Customer Reviews

Art (Illustrated Edition) (Dodo Press)

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The book was written ninety years ago. People who repond instantly to art may not be capable of talking about it. One must start with the personal experience, a peculiar emotion. It is possible for theories of aesthetics to have general validity.

How quaint to be discussing Landseer, Frith, Alma Tadema. What is primitive tends to move people. For appreciation we need only a sense of form and color. The aesthetically challenged will remember paintings by their subjects. People are more humble about appreciating music than the visual arts.

Clive Bell says that significant form moves him. He claims there are only two kinds of art--good and bad. He sees Post Impressionism as a return to first principles. The artist has got to feel the necessity of making his work right.

Religion like art is concerned with the world of emotional reality. There is a connection of religion and art and it is history. The moral justification for art may be considered to be linked to pleasure, goodness, beauty, utility. It may be a matter of valuation. If art produces a good state of mind, and it does, it is ethical.

Greek civilization was sick by the time of sack of Corinth. Materialism infected the ages of Marcus Aurelius and Queen Victoria. The paintings in the catacombs are classical. Bell seeks to identify eras of enthusiasm. One has to think of what has survived successfully. Every artist sacrifices form to substance.

Bell calls Giotto a peak. Afterwards there was a long decline. It is claimed that all of the artists of the nineteenth century are ominous. Modern artists owe a debt to Cezanne. He showed a method. Humans need to be freed from erudition and well-meaning efforts to induce art appreciation.

This book is good for understanding what goes on under the hood of art critics, not all, but Bell represents the type of Brit, who thinks overly high of himself right before the great war. That aside, he makes a good starting point for looking at art(mostly painting) but leaves one wanting as he never gets to what really makes a painting good.(says the best art comes from 600 CE) And yes that is what hes talking about, just painting. This book, short and fast only makes me, and perhaps you want to look at other points in other books, which is the point of the course I read it for does.

Overall he suffers from "missing the point" I'm curious if he changes his tune during the rest of his life over that next 40 years.

Bell wrote this when he was very young. In the preface he even hints at embarrassment over its overambitious breadth. His later "What Is Painting?" is MUCH better.

This book was better than I expected for one that has been written so long ago. Great theory never goes out of fashion.