Pittura e letteratura.Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf e la critica nella prima metà del Novecento, Critica e letteratura negli scritti sull'arte. Contributi per una tipologia, (Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze 3-4 ottobre 2013), atti del convegno di studi, a cura di Donatella Pegazzano e Massimiliano Rossi in "Annali di Critica d'Arte" XI, 2015. Quaderni dei Seminari

In his influent book Axel’s Castle (1931), the American literary critic Edmund Wilson noticed that Virginia Woolf’s and Clive Bell’s critical attitude shared some common features: both, he wrote, were interested in the arts only «from the point of view of varying degrees of pleasures» they can provide. The paper aims to explore this claim, since then never really investigated, to demonstrate that, between the wars and in full crisis of social, economic, politic, aestehic and artistic values of Modernism, the two Bloomsbury members Bell and Woolf propose a new critical method, descriptive and not normative, hierarchical and not exclusive, and a more affordable definition of aesthetic experience. Between élite and mass culture, this mature version of their art theory negotiates with the common sense in order to initiate the new public of art into the basis of a free and democratic cultural society.