Form and Style in the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetic Morphology by Thomas Munro (review)

Leonurdo, Vol. 4, pp. 391-400. Pergamon Press 1971. Printed in Great Britain BOOKS Readers are invited to recommend books to be reviewed. Only books in English and in French can be reviewed at this stage. Those who would like to be added to Leonardo’s panel of reviewers should write to the Founder-Editor, indicating their particular interests. Form and Style in the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetic Morphology. Thomas Munro. The Press of Case Western Reserve University/The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland and London, 1970. 467 pp., illus. $17.50. Reviewed by: John Elderfield* Thomas Munro’s new book has allthe thoroughness, objectivityand reasonableness that characterised his Evolution in the Arts (1963) and The Arts and their Interrelations (1967). Moreover, concerned as it is with the decidedly analytical and typological subject of aesthetic morphology, it makes explicit Munro’s insistence on a scientifically analogous methodology for aesthetics (and, specifically, one comparable with the classifying aspects of natural science); this methodology is envisaged as encompassing the widest possible interpretation of ‘art’. To anyone sympathetic to his ambitions, this is undoubtedly a monumental work, for he is a great typologist. The classification and cataloguing of art components , such as Munro undertakes, requires that the component-units be expressed as unambiguous finite data, so systematised as to fit the regularised structure of the catalogue itself. To ensure accuracy, only smallnessof scalein both analysisand structure will suffice. Here, both are minute. If one has reservations about this book, they are not in terms of its treatment. There are odd instances where he is careless and assumes too much: complexity is sometimes made to appear a quality, not a factor (e.g. p. 127); the notion of content as ‘psychological materials’ seems difficult to reconcile with : ‘the contents or ingredients are what is arranged; the form is how they are arranged’ (p. 79). [I also wonder whether one can legitimately summarise the development of post-Renaissance painting as a trend versus linearity (p. 139)]. The point is, however, if one accepts the ambition of this work, one welcomes the work itself as an incisive demonstration of its point of view. Personally , I find Munro’s ambitions as undesirable as I find them irrelevant but they deserve serious discussion in so far as they someho,w epitomise a malady in the discussion of art-the idea that art as *15 Sparkford Close, Winchester, Hants., England. stuff is qualitatively no different from the natural stuffs of science and can be approached similarly with useful results. If here I attack Munro’s doctrine of aesthetic morphology, this is not to underestimate his achievements over many years within the discipline of aesthetics. Taken as a specialised treatise his new book evidences, as I have said, a very remarkable analytical mind. Once, however, one begins to think of aesthetics as not only a specialised academic discipline but a study which should enrich our understanding of art (not merely using art as evidencefor abstract speculation but actually giving itself to art and wishing to have meaning in art’s living context), his whole endeavour appears, sadly, to miss the point. I will raise three allied objections to his assumptions: (1) the impractibility of a separate status for description whenconfronting art, (2) the weakness of a neutral, that is, a-temporal language in descriptive effort and (3) the general paucity of the botanical analogy in aesthetic morphology. But, first, it is necessary to account for the significance he ascribes to his subject and his manner of treating it. Aesthetic morphology is an examination of form in art in terms of its components and structure. Such an examination, Munro insists, depends itself on the existenceof a systemof taxonomic classification, so that the varieties of form may be logically catalogued and description may hence have available a systemic framework from which evaluation is theoretically expelled. The establishment of such a taxonomy is the aim of the book. With it (drawn from the widest range of artistic examples-even fireworks, gardening and sport are not excludedand encompassing a multitude of compositional and structural devices) we may, he argues, have something like a science of art-writing. Comparing himself with Linnaeus the plant...