Abstract: | We consider hereditary classes of bipartite graphs where clique-width is bounded, but linear clique-width is not. Our goal is identifying classes that are critical with respect to linear clique-width. We discover four such classes and conjecture that this list is complete, i.e. a hereditary class of bipartite graphs of bounded clique-width that excludes a graph from each of the four critical classes has bounded linear clique-width. |