Stieglitz had a direct effect on Edward Weston’s
work. Straight, simple, pure form was his hallmark.
Weston’s studies of a toilet, includingExcusado
(1925), are completely devoid of irony or cultural
criticism and stand as a document of pure form
divorced from reference to Duchamp’sFountain
of 1917, an actual urinal displayed as a ‘‘ready-
made’’ sculpture. The primary distinction between
Formalist and documentary photography lies with
Formalism’s core reliance on the technical skill of
the photographer, whereas documentary photogra-
phy is interested in the subjective meanings of the
people and things being depicted. Imogen Cun-
ningham’s 1923 nude studyTrianglesalso exempli-
fies the Formalist approach, in which the highly
loaded subject of female flesh is reduced to a series
of volumes and shapes, sensual in its gradations of
light and tone rather than in its representation of
the nude female body.
Bell’s and Fry’s theory of Formalism contained
logical flaws. Bell’s terms, aesthetic emotion and
significant form, are inseparably linked and he can
offer no definition of one without implying the
definition of the other. This, of course, leads to
circular reasoning. Also, he can provide no ade-
quate criterion for differentiation on what emo-
tions are aesthetic and which are not. Another
flaw in Bell’s approach is his inability to completely
dismiss the historic importance of subject matter as
it is opposed to form. Bell’s logic defines criteria for
what an artwork is by first finding a common
denominator for all art. Not all art is Expressive;
many artists have strived to remove any emotive
content from their works. Not all art is representa-
tional. But it seems all art has form, therefore a
thing is not art unless it has form. Some would
argue, however, that everything has form, so Bell
qualifies himself, and says art is that which has
significant form. This, critics maintain, does little
to differentiate fine art from a mathematic theo-
rem. In response, the formalist cites a theory of
function. A mathematical theorem does not have
the primary function of displaying its significant
form. It may be more eloquent with form, but it
is still a valid and accepted theorem without form.
Art, to be art, must have the primary function of
displaying its form. Yet this argument is also
flawed because it ignores the very real possibility
that art may have no primary function unique to it-
self. This point of criticism, with the mathematical
comparison, is eloquently explained inThe Routle-
dge Companion to Aesthetics(2001).
An essential modern theorist whose Formalism
radically changed painting after World War II was
the American Clement Greenberg. Greenberg dif-
fers most radically from Fry and Bell in the Marxist
bent of his writings. This is seen in his idea of
dialectical conversion, which is a phenomenon
that occurs when one pushes a concept to its ex-
treme and finds oneself proceeding in the opposite
direction. An example is the painting movement
Cubism of the early years of the twentieth century.
Cubism’s pursuit of naturalism by depicting objects
and figures in the world from multiple viewpoints
and planes, ends in utterly flat abstraction. In this
way, Greenberg, like Bell, considers abstract, non-
representational art as continuous with representa-
tional forms; indeed they are a natural evolution of
art towards unity.
Greenberg reduces art to formal elements but is
much more extreme than his predecessors. An
artist must exploit the characteristic methods of
his media to embed the art in its area of expertise.
Painting must therefore exhibit only the character-
istics of paintings, not sculptures or photographs,
and so on. In the 1950s and 1960s he championed
pure painting as he contrasted it with the painterli-
ness of Abstract Expressionism. He applauded the
openness of artists such as Clifford Still, Barnett
Newman, and Mark Rothko.
In Greenberg’s thought art was in danger of
becoming kitsch, entertainment. To avoid this art
must purge itself of uncharacteristic elements and
become literal and purely self-referent, but most of
all, abstract. Essential to his abstraction is the com-
plete absence of any illusionist space. Greenberg
believed, as did Fry, in art-for-art’s sake. Art was
outside reality and morality; it stood as a refuge
from the chaos of ordinary life.
Formalism as it developed in the latter half of the
twentieth century is relatively easy to understand
but difficult to apply with any consistency. Many
critics acknowledge that there are two basic camps
of Formalist thought. Hard or Extreme Formal-
ism, which is absolute in its assertion that art is
only that which evokes aesthetic emotion through
significant form, meaning that all aesthetic proper-
ties are formal properties; and Soft or Moderate
Formalism, which allows that the historic nature of
subject matter may be considered in the value of
some works. This mode of Formalism allows that
many aesthetic properties of art are formal, while
many are not formal.
Moderate Formalism addresses the critique of
the theory that points out that much of what is
currently and openly accepted as art does not
have the primary function of displaying significant
form. Some art, like Dadaist ready-mades, have no
created aesthetic form at all. Such pieces are made
to provoke intellectual consideration. For a HardFORMALISM