Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism

This landmark biography brings art critic Clive Bell, member of the Bloomsbury Group, back into prominence

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.

About the Author

Mark Hussey is Distinguished Professor of English at Pace University in New York City. Born in London, after completing a PhD at Nottingham, he moved to the US in 1982 and worked at the Association of American Publishers and the Sander Gallery in Soho. Mark is best known for his decades of work on the Bloomsbury Group and Virginia Woolf- he is the General Editor for Harcourt's annotated editions of her works and editorial board member of the Cambridge Edition of Woolf.