Clive Bell Quotes

#1. We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.

Clive Bell

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art.

Clive Bell

#5. It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.

Clive Bell

#6. Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form.

Clive Bell

#7. Art and relligion 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 product to live - they live to produce.

Clive Bell

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

Clive Bell

#12. 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

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

Clive Bell

#14. Civilized people can talk about anything. For them no subject is taboo ... In civilized societies there will be no intellectual bogeys at sight of which great grownup babies are expected to hide their eyes.

Clive Bell

#15. A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.

Clive Bell

#16. Comfort came in with the middle classes.

Clive Bell

#17. 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.

Clive Bell

#18. I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.

Clive Bell

#19. 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

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

Clive Bell

#21. 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

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

Clive Bell

#23. Do not mistake a crowd of big wage-earners for the leisure class.

Clive Bell