Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

Style in art

Style in art is not unlike pornography - one of those things that one knows when one sees it. Almost anyone - regardless of the absence of formal art historical training - can recognize an Impressionist painting, or an Art Deco marquis or Roman marble sculpture. But how do we recognize these works? The short answer is that this is what human brains do: Much of the intelligence of our species is bound up in our ability to categorize things, to place together things that we believe are more similar to each other than are the items placed in other groups. When we designate items as belonging together under the rubric of an artistic style, we are using our essentially human inclination to place like with like.

But this explanation of artistic style is all too facile, hiding as it does under the guise of reasonableness a great deal of legerdemain. In classifying works of art together under the rubric of one style or another, we are already operating under certain assumptions. When, for example, we determine that the plein-air paintings created in California in the first decades of the 20th century are like Impressionist paintings but not really quite Impressionism themselves, we are using well-established artistic styles: We could not make such distinctions (plein-air paintings are made with too muddy a palette, with too much impasto, with too little delight in the play of light over the surface of nature, with too much lugubriousness to be Impressionist works) if we did not already have access to a list someone in our consciousness of what it is that we believe constitute the key elements of artistic style - and specifically of Impressionism.

"There is no such thing as a work of art without style," argues Atkins (p. 155) - and yet in the next moment he undercuts the sureness of his remark by noting that "the idea of style as defined by art history is rooted in the belief that artworks from a particular era (the T'ang Dynasty, the Ita...

Page 1 of 4 Next >

More on Style in art...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Style in art. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:38, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1688408.html