formalism

formalism. A term used in the discussion of the arts to describe an approach (on behalf of creator or critic) in which the formal qualities of a work—such as line, shape, and colour—are regarded as self-sufficient for its appreciation, and all other considerations—such as representational, ethical, or social aspects—are treated as secondary or redundant. The idea that formal qualities can have meaning or resonance independently of representative function was essential to the development of abstract art, and many notable writers on art in the 20th century have been essentially formalist in outlook. Among them were Clive Bell and Roger Fry, who were among the leading British critics in the first half of the century, and Clement Greenberg, the most influential American critic of the 1950s and 1960s. By directing attention away from what was represented in a work to how it was represented, such writers played an important role in increasing appreciation of various types of non-naturalistic art, but their views were sometimes narrow-minded. Bell coined the vague term ‘significant form’ to try to isolate what he considered was the factor that stirred our aesthetic emotions—the common demoninator in all visual art. He did not deny that there were other qualities to be enjoyed in art, but these were subsidiary. Fry was less explicitly theoretical in approach, but his outlook was broadly similar, as is indicated by the following passage, in which he discusses Indian sculpture with a sweeping lack of concern for its cultural context: ‘A great deal of their art, even their religious art, is definitely pornographic, and although I have no moral prejudices against that form of expression, it generally interferes with aesthetic considerations by interposing a strong irrelevant interest which tends to distract both the artist and spectator from the essential purpose of a work of art.’

Greenberg's ideas on formalism were more sophisticated but no less dubious. He thought that art should be ‘pure', eliminating any effect ‘that might conceivably be borrowed from … any other art'; in painting, this involved ‘stressing the ineluctable flatness of the support (i.e. the stretched canvas or panel) … Flatness alone was unique and exclusive to that art … and so, Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.’ He did not dismiss representative paintings wholesale (which might be thought the logical outcome of his beliefs), but he judged them with the same kind of blinkered self-assurance that Fry displayed towards Indian sculpture, as in the following passage, where he takes Picasso to task for the ‘will to illustrative expressiveness’ that he shows in The Three Dancers (Tate Gallery, London, 1925): it ‘goes wrong, not just because it is literary … but because the theatrical placing and rendering of the head and arms of the center figure cause the upper third of the picture to wobble'.

Many other writers have been strongly opposed to the ideas of critics such as Bell, Fry, and Greenberg, believing that form and ‘content’ are to a large extent interdependent. Formalism has been particularly opposed in Communist countries, especially Stalinist Russia, where art was supposed to serve a moral purpose in the education and inspiration of the masses and anything that suggested cultural elitism was condemned. The Soviet authorities regarded formalism as a sign of Western decadence—so much so that the word was used virtually as an all-purpose term of abuse for Western art or its influence. In 1933, Osip Beskin (1892–1969), head of the critics' section of MOSSKh (Moscow Section of the Union of Soviet Artists) published a book entitled Formalism in Painting. It begins by remarking that ‘Formalism in any area of art, in particular in painting, is now the chief form of bourgeois influence’ and goes on to censure painters who have not adhered closely enough to the ideals of Socialist Realism. Artists guilty or suspected of formalism were persecuted and encouraged to make public recantations for their offences. This applied to writers and composers as well as painters and sculptors. In 1936, for example, Dmitri Shostakovich was attacked in Pravda for producing ‘leftist confusion instead of music for the people’ in his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which ‘tickles the perverted tastes of bourgeois audiences abroad'. In literature, ‘The charge of formalism will commonly mean that a novelist has devoted too much attention to plot, characterization and description, and that his work lacks the requisite inspirational quality’ ( C. Hunt, Guide to Communist Jargon, 1957).