated little interest in becoming a member, while Clive seems to have never been considered, perhaps owing in part to his family’s fortune and provincial origins. (12) Bell belonged to a class seen by many in his circle as representing a form of Englishness marked by philistinism and lacking what Lytton Strachey may have called ‘sensitiveness to the finer shades of thought and feeling’. (79)

Clive’s friends seem to have found him difficult to pin down. Desmond MacCarthy  said that Bell ‘seemed to live, half with the rich sporting-set, and half with the intellectuals’, (13) while another friend, Louisa Gibson Blaikie, went further:

You are two men in my mind – the poet, & the hard, level headed lawyer & politician. I’ve always heard of you as the latter, but my own knowledge of you is of the former – Who are you really? (22)

Lytton Strachey, although a longtime friend, is much harsher in his assessment; to him, Clive’s character consisted of several layers, the most dominant being ‘a layer of stupidity, which runs transversely through all the other layers’. (35) Hussey deepens our understanding of Clive Bell and makes clear that he was not altogether at home in any of the worlds he inhabited (and perhaps even unwelcome in some). This ‘not belonging’ in some measure remained with him throughout his life. As Hussey tells us, ‘Clive never fully inhabited any of the various personae he presented to the world.’ (418) Perhaps it is precisely this quality that makes him so fascinating. 

In 1907, soon after Thoby’s untimely death, Clive and Vanessa Stephen, Thoby’s sister, were married. (52) Having met through Thoby, they had enjoyed many fruitful conversations about art and in 1905, Vanessa had invited Clive to assist in the formation of the Friday Club, a space dedicated to exhibiting and discussing art. (34-35) His marriage to Vanessa did not prevent Clive from carrying on a lengthy, intense flirtation with her sister, Virginia Stephen (Virginia Woolf). Brought together by a love of literature and a mutual attraction, the close friendship lasted until Woolf’s death in 1941. Clive was the only person to whom she showed the early drafts of her novel Melymbrosia, later to be published as The Voyage Out in 1915. (62) Clive immediately recognised Virginia’s genius, marveling at the gift she had ‘of lifting the veil & showing inanimate things in the mystery and beauty of their reality’. (65) Clive’s encouragement was reciprocated, Virginia urging him to not be content with what he could easily achieve, but to take risks and to ‘try to grasp what you don’t quite grasp’. (65) Hussey argues, however, that 

[Bell’s] genuinely valuable criticism became entangled with his manipulation of her feelings of exclusion and jealousy of her sister’s new life, as well as with her own provocation of Clive’s insecurity about his own worth. (54)           

Nevertheless, Virginia Woolf admired Bell’s joie de vivre, enthusing:

He enjoys everything – even the old hag in the doorway. There is no truth about life, he says, except what we feel. It is good if you enjoy it, & so forth. (220)

A fortuitous chance meeting with the renowned art expert, Roger Fry, led Bell to become involved in the organisation of the first major exhibition in Britain of the innovative painters active in France in the late nineteenth century, including Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse. (81) Manet and the Post-Impressionists caused a sensation when it opened at the Grafton Galleries in 1910. (86) Derided by some as ‘aesthetic insanity’ (102n1), it liberated artists such as Vanessa Bell who declared that: 

It was as if at last one might say things one had always felt instead of trying to say things that other people told one to feel. Freedom was given to one to be oneself. (87) 

One can’t help thinking of the painter Lily Briscoe in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) as she struggles to capture her ‘vision’. Even the writer Katherine Mansfield, Hussey tells us, discovered ‘a kind of freedom’ in her writing after viewing the Van Goghs. (87) In 1912, works by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant would be shown alongside the European artists at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition. (104)

Clive Bell decided early on that he wanted to express in words what he felt in front of a work of art. (73) Discussions with Fry helped to articulate his inchoate ideas. (82) In his most famous work, Art, published in 1914, Bell defined the quality he found in all works that he would call art as ‘significant form’; he could not explain what it was other than to say that it was ‘a combination of lines and colours that moves me aesthetically’ having nothing to do with beauty. Significant form was not identified with any specific kind of object, historical era, location, or medium. (119-120) Hussey provides perceptive analysis:    

[Bell] was not appealing to an established canon of taste, of  ‘great works’, but to his own subjective experience, a key aspect of the radicalism of his aesthetics. The mode of criticism he would become associated with did not argue from a norm but rather tried to establish a community of feeling by sharing those objects that provoked in him an aesthetic emotion. (110)

As examples of objects that evoked this emotion, Bell included illustrations: a fifth-century Wei sculpture; an eleventh-century Persian dish; a Peruvian pot; a detail from a sixth-century San Vitale mosaic; and paintings by Cézanne and Picasso. (120) Art was so culturally consequential that it appears in two different novels published nearly 30 years apart: in 1916, Rose Macaulay makes mention of Bell’s book in her novel Non-Combatants and Others, while in 1945, Evelyn Waugh places it on Charles Ryder’s bookshelf in Brideshead Revisited. (175, 389)

As he evolved his ideas about art, Bell also considered the critic’s role. Always careful to draw a distinction between himself (a self-proclaimed ‘sciolist’) and scholars such as Roger Fry, (418) Clive settled on the notion of critic as guide rather than instructor. As Hussey tells us, ‘Clive now articulated a view of the critic as signpost, guiding a viewer towards worthwhile experiences by “infecting” them with his own enthusiasm’, thereby creating ‘a community of feeling’. (193) Clearly, Bell’s mission to expose the public to art was a successful one; throughout his life, he received letters of thanks from young artists and members of the general public. (313-314) During two well-received lecture tours of the United States in the early 1950s, Clive enjoyed his status of elder statesman and entertained his audiences with many reminiscences about the artists he had championed for years. (406-415)

Clive Bell was no aesthete, however. Though Bloomsbury is often accused of detachment from the world, this is untrue. Through two world wars, Bell maintained a steadfast pacifist stance and in such writings as Peace at Once, published in 1915, was openly critical of the forces at work to keep the war going. In this pamphlet, Clive identified the war as being fought on behalf of a small ruling caste, who, along with the press, invented rationales such as national honour to foment war fever. (137) He met with political leaders including Lloyd George to consider alternative work for conscientious objectors. (154) (Bell, himself, spent the war as a CO at Ottoline Morrell’s home, Garsington, while Duncan Grant and Bunny Garnett farmed at Charleston.) (156)

During the rise of Fascism in the 1930s and through the Second World War, Clive clung to his pacifist beliefs. (298-301, 331-336) While his loyalty to this anti-war position is admirable, Clive seems to have not completely appreciated the different circumstances of the 1939-45 war. His statement, as related to Maud Russell, that ‘war was a far greater disaster … than any arrogant and loathsome dictatorship, no matter how repugnant or how disastrous it may be to a small minority of rich or intelligent people’ (335) appears myopic in the face of Fascist atrocities and is difficult to overlook. Nevertheless, Clive’s belief that war led to the collapse of civilisation never wavered, nor his view that a society’s response to art reflected its overall liberty. (305)

In his epilogue, Hussey leaves the reader first with a wonderful remembrance of his father by Quentin Bell. Hussey writes: 

The aesthete who had caroused with Picasso and Cocteau, who liked nothing more than to imagine himself a Byron in a Venetian palazzo, whom Isadora Duncan had pulled onto her lap at a party in Paris … was recalled by his son returning from a day’s shooting, ‘tired and muddy, but content, with his gun, his dog, a brace of pheasants or in hard weather two brace of snipe for the table’. (446)

Hussey then concludes with the poignant image of Clive’s books arrayed on the shelves at Charleston and alludes to the ‘zestful continuity’ which the art critic Nevile Wallis observed when he visited Duncan Grant there the morning after Clive’s death. (446) Hussey’s remarkable book takes its place in this continuity, in this ‘community of feeling’, by inspiring the reader to look at and react to the art so loved by Bell, to read his writings on that art, and to visit Charleston, his home for so many years. There could not be a more fitting tribute to Clive Bell and his life’s work.

Works Cited

Clive Bell, Art, ed. J.B. Bullen (Oxford University Press, 1987)
Clive Bell, Peace At Once (National Labour Press, 1915)
Mark Hussey, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2021)