Significant Form and Aesthetic Emotion

Abstract

The early twentieth-century revolution in visual art that came to be known in England as post-impressionism emphasized the view that artistic creativity resides not only in the making of the artwork, but also in the interaction between the artwork and the spectator, an orientation which the contemporary discipline of neuroaesthetics holds in our time. Clive Bell’s theory of “significant form” provided an approachable way for the British public to integrate their understanding of the new art into existing notions of art history and led to a severely diminished role for representation in visual art. Bell’s theory is identifiable as one manifestation of pervasive changes in the understanding of creativity and perception that were sweeping through Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bell could not say why certain combinations of lines and colors led to the experience of an “aesthetic emotion,” only that they did. Contemporary researchers in neuroaesthetics, such as Semir Zeki, have returned to Bell’s notion to ask whether the experience of aesthetic emotion might be due to some common neural organization. This chapter points to commonalities between the speculations of Bell and other members of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry, and those of contemporary researchers into brain processes.