GARDE ABSTRACTION

BELL AND AVANT-GARDE ABSTRACTION
Although Bell’s theory was simplistic, it underlined a shift of sensibility away from making evaluative judgements about art arising from criteria of resemblance or academic naturalism which had previously defined mainstream British, European and American painting. The increasing prevalence of photography, which provided mechanical reproductions of images, underlined the importance of identifying those features and attributes which were unique to other forms of aesthetic practice (Gould 2003: 37–38).

Like his colleague and contemporary Roger Fry (1886–1934), Bell was an advocate of the work of Cézanne (see for example Figure 11, p. 49) and the Post-Impressionists, exhibitions of which he had supported in London in 1910 and 1912 (Gaiger and Wood 2003: 4). More provocatively, Bell also argued that the narrative content of art was at best irrelevant, and at worst actually negated an object’s aesthetic status. Appealingly for some of his Edwardian contemporaries, he effectively wrote off much of the Western canon
of art since the Renaissance! These ideas were important because they anticipated some of the critical responses to avant-garde abstraction which subsequently became widespread.