'Amusing, charming, stimulating, urbane' - THE TIMES 'Revelatory' - GUARDIAN 'Restores Clive Bell vividly to life' - Lucasta Miller ______________ Clive Bell is perhaps better known today for being a Bloomsbury socialite and the husband of artist Vanessa Bell, sister to Virginia Woolf. Yet Bell was a highly important figure in his own right: an internationally renowned art critic who defended daring new forms of expression at a time when Britain was closed off to all things foreign. His groundbreaking book Art brazenly subverted the narratives of art history and cemented his status as the great interpreter of modern art. Bell was also an ardent pacifist and a touchstone for the Wildean values of individual freedoms, and his is a story that leads us into an extraordinary world of intertwined lives, loves and sexualities. For decades Bell has been an obscure figure, refracted through the wealth of writing on Bloomsbury, but here Mark Hussey brings Bell to the fore, drawing on personal letters, archives and Bell's own extensive writing. Complete with a cast of famous characters, including Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism is a fascinating portrait of a man who became one of the pioneering voices in art of his era. Reclaiming Bell's stature among the makers of modernism, Hussey has given us a biography to muse and marvel over – a snapshot of a time and of a man who revelled in and encouraged the shock of the new. 'A book of real substance written with style and panache, copious fresh information and many insights.' - Julian Bell

'Amusing, charming, stimulating, urbane' - THE TIMES 'Revelatory' - GUARDIAN 'Restores Clive Bell vividly to life' - Lucasta Miller ______________ Clive Bell is perhaps better known today for being a Bloomsbury socialite and the husband of artist Vanessa Bell, sister to Virginia Woolf. Yet Bell was a highly important figure in his own right: an internationally renowned art critic who defended daring new forms of expression at a time when Britain was closed off to all things foreign. His groundbreaking book Art brazenly subverted the narratives of art history and cemented his status as the great interpreter of modern art. Bell was also an ardent pacifist and a touchstone for the Wildean values of individual freedoms, and his is a story that leads us into an extraordinary world of intertwined lives, loves and sexualities. For decades, Bell has been an obscure figure, refracted through the wealth of writing on Bloomsbury, but here Mark Hussey brings him to the fore, drawing on personal letters, archives and Bell's own extensive writing. Complete with a cast of famous characters, including Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism is a fascinating portrait of a man who became one of the pioneering voices in art of his era. Reclaiming Bell's stature among the makers of modernism, Hussey has given us a biography to muse and marvel over – a snapshot of a time and of a man who revelled in and encouraged the shock of the new. 'A book of real substance written with style and panache, copious fresh information and many insights' - Julian Bell

Bloomsbury critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell instigated a new way of looking at art that focused on the visionary genius of the artist. This book traces the Anglo-American dialogue they inspired and demonstrates how Bloomsbury's new aesthetic was taken up by the urban intelligentsia in 1920s.

This important new study reevaluates British art writing and the rise of formalism in the visual arts from 1900 to 1939. Taking Roger Fry as his starting point, Sam Rose rethinks how ideas about form influenced modernist culture and the movement’s significance to art history today. In the context of modernism, formalist critics are often thought to be interested in art rather than life, a stance exemplified in their support for abstract works that exclude the world outside. But through careful attention to early twentieth-century connoisseurship, aesthetics, art education, design, and art in colonial Nigeria and India, Rose builds an expanded account of form based on its engagement with the social world. Art and Form thus opens discussions on a range of urgent topics in art writing, from its history and the constructions of high and low culture to the idea of global modernism. Rose demonstrates the true breadth of formalism and shows how it lends a new richness to thought about art and visual culture in the early to mid-twentieth century. Accessibly written and analytically sophisticated, Art and Form opens exciting new paths of inquiry into the meaning and lasting importance of formalism and its ties to modernism. It will be invaluable for scholars and enthusiasts of art history and visual culture.

A selection of letters by the pacifist and noted art critic Clive Bell, expertly annotated by his biographer Clive Bell was a pivotal member of the Bloomsbury Group. His marriage to Vanessa Bell and his, at times tempestuous, relations with his sister-in-law Virginia Woolf form important strands in the cultural history of modernism. A tireless champion of modernist art, a committed pacifist and conscientious objector, Bell produced a huge body of correspondence with many of the leading artistic and political figures of his time. His lively, witty, highly opinionated letters are a window into the turbulence of the early twentieth century, populated by friends and acquaintances including T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, as well as his Bloomsbury set, Desmond MacCarthy, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell. Arranged in eight categories - Bloomsbury Circles; Virginia; War; Arts and Letters; To the Editor; Francophile; Travels; Love, Gossip, Home - this selection emphasises Bell's enormously varied life and interests. Bell was born in the reign of Queen Victoria and lived long enough to have been able to hear the Beatles on the radio. His letters demonstrate an appetite for art, for love and for peace that never flagged. [bio]Mark Hussey is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Pace University in New York. His most recent book is Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism, A Biography (2021). He is also the General Editor of the Harcourt annotated edition of Virginia Woolf. www.markhusseybooks.com

A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR The ten years leading up to the First World War were the most exciting, frenzied and revolutionary in the history of art. They were the crucible of Modernism, when Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism and Abstract Art all burst forth. Simultaneously the Old Master market boomed, and art itself was politically weaponised in advance of approaching war. What was the conventional art against which Modernism was rebelling? Why did avant-garde artists become so obsessed with themselves? What persuaded a few bold collectors to buy difficult modern art? And why did others pay so much money for Old Masters? Art expert Philip Hook brings to bear a unique perspective on the art of a unique and extreme decade.