formalism in art

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a critical approach to art that holds that the value and meaning of a work of art reside in its formal properties — composition, line, colour, shape, texture, and spatial organisation — rather than in its subject matter, historical context, or social function; formalism, associated with critics including Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and later Clement Greenberg, dominated Anglo-American modernist art criticism in the mid-twentieth century and provided the theoretical basis for the elevation of abstract art; it has been criticised by social art historians, feminist critics, and post-colonial scholars for evacuating art of its political and social dimensions and for privileging a narrow aesthetic experience divorced from the conditions of production and reception