Art as form

The formalist position

Against all the foregoing accounts of the function of art stands another, which belongs distinctively to the 20th century—the theory of art as form, or formalism. The import of formalism can best be seen by noting what it was reacting against: art as representation, art as expression, art as a vehicle of truth or knowledge or moral betterment or social improvement. Formalists do not deny that art is capable of doing these things, but they believe that the true purpose of art is subverted by its being made to do these things. “Art for art’s sake, not art for life’s sake” is the watchword of formalism. Art is there to be enjoyed, to be savoured, for the perception of the intricate arrangements of lines and colours, of musical tones, of words, and combinations of these. By means of these mediums it is true that objects in the world can be represented, scenes from life depicted, and emotions from life expressed, but these are irrelevant to the principal purpose of art. Indeed, art is much less adapted to the telling of a story or the representation of the world than it is to the presentation of colours, sounds, and other items in the art medium simply for their own sake.

Most people who claim to enjoy paintings, for example, enjoy them not as presentations but as representations of things and situations in life, and thus their response is not of a kind that is unique to art but one that takes them back to the emotions of life, from which they came. They could use art to take them into a realm of pure form unknown to anyone who is unacquainted with art, but instead they use it to direct them back to the feelings and situations of life. Thus, according to the formalists, these viewers miss the opportunity of being taken into a fresh world of purely aesthetic experience and get from a work only what they bring to it: familiar experiences and emotions they employ the work to recall.

What, then, should be brought from life to art? Knowledge of life’s struggles and emotions? Knowledge at least of what people are like, and what visual objects look like? Not even these things, for even they get in the way. Representation is not bad in itself, it is merely irrelevant. Only if the representation is satisfactory as form and contributes to the general abstract design can it be said to matter aesthetically.

Most formalists have directed their attention primarily to visual art. The prerequisite for appreciating this, they believe, is a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space (the last required because otherwise a cube, for example, would appear in a painting as a flat pattern and would be unable to play the architectural role intended for it). Armed with this bit of knowledge from life, they have all they need (as far as knowledge of the world outside art is concerned) for appreciating visual art. Armed with more than this, they would find their attention drawn away from the sublimities of art to the more approachable concerns of humanity (such as representation). Shorn of this extraneous knowledge and coming to painting with eyes innocent of extraneous concepts, viewers could then be in a position to look at what painting presents directly to their vision—complex arrangements of forms and colours—which, for reasons thus far unexplained, have the capacity to move recipients deeply with emotions utterly alien to the emotions of life.

The formalist’s account of music runs along similar lines: not only representation (program music) is excluded but so is the entire realm of human feeling—not the feeling that the contemplation of pure form can give but only the feelings of life, such as love or terror. As to literature and all those arts in which words play a part (song, opera, drama, cinema), the formalist position would seem to be impossible, and indeed formalists have seldom attempted to extend their theory to literature. The medium of literature is words and sentences, and words and sentences are not merely noises but noises with meanings, and these meanings inevitably have to do with the objects, actions, qualities, and situations of life. As sound, literature is a poor thing—as a complex of meanings, it can be profound and beautiful. Take these away, and literature could cease to be. Literature does have formal properties—a drama can be as tightly knit as a fugue or a symphony—but the appreciation of it can never consist of these formal properties alone, and the reason lies in the very nature of the medium. It is the role of words to indicate images and meanings and emotions, and these are the stuff of life—therefore verbal art is inescapably humanistic. Whatever sensory beauty words have in their sounds is slight and secondary; not so with painting, where colour, line, and space have a beauty all their own and need stand for nothing outside themselves to satisfy the eye.