Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism by Sam Rose (review)

Sam Rose's compelling new book Art and Form begins with the observation that modernist formalism has suffered severe blows to its reputation since its heyday in Clement Greenberg's aesthetics, but argues that many of its critics have been attacking straw men. The supposed doxa of formalist aesthetics—that there is an autonomous realm of aesthetic experience, that this realm is radically separated from the world and available only to the sophisticated, and that a work of art is independent of its creator—have been long-standing targets of attack, and have often seemed like important and significant mistakes whose failures require significantly different accounts of the nature of art. But, Rose contends, when one looks back at key sources for modernist formalism, what one finds is that many of these issues were energetically present at the moment of its inception. Returning with this in mind to the central writers for the theory of artistic form in the years between 1910 and 1939, then, restores a sense of the real complexity of the history. But it does something more. In the book's most ambitious (and most tentative) claim, Rose contends that this restored history points towards a more plausible theory of the artwork: a modest or post-formalism, which "acknowledges at once both the end of grand modernist self-confidence and universality and the fact that the desire to do anything historical with objects will always require some… appeal to form" (152).

Five pleasantly concise chapters present this revisionist history of formalism topically. The first chapter emphasizes Clive Bell and Roger Fry, and points out, in particular, the importance of connoisseurship for making sense of what Fry thought the formalist response to the work of art involved. Contrary to the assumption that modernist aesthetics ignored artistic intention, Rose contends that Fry's formalism depended on an extensive analysis of just that: interpretation required an imaginative grasp of the process of artistic creation. Chapter two addresses the question of what knowledge, exactly, is produced by formalist art criticism and how this knowledge compares to scientific investigation; the chapter concludes provocatively by arguing that the postwar revival of aesthetics in analytic philosophy by writers like Nelson Goodman involved forgetting the complexity of earlier formalisms. Chapter three turns to the ethics and politics of formalism, observing the irony by which the informed and active kind of perception championed by Fry became the seed of the experience of mass consumer culture by later writers, and contends that the fusion of social criticism and formalist aesthetics in writers like Richard Wollheim should be understood not "as a move beyond early formalism so much as a development and exemplification of its ethical ideal" (97). Chapter four takes a slightly different tack, narrating formalism's encounter with "mass culture," which Rose portrays as a tension between the mechanized production inherent in "design" on the one hand and Marxist attempts to imagine a truly popular art on the other. The iterations of formalism in this chapter are uncertain, seemingly abandoned by Marxists but surprisingly maintained when such critics hesitated to affirm "mass taste under modern industrialized capitalism" (122). Finally, chapter five turns to the question of global modernism, discussing several artists from Nigeria and India as a way of developing a humbler formalism that neither privileges the artistic tradition of the West or assumes the universality of artistic experience but preserves the sense that formalism is a necessary part of historical interpretation.

Rose's correction is a welcome one, restoring a fuller picture to an approach that is often easily caricatured, while keeping in mind a sense of its limitations. It is particularly sharp in pulling out the limitations of British conceptions of aesthetic education and their emphasis on individual and cultural authenticity when they were imported to the Empire, noting of Gerard Sekoto's use of postimpressionism in imperial South Africa that "[t]here could be no stronger indication of...