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. Formal principles in art
What, then, are the specific qualities in works of art that the formalist is seeking? Most formalists have held that a partial account can be given of these but that, in the end, the presence of the qualities must be felt intuitively and cannot be described. Accounts of formal qualities in works of art go back as far as Aristotle’s Poetics, written in the 4th century bce, and usually include (though sometimes in different terminology) the following as principal ingredients:
Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, oil on canvas by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1653; in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 143.5 × 136.5 cm.Photos.com/Thinkstock
Organic unity
A work of art must have what Aristotle called “a beginning, a middle, and an end”; it must be unified, it must “hang together” as one entity. Everything, of course, has some degree of unity or other. Even a collection of things, such as a woodpile, has some unity inasmuch as it can correctly be called one thing: it is a collection, but it is a single collection. But the unity desired in works of art is much greater than this: it is more like the unity of the higher organisms in which every part functions not independently of the others but interdependently with them, and it is this interdependency of the parts that constitutes an organic unity. Take away one part, and the remainder of the parts fail to function as before. This is only approximately true of organisms: without a heart or a brain a person could not continue to exist (and the activity of the other organs would cease), but a person without an ear or a toe surely would. Philosophers of art have often noted that the purest examples of organic unity in the universe are not organisms but works of art: here the interdependency of parts often achieves a state of such perfection that it could often be said, of a melody or a sonnet, that if this note (or word) were not there, in just the place that it is, the effect on the entire remainder of the melody or poem would be disastrous. Complexity, or diversity
This principle is the natural accompaniment of the first one. A blank wall has unity but no variety and is not long worth contemplating. Nor is there any triumph in achieving unity at so small a price. The work of art must hold in suspension (as it were) a great diversity of elements and unify them—the greater the complexity that is integrated into a unity, the greater the achievement. This fact is so universally recognized that the two criteria are often stated as one, unity-in-diversity, or variety-in-unity.
Very many great works of art are much less than perfect organic unities (which is another way of saying that unity-in-variety is not the only criterion for excellence in works of art). Particularly in long poems or novels or operas, some parts are clearly more important than the others, though contributing to the whole, and some parts may be simply “padding.” One could hardly allege that Homer’s entire epic the Iliad is an organic unity and that if (for example) the catalog of ships were removed the entire epic would be ruined (some even say it would be improved). In the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a 19th-century Russian writer, there are whole chapters that are unnecessary from the point of view of relevance to the rest of the story, and, aesthetically (though perhaps not in other ways), these are a pure excrescence. In most works of art there are high spots and low spots, and there is a great deal of elasticity as to what could follow what. But in spite of this, unity-in-variety is quite universally recognized as a criterion for artistic excellence. If a drama consisted of two plots that never connected with one another, even at the end, such a play would be condemned at once for lack of unity; a work of art is never praised for being disjointed or disunified, though it might be praised in spite of being disunified. Theme and thematic variation