formalism

Examples of formalism in the following topics:

• Chinese Literati Expressionism under the Ming Dynasty

  • The Southern School of Chinese painting, often known as "literati painting", is a term used to denote art and artists which stand in opposition to the formal Northern School of painting.
  • Where formal and professional painters were classified as Northern School, scholar-bureaucrats, who had either retired from the professional world or who had never been a part of it, constituted the Southern School.
  • Never a formal school of art in the sense of artists training under a single master in a single studio, the Southern School is more of an umbrella term spanning a great breadth across both geography and chronology.
  • Generally, Southern School painters worked in monochrome ink, focused on expressive brushstrokes, and used a somewhat more impressionistic approach than the Northern School's formal attention to detail, use of color, and highly refined traditional modes and methods.
  • While this sort of landscape with certain features and elements is the standard stereotypical Southern School painting, the genre actually varied quite widely in rejecting the formal strictures of the Northern School.

• What is Art?

  • Despite the seemingly indefinable nature of art, there have always existed certain formal guidelines for its aesthetic judgment and analysis.
  • Formalism is a concept in art theory in which an art work's artistic value is determined solely by its form, or how it is made.
  • Formalism evaluates works on a purely visual level, considering medium and compositional elements as opposed to any reference to realism, context, or content.

• Categorizing Art

  • The constraints and limitations of a particular medium are thus called its formal qualities.
  • To give another example, the formal qualities of painting are the canvas texture, color, and brush texture.
  • The formal qualities of video games are non-linearity, interactivity and virtual presence.
  • The form of a particular work of art is determined by the formal qualities of the media, and is not related to the intentions of the artist or the reactions of the audience in any way whatsoever as these properties are related to content rather than form.

• Conceptual Art

  • It began to emerge as a movement during the 1960s, in part as a reaction against formalism as then articulated by the influential New York art critic Clement Greenberg.
  • According to Greenberg, Modern art followed a process of progressive reduction and refinement toward the goal of defining the essential, formal nature of each medium.
  • Relate the development of conceptual art to both formalism and the dematerialization of art.

• European Expressionist Architecture

  • The style was characterized by an early-modernist adoption of novel materials, formal innovation, and very unusual massing—sometimes inspired by natural biomorphic forms and sometimes by the new technical possibilities offered by the mass production of brick, steel, and glass.
  • An example of a built expressionist project that is formally inventive is Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower .

• Video Art

  • Much video art in the medium's heyday experimented formally with the limitations of the video format.
  • A still from Vertical Roll by Joan Jonas, a video that experiments with the formal limitations of video as a medium.

• Renaissance Painting: Masaccio

  • However, Florentine painting was revitalized the early fifteenth century, when the use of perspective was formalized by the architect Filippo Brunelleschi and adopted by painters as an artistic technique.
  • Masaccio was deeply influenced by both Giotto's earlier innovations in solidity of form and naturalism and Brunelleschi's formalized use of perspective in architecture and sculpture.

• Postmodern

  • The Postmodern response to the formalism of Modernism continues to influence present-day architecture.
  • The functional and formal spaces of the Modernist style were replaced by diverse aesthetics: styles collide, form is adopted for its own sake, and new ways of viewing familiar styles and space abound.

• Effects of Colonialism on Nigerian Art

  • Nigeria did not become a formally independent federation until 1960.
  • When the colonial government in Nigeria took control of formal education in 1909, the curriculum in the schools was geared toward the provision of suitable education to train clerks for the colonial administration.
  • Prior to the report, Onabolu had formally presented requests for the introduction of modern arts education in secondary schools, but his option was rejected by the colonial education officers.

• Art Informel in Europe

  • Art Informel did not refer to a sense of "informal art" or a simple reduction of formality, but instead was characterized by a complete absence of form in art.