ART AS SIGNIFICANT FORM THEORIES OF ART

FORMALIST THEORIES OF ART – ART AS
‘SIGNIFICANT FORM’
In the novel Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s doomed character, Sebastian Flyte, reads aloud an extract from Clive Bell’s Art.
He quotes:
Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?
(Waugh 1982 [1954]: 27) Bell believed that we respond to instances of natural beauty differently from how we do to examples of art. A British journalist and art critic, Clive Bell (1881–1964) outlined these and similar ideas on formalist aesthetics in his treatise Art (1914). In outline, formalist approaches to art emphasise the appearance and composition of the art work (its form) rather than its narrative or content. Here, discussing
‘works of art’, Bell asks the question, ‘What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions?’ (Bell 1949: 8).

Bell asserted that our response to certain types of art arose from the impression made by the properties of its form – lines, colours, shapes and tones. He claimed that such an aesthetic response was intuitive and involuntary. That is, we have no control over how we feel in front of, for example, a Cézanne canvas or a Persian tapestry.
Represented in a particular way, a configuration of lines, shapes and colours provides the viewer with the experience of significant form which Bell judged to be the benchmark of all great works of art.
Similarly, all such examples have in common this quality of significant form.
Bell’s theory appears circular and self-justifying. Since it also
fails to clearly define either ‘form’ or ‘significant’ it is impossible to
evaluate more clearly what criteria he actually envisaged. It is
suggested that the spectator will know when they have experienced
such a compelling response to an object, even if it cannot be clearly
explained.
Bell’s theory was also essentialist – it asserted that great art
shared, or had in common, essential and consistent visual qualities
which enabled its recognition as such. Refreshingly, for the
Edwardian times in which his ideas were expressed, Bell judged

such attributes to be as applicable to fine art as they were to examples
of design, craft or architecture, all of which were given
comparable status (Edwards 1999: 9). The idea of significant form,
even if deliberately vague, proved attractive to a new generation
because it seemed to account for the apparently simple, sensual
pleasure derived from actually looking at aesthetic objects, regardless
of their purpose, previous categorisation or status.