Arthur Clive Heward Bell (Berkshire, 1881 – London, 1964) was an English art critic associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group. His best-known contribution is an art theory called 'significant form', which describes the quality that distinguishes a work of art from other objects. He was not a painter, but his ideas about modern painting were influential in English criticism for several decades.
Bell was educated at Marlborough and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history. In 1902 he won an Earl of Derby scholarship to study in Paris, and there his interest in art began. On returning to London in early 1907, he met and married the artist Vanessa Stephen, sister of Virginia Woolf. Together with Roger Fry, with whom he shared a passion for contemporary French art, he became part of the Bloomsbury circle and developed his aesthetic theory.
His book Art (1914) first set out the idea: lines and colours combined in a particular way, along with certain forms and relations between forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. For Bell, appreciating art meant responding emotionally to purely formal qualities, independent of subject matter. In Since Cézanne (1922) he extended these arguments, and the thesis remained highly influential for several decades.
His marriage was over by the First World War, although he and Vanessa never officially separated or divorced. He had a number of relationships with other women and spent long periods at Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, where Vanessa lived with Duncan Grant and their children. As a writer he also published Proust (1929) and An Account of French Painting (1931), surveying modern French painting.
His name is chiefly associated with significant form, a concept that became a point of reference for formalism and reached a wide readership through his essays. His judgements on the artists of his time are debated today, and scholars of Bloomsbury often point to both his contributions and his personal failings.}