When Charles Ryder, the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s semi-autobiographical Brideshead Revisited (1945), arrives as an undergraduate at Oxford in the early 1920s, he fills his bookshelf with volumes by Lytton Strachey, A. E. Housman, Norman Douglas, Compton Mackenzie, and a copy of Clive Bell’s Art (1914), a touchstone of modernist theory. It is a nice detail, indicating not only the boy’s aspirations to intellectual modishness but his cultural insularity, a point that will be underscored later in the novel when, in thrall to the Flyte family, Charles makes an aesthetic conversion to the international Baroque.

For Bell (along with his older comrade-in-arms, Roger Fry—also featured on Ryder’s bookshelf) was modern art’s apostle to the Anglo-Saxons, the island nation’s interpreter of the ideas behind the post-Impressionist revolution taking place across the Channel. Most famously, Bell explicated the concept of “significant form.” “For a discussion of aesthetics,” he wrote in his widely read Art, “it need only be agreed that forms arranged and combined according to certain mysterious laws do move us profoundly, and that it is the business of an artist to combine and arrange them that they shall move us.” According to Mark Hussey, who has written an enlightening new biography of Bell entitled Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism, Bell’s view was that “the represented element in a picture should be only an aspect of design and not be associated with memory, anecdote, biography or any other non-aesthetic matter.” The aim was no