"It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality"
About this Quote
Bell is trying to rescue art from the twin dead ends of storytelling and moral instruction by giving it a metaphysical job: good form is not just pleasing arrangement, it is a veil you can see through. The phrase "it would follow" performs a critic's sleight of hand, as if the leap from brushstrokes to "ultimate reality" were a tidy syllogism rather than a wager. That cool, almost bureaucratic setup lets him smuggle in a grand claim: formal relations (line, color, composition) can trigger an apprehension that feels deeper than depiction.
The subtext is polemical and defensive. Writing in the early 20th century, with Post-Impressionism cracking open Victorian expectations, Bell needs an account that justifies why a Cezanne apple might matter more than a perfectly rendered anecdote. "Significant form" becomes a way to rank art without leaning on subject matter, biography, or national tradition - all the usual crutches of cultural authority. It's also an escape hatch from argument: if the work makes you "catch" that sense, it counts; if you don't, you're simply not catching it.
His diction matters. "Behind which" suggests art isn't reality, but a surface that can be penetrated; "catch" implies a fleeting, half-conscious grasp, closer to a shiver than a proposition. Bell's modernist ambition is to make aesthetics feel like secular mysticism: the canvas as a portal, formalism as a spiritual technology, and the critic as the one who insists the portal is real even when the room still looks like a room.
The subtext is polemical and defensive. Writing in the early 20th century, with Post-Impressionism cracking open Victorian expectations, Bell needs an account that justifies why a Cezanne apple might matter more than a perfectly rendered anecdote. "Significant form" becomes a way to rank art without leaning on subject matter, biography, or national tradition - all the usual crutches of cultural authority. It's also an escape hatch from argument: if the work makes you "catch" that sense, it counts; if you don't, you're simply not catching it.
His diction matters. "Behind which" suggests art isn't reality, but a surface that can be penetrated; "catch" implies a fleeting, half-conscious grasp, closer to a shiver than a proposition. Bell's modernist ambition is to make aesthetics feel like secular mysticism: the canvas as a portal, formalism as a spiritual technology, and the critic as the one who insists the portal is real even when the room still looks like a room.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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