Bell, Clive, 1881–1964, English critic of art and literature. He was a member of the Bloomsbury group Bloomsbury group, name given to the literary group that made the Bloomsbury area of London the center of its activities from 1904 to World War II. It included Lytton Strachey , Virginia Woolf , Leonard Woolf, E. M.
..... Click the link for more information. . His works include Art (1914), Since Cézanne (1922), Landmarks in Nineteenth-Century Painting (1927), and Proust (1929). His wife,

Vanessa (Stephen) Bell, 1879–1961, was a painter and the sister of Virginia Woolf Woolf, Virginia (Stephen), 1882–1941, English novelist and essayist; daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen . A successful innovator in the form of the novel, she is considered a significant force in 20th-century fiction.
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Bibliography

See C. Bell's Old Friends (1956); biography of Vanessa Bell by F. Spalding (1983); R. Marler, ed., Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (1993).

Bell, (Arthur) Clive (Heward)

(born Sept. 16, 1881, East Shefford, Berkshire, Eng.—died Sept. 17, 1964, London) British art critic. He studied at Cambridge University and in Paris. In 1907 he married Vanessa Stephen, sister of Virginia Woolf; with Virginia's husband, Leonard Woolf, and Roger Fry, they formed the core of the Bloomsbury group. Bell's most important aesthetic ideas were published in Art (1914) and Since Cézanne (1922), in which he promoted his theory of “significant form” (the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other objects). His assertion that art appreciation involves an emotional response to purely formal qualities, independent of subject matter, was influential for several decades.