impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." This criticism provoked Whistler into suing the critic for libel. The ensuing court case proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for Whistler. Turn of the twentieth century Towards the end of the 19th century a movement towards abstraction, as opposed to specific content, began to gain ground in England, notably championed by the playwright Oscar Wilde. By the early twentieth century these attitudes formally coalesced into a coherent philosophy, through the work of Bloomsbury Group members Roger Fry and Clive Bell. As an art historian in the 1890s, Fry became intrigued with the new modernist art and its shift away from traditional depiction. His 1910 exhibition of what he called post-Impressionist art attracted much criticism for its iconoclasm. He vigorously defended himself in a lecture, in which he argued that art had moved to attempt to discover the language of pure imagination, rather than the staid and, to his mind, dishonest scientific capturing of landscape. Fry's argument proved to be very influential at the time, especially among the progressive elite. Virginia Woolf remarked that: "in or about December 1910 [the date Fry gave his lecture] human character changed." Independently, and at the same time, Clive Bell argued in his 1914 book Art that all art work has its particular 'significant form', while the conventional subject matter was essentially irrelevant. This work laid the foundations for the formalist approach to art. In 1920, Fry argued that "it’s all the same to me if I represent a Christ or a saucepan since it's the form, and not the object itself, that interests me." As well as being a proponent of formalism, he argued that the value of art lies in its ability to produce a distinctive aesthetic experience in the viewer. an experience he called "aesthetic emotion". He defined it as that experience which is aroused by significant form. He also suggested that the reason we experience aesthetic emotion in response to the significant form of a work of art was that we perceive that form as an expression of an experience the artist has. The artist's experience in turn, he suggested, was the experience of seeing ordinary objects in the world as pure form: the experience one has when one sees something not as a means to