Art and Philosophy: Formalism, Expressionism, and Hedonism
Formalism, Expressionism, and Hedonism
Objectives
Relate art to philosophy.
Compare and contrast formalism, expressionism, hedonism, and other art theories.
Identify artworks, styles, and artists aligned with formalist, functionalist, and hedonistic theories.
Apply these theories to art analysis.
Interpret formalism as the foundation of modern non-objective art.
Formulate a philosophical approach to Art Appreciation.
Evaluate artworks using formalist, expressionist, and hedonistic principles.
Create art that applies these theories.
5.1 Formalist Theory of Art
Formalism combines perceptual elements, resulting in non-figurative art.
Formalist artwork contains no representation.
It aligns with Gautier’s “art for art’s sake” notion.
Adams (2011) states that formalism grew from the 19th-century aesthetic of art as an end in itself.
Pure formalism views art independently of context, function, and content, focusing on formal elements and their aesthetic effect.
Formalism analyzes works by their form or shapes.
It considers how lines and curves span distances, and the use of marks, outlines, and implied lines (Devilles, Maiquiz, & Tolentino, 2018).
From the 20th century, painters increasingly created nonobjective paintings focused on the surface articulation rather than referencing nature (Carroll, 1999).
Unlike representational art where a green triangle/isosceles and brown rectangle create an image of a tree, formalists do not interpret the image, it's just composed of basic perceptual elements.
Artwork is seen on its basic form.
Paul Cezanne suggested artists should view nature as forms made of spheres, cylinders, and cones.
Clive Bell (1913) believed that to appreciate art, one should bring nothing from life, focusing solely on the “significant form”.
Lines and colors combine in a way that forms and relations of forms stir aesthetic emotions.
Bell defines “Significant Form” as the quality common to all visual art.
Bell further explained:
The distinction between form and color is unreal.
You cannot conceive a colorless line or a colorless space, nor a formless relation of colors.
Spaces are all white and bounded by black lines in a black and white drawing.
In oil paintings, spaces and boundaries are multi-colored.
A boundary line without content or content without a boundary line is unimaginable.
Significant form is a combination of lines and colors that moves one aesthetically.
To appreciate art, we need no knowledge of its ideas, affairs, or familiarity with its emotions.
Art transports us from human activity to aesthetic exaltation.
We are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life.
5.2 Expressionist Theory of Art
Expressionism is based on excerpts from Noel Carroll’s Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction.
“Expression” comes from the Latin word meaning “pressing outward”.
Expression theories claim art brings feelings to the surface, where artists and audiences perceive them.
Art externalizes inner emotional states, transmitting them to viewers, readers, and listeners.
An emotion is transferred.
An artist feeling gloomy while viewing a landscape expresses this by drawing the landscape to evoke the same gloominess in the viewer.
The artist conveys or instills a feeling in the audience by drawing in a certain way.
This conception involves:
The artist experiencing some emotional state.
The artist expressing this state by finding configurations of lines, shapes, colors, sounds, actions, and/or words that match the feeling.
These configurations stimulating the same emotional state in the audience.
The expression theory requires an artist, an audience, and a shared emotion.
An artist begins with an insistent, vague feeling, and works to bring it into sharp relief.
Clarification occurs by externalizing the emotion—experimenting with different expressions.
A dancer combines phrases, a painter brushstrokes, a composer chords, and then evaluates whether they feel right, clarifying the emotion for the artist.
The emotion inspires and informs the artist’s choices.
The artist articulates their emotion in their medium.
The artist is doing what we all do when we ask ourselves what we really feel about something.
Sentences we utter may be vague initially, but we revise them to be more accurate and precise.
A painter uses lines, shapes, and colors, rather than words, to clarify their emotion.
The painting is under the guidance of the emotion, but as the picture acquires more detail and definition, so does the emotion.
Painting is a way of getting at the specific emotion, clarifying what it is.
This is a controlled activity, not an outburst.
The artist studies their emotion like a biologist studies a cell.
5.3 Aesthetic Hedonism
Something is beautiful when it is pleasurable or gives a pleasurable experience.
Beauty is bodily, sensual, personal, subjective, relative, temporal, momentary, limited, and gratifying.
Art is the art and appreciation of beautiful human-made objects.
Orate (2000) states that Aristippus and Epicurus formulated aesthetic hedonism as an ethical view.
They believed that whatever brings pleasurable experience to the individual is good.
Food, money, and sex are good because they give self-interested pleasure.
Gabelo (2018) explains that Kant wrote Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime.
Kant thought beauty rests not on the properties of objects but on how people respond to them.
Taste can be both subjective and universal.
Subjective taste focuses on the pleasure one experiences in response to the object.
Universal taste is non-aesthetic and appreciates the artwork for what it is, not considering beauty or mastery.
Orate (2000) says aesthetic hedonism has some truth, considering our common experience of nature and art.
We find rainbows beautiful because of the pleasure they give to our eyes, while the sight of feces is ugly because of its terrible appearance and bad odor.
Music can be relaxing, and movies enjoyable.
Art is beautiful because of the sensuous delight it affords.
Irritating music or boring films bring pain and are thus ugly.
In culinary art, we appreciate food because it is delicious, not just nutritious.
When eating lechon, one might simply enjoy the taste, ignoring the cholesterol.