1914 work,Art, Bell considers very few artists actu-
ally great. For Clive Bell the essential quality of any
artwork was its ability to provoke an aesthetic emo-
tion. Aesthetic emotion is obtainable only through
the presence of what Bell termed ‘‘significant form.’’
Bell does not deny that art can contain represen-
tational forms and still be considered art, but he
asserts that artistic value can only be measured
through significant form, which although it can be
pointed out by a critic, an object is not art until it
has independently provoked this response from the
viewer. By Bell’s own admission all art experiences
are thus entirely subjective. While representational
imagery can be amusing or intellectually challen-
ging, it is often not aesthetic. Its nature is often
more documentary. Bell compares the history of
art to the history of religion and finds a common
motive for both. The aesthetic and the divine are
both roads for people to exchange mundane reality
for ecstasy. Aesthetic and religious rapture are very
similar as described by Bell, and at their best both
are completely independent of historic facts or con-
trived dogmas.
A contemporary of Bell, Roger Fry published his
major writing on art in 1920, calledVision and
Design.While Bell was dismissive of the relatively
new tendency in painting, Impressionism, Fry cites
the movement as the beginning of a new revolution
in art. Impressionist artists removed art from the
arena of strict representation and placed it firmly in
the realm of structural design and harmony. More
technical than Bell, Fry identified five emotional
elements of design in all forms of art: rhythm or
gesture, mass, space, light and shade, and color.
According to Fry, art stimulates emotion by
using the emotional elements of design, and com-
bined with sympathy within the viewer for the ar-
tist, and the purpose of the thing, thereby creates a
feeling of unity and harmony in the viewer. These
are what indicate a successful work of art. Follow-
ing from Kant, Fry believed distinguishing art
from natural beauty is the consciousness and the
intent of the artist.
The contemporary painter-theorist in Poland,
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, deserves mention for
his 1919 workNowe Formy w Malarstwie (New
Forms in Painting).His Formalist theory was very
similar to Bell’s argument. He identified that the
essence of art lies in its form and that a successful
artist strove to create a multi-structured unity of
forms. He acknowledged that all art comes from
an understanding of life, and because of this art
may or even must contain referents to the real
world, but that the evaluation of any work of art
must be dependant on aesthetic qualities not related
to the real world referents on which that work may
be based.
In 1904, American photographer Sadakichi Hart-
man wrote essays strongly objecting to painterli-
ness in photography, a basic tenet of the overriding
photographic style of the day, Pictorialism. He
referred to over-manipulated negatives and allego-
rical sentimentality and the inferiority of these to
pure photography relying on nothing more than an
artistic eye and technical skill. The straight photo-
graphy movements in the early part of the century
included such American artists as Alfred Stieglitz,
Paul Strand, and Edward Weston. In Russia the
Constructivist photographers had many of the
same aims as the straight photographers did, and
was epitomized by the work of Alexander Rod-
chenko. These movements addressed the tension
between the concepts of objectivity and subjectiv-
ity. The important matter for these artists was not
the object being captured, but rather the mind that
directs the capturing. Photography of the 1920s
and 1930s made such a visual impact that its effects
were seen in the works of painters around the
world. Despite this, aesthetic theorists of the era,
like Bell and Fry, largely ignored photography in
favor of painting, sculpture, and architecture.
Perhaps art history’s best-known straight photo-
grapher was Alfred Stieglitz, who was very inter-
ested in Formalist composition. For Stieglitz, form
was the main concern of the photographer, what-
ever narrative or moral or allegorical interpreta-
tions might come from the final image was
irrelevant to the production of the image. Perhaps
Stieglitz’s most famous photo,The Steerage(1907),
is potentially a cold, documentary criticism of class
divisions in a democratic society, but for the artist
and for the Formalist it is a composition in form
consisting of round and triangular shapes, diago-
nals, and light areas juxtaposed with dark masses.
In order to reach his lofty formalistic goals without
provoking confusion about potentially meaningful
subject matter, Stieglitz and others in his group
began photographing ordinary objects. The epi-
tome of his efforts was the production of a series
called theEquivalentsand hisDreaming Treesser-
ies. TheEquivalentsbegan in 1923 with cropped
studies of clouds. They were documentary, but
also evocative and beautiful. These works have a
connection to Bell’s theories as they use signifi-
cant form without narrative or even pictorial con-
text to invoke an aesthetic emotion. He moved the
documentary out of mundane life and into the
realm of high art. The images are still works of
straight photography, but as documents, they have
no function.FORMALISM