Bernard Smith’s Formalesque and the end of the history of art

Abstract

The concept of the Formalesque preoccupied Bernard Smith during the last decades of his life. First propounded in Modernism’s History (1998), the Formalesque is a proposed period style describing the art of the 20th century. Yet, despite his ambitions for the Formalesque as a new classification for modern art, the idea failed to appeal to academic art history. This paper does not attempt to salvage the Formalesque from art-historical obscurity. But it does argue Smith’s work on this topic is relevant by virtue of the contribution it makes to debates about modernism and art history. Although Smith’s thesis emphasizes the necessity of period styles and the perennial development of art history, paradoxically, the Formalesque also highlights the limitations of art history. If the Formalesque has a place in art historiography, it belongs to a speculative discourse describing the end of the history of art.

Keywords

Art history ‘end of art’Formalesque modernism Bernard Smith

Our understanding of modernism and our uncertainty whether we still live in it also applies to the argument of written art history, which, as an object of scholarship, is itself a product of modernism. Art history began with a concept of history and extended it to a concept of style. While the concept of history was a legacy of the nineteenth century, that of style materialized in the early twentieth century. Style was that quality of art for which a logical evolution was to be traced. (Belting 2003: 26)

Bernard Smith coined the term the Formalesque to describe the art of the 20th century. Implying an emphasis on form, this neologism sought to describe the stylistic attributes of the principal avant-garde movements that spanned the modern era, from post-impressionism to abstract expressionism. On the face of it, there is nothing particularly controversial about this observation. Indeed, the idea of stylistic continuity and the orthodoxy of formalism are far from original insights. But the Formalesque, and the central arguments advanced in Modernism’s History (Smith 1998a), were not meant to rehash the familiar story of 20th-century art history. Despite Smith’s great ambitions for Modernism’s History, the Formalesque failed to make an impression. Worse than inciting a critical panning, Smith spoke of the ‘contempt of silence’ that greeted the book (Smith 2006–7: 14). But unperturbed, he continued to argue his case (Smith 1998b, 2001–2, 2005, 2006–7). In 2007, this resulted in the publication of The Formalesque: A Guide to Modern Art and its History, a pedagogic companion volume to Modernism’s History. This was to be Smith’s last book, thus concluding a remarkable intellectual output that commenced with Place, Taste and Tradition (Smith 1945).

In the intervening years, Smith built his reputation as the ‘father of Australian art history’ with many critically acclaimed volumes, including European Vision and the South Pacific (Smith 1960) and four editions of his authoritative textbook, Australian Painting (Smith 1962). On the basis of his career’s work, Smith hoped that Modernism’s History would establish his international reputation and legacy. The book was to be his magnum opus and the capstone of a long and distinguished academic career. Importantly, it was also the first book Smith had written that was not about Australian art: ‘I did not publish any book on European art until 1998 when, at the age of 82, Modernism’s History appeared’ (Smith 2005: 6). As such, the book was written for an international art-historical readership, principally North American and European. Smith hoped the key arguments of Modernism’s History would inspire debate among his international peers. Furthermore, he had ambitions the Formalesque would be adopted, universally, to describe the period style of modernism. At the time of publication, Yale University Press sent more than 60 review copies to key North American journals. But when only one resulted in a review, a damning critique in the prestigious journal of the Association of Art Historians (Brauer 2001), the fate was sealed for the Formalesque.

In the years since its publication, Modernism’s History and the Formalesque have failed to generate international debate and discussion. Although Smith’s work on the history of modernism made a passing impression in Australia (McCaughey 2008; Mcdonald 2008; Anderson 2008), the Formalesque has disappeared from the art-historical lexicon. It is not the intention of this paper to remedy the situation and incite a debate about the merits of the Formalesque as a proposed period style. Rather, if the Formalesque is to have a place in the international art-historical discourse, as was Smith’s intention, then its actual contribution will be largely incidental to its central, more ambitious, aims. Smith’s work on the Formalesque deserves wider recognition because it describes the complex historical interplay between art history and modernism. But contrary to Smith’s intentions, the premise of Modernism’s History underscores the limitations of an art history based on grand universal themes. The continuity of stylistic autonomy, as advanced by Smith, becomes deeply problematic in the context of post-formalist art theory and practice. Because the Formalesque exemplifies a type of unfolding, objective art history that no longer holds sway, I argue it belongs to the end of art, as described by Hans Belting (1987, 2003) and Arthur Danto (1986, 1997).

Despite its problems as art history, Modernism’s History raises several pertinent questions. Was this Smith’s endeavour to rewrite the history of modernism or his attempt to defend the epistemological boundaries of academic art history? How do both undertakings relate to the project of the Formalesque? And what problems arise from this endeavour? Before considering these issues in more detail, it is necessary to revisit the thesis of the Formalesque, as propounded by Smith in Modernism’s History and his subsequent publications on this topic.

In the first instance, Smith objected to the phrase ‘modern art’ on semantic and temporal grounds. Modern art is the art of the present: it is contemporary. Thus, a cubist collage created by Picasso in 1913 is no longer modern in the temporal sense; it is now historical, an artwork from the past. To deny this historical reality meant that art history was caught in a logical cul-de-sac, or as Smith described it, ‘an infinite regress’ (Smith 2005: 12). This argument anticipates the central thesis of the Formalesque – namely, the necessity of an appropriate 20th-century period style which captures the stylistic and aesthetic attributes of the avant-garde movements conventionally described as modern. According to the programme originally developed in Modernism’s History, the period of the Formalesque spanned c.1890 to c.1960. With the publication of The Formalesque (Smith 2007), the end date was revised to 1970. However, this slight modification did not affect the fundamental thesis.

The Formalesque

Smith’s Formalesque is a systematic model. The proposed period style comprises three distinct stages of development (Smith 1998a: 5), the first of which was the early avant-garde stage, which lasted from c.1890 to c.1915. The second (or middle) period lasted c.1916 to c.1945; this period saw the institutionalization of the Formalesque and its legitimation as a new high art. And finally the late (or high) period of the Formalesque, which lasted c.1945 to c.1960/70. At its apogee in the 1950s, the influence of the Formalesque attained imperial dimensions as a global style. Pure abstraction was its ultimate manifestation. There is an obvious analogy with biological process in the style-cycle outlined: youth, adolescence and maturity.

The 20th-century stylistic characteristics identified with the Formalesque were initially discernible in the avant-garde art of the late 19th century. Paul Gauguin, not Paul Cézanne, is its principal innovator, the first artist self-consciously Formalesque. According to Smith, Gauguin ‘stands on the threshold of abstract art, the immanent destination of the style’ (Smith 1998a: 84). The constituent elements of the emergent style – exoticism, primitivism and spiritualism – are combined in Gauguin’s late paintings. The early Formalesque not only broke with the prevailing academic classicism of 19th-century art. Moreover, its programme involved a generational disavowal of ‘the high arts of naturalistic mimesis’ and ‘the visual arts which Europe had made use of, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, to dominate the world’ (Smith 1998a: 104). The Formalesque’s early – avant-garde – stage peaks and concludes with the cubism of Picasso and Braque. The pivotal historical event was the Great War of 1914–18. The middle Formalesque, of the interwar decades, saw the style attain a degree of legitimacy. The Bauhaus was central to both the institutionalization and the internationalization of the Formalesque as the 20th-century period style, since ‘it developed a coherent educational programme by means of which its beliefs and values were disseminated globally’ (Smith 1998a: 117). The ascent of the Third Reich, and the resultant dispersal of key Bauhaus artists, architects and theoreticians, especially to the United States, aided the expansion of the Formalesque in the 1930s. Although now a cosmopolitan style, the Formalesque was ‘no longer creatively avant-garde’ and ‘was still little more than an aesthetic embraced by an influential minority of artists, patrons, dealers, art historians and educationists of Europe and the Europeanised world’ (Smith 1998a: 197).

The Americanization of the Formalesque, in the post-war decades, marks the late stage of the style. Abstract Expressionism, especially the large canvases painted by Jackson Pollock and Barnet Newman, exemplify the art of the high Formalesque. In terms of international influence, this also marks its highpoint of dominance as a global aesthetic. Clement Greenberg, the New York art critic whose writing greatly popularized the emphasis on form, was its most influential proponent. But although Greenberg’s criticism was historicist and positivist in aspiration, his rhetoric lacked a firm historical grounding. Thus, of the principal exponents of the Formalesque, Alfred H. Barr Jr. was most instrumental in establishing the historical legitimacy of the style. Barr was the foundation director of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Art-historically trained, he was in a better position to view retrospectively the movements that had constituted the development of the Formalesque, as elements belonging to a coherent stylistic lineage dating back to the 1880s. Barr is therefore described as the first historian of the Formalesque (Smith 1998a: 188). MOMA’s sponsorship of international travelling exhibitions in the 1950s and 1960s is credited with propagating the Formalesque as a universal style. As a powerful juxtaposition to the programmatic socialist realism mandated by Soviet officials in the Eastern Bloc, the Formalesque played an indirect role in aiding American foreign policy during the Cold War. Smith writes:

MOMA became the decisive vehicle for the globalisation of U.S. cultural imperialism in the visual arts during the 1950s and 1960s. The acceptance and recognition of U.S. Abstract Expressionism in Europe is homologous with the rise of the United States to the status of supreme world power after World War II. (Smith 1998a: 248)

The relationship between the Formalesque and European – and later American – imperialism is a cornerstone of Smith’s thesis. His Gramscian Marxism is central to this account. The emergence of the Formalesque, as a period style, ‘is basically the story of the reduction of the concept of style to that of form under the over-arching conditions of cultural imperialism’ (Smith 1998a: 29). Although the Formalesque originated in the imperial project of the 19th century, the so-called age of empire, its heyday coincided with the rise of American cultural hegemony in the mid-20th century. Smith coined yet another neologism, the ‘Eurusan’, to describe a sphere of cultural influence encompassing the western hemisphere. The Eurusan worldview produced the Formalesque as an imperial aesthetic. In the United States, the Eurocentric Formalesque supplanted the native regional traditions of American art, social realism most notably. Hence, at the service of the geostrategic power of the United States, the Formalesque became globally dominant. But despite the Formalesque being emblematic of 20th-century movements and isms, Smith is adamant that it must be viewed in terms of its 19th-century – European – imperial origins since:

what it represents as a whole is an end phase of European culture in a condition of global imperialism prior to the collapse of its innumerable colonies, protectorates and mandates. Viewed from a world perspective, the congeries of modernist movements that flourished so vivaciously during the first decade of the twentieth century and collapsed so swiftly after 1960 are witness to the desire to translate European art into a global art suited to the conditions of cultural imperialism. (Smith 1998a: 103)

As a style originating in the 19th century, the Formalesque manifests the 19th-century values of its avant-garde origins, dating from c.1880 to c.1915. Dialectically related to 19th-century ideas of progress and rationality, the conceptual elements of the Formalesque combine exoticism, primitivism and spiritualism. Thus, the stylistic echo of the 19th century resounds in the movements of the 20th century, especially those movements tending towards abstraction. While Smith was committed to the eternal progress of art history, the life cycle of the Formalesque was finite. It concluded in the 1960s, with the end of European imperialism.

So how do avant-garde movements not espousing Formalesque aesthetics, such as Surrealism, Dada and the Neue Sachlichkeit (the New Objectivity), fit the stylistic story of 20th-century art? Smith maintains that these are the movements that actually constitute 20th-century modernism. For, ‘the modernism of the twentieth century does not trace its origins back to Manet and Cézanne’ (Smith 1998a: 109). According to Smith, modernism originated during and immediately after the Great War of 1914–18, as a critique of modernity. It developed, subsequently, in opposition to the institutionalized Formalesque. Dada, the most radical of the modernist movements, is the exemplar of 20th-century avant-gardism.

Whereas Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, De Stijl, Cubism, Expressionism, and the like, had been avant-garde movements successively critical of each other within the Formalesque, Dada developed a radical critique of the Formalesque itself, the generic style to which they belonged. That is why it should be seen as the primal, though not exclusive, source of twentieth-century modernism. (Smith 1998a: 122)

Twentieth-century modernism was critically opposed to social modernity, conceived of as modern technological civilization. It was also opposed to aesthetic attitudes that isolated form from content, as the primary quality of art. These orientations were not unrelated. Dada negated the institutional structures that supported art’s status as a distinct ontological category, as an autonomous realm separate from life praxis and political action. In other words, the 20th-century avant-garde rejected the 19th-century l’art pour l’art ideal that promoted aesthetic value as a singular and irreducible quality of the work of art. In this respect, Smith’s understanding of modernism is broadly congruent with Peter Bürger’s account of the ‘historical avant-garde’, which also comprises Dada and Surrealism as movements hostile to the ‘institution of art’ (Bürger 1984). But the oppositional movements of 20th-century modernism were not only adverse to the Formalesque on ideological grounds. Art-historically, they were also incompatible with the Formalesque’s stylistic framework. Surrealism sits awkwardly in Barr’s prescriptive genealogy of 20th-century art. Dismissed as art-historical aberrations or dead ends – as might be the case with the realism of the Neue Sachlichkeit – these movements challenged the immanent march towards abstraction.

The Formalesque and art history

If style is the criterion by which the art of the Formalesque is historicized, how should art history explain Dada, Surrealism and the Neue Sachlichkeit? Surrealism, says Smith, is better understood by its mood and meanings, ‘not by visual analysis but by interpretation’ (Smith 2005: 12). Here lies the crucial problem of the Formalesque thesis and its implications for the disciplinary practice of art history. Smith’s idea of the Formalesque is contingent on the existence of art history as a special branch of history. This in turn is based on the independence of art as a special category of material culture. Art’s uniqueness is defined in terms of aesthetic value; Smith is uncontroversial in this regard, placing Kant’s concept of disinterestedness ‘at the heart of the claim that art practice is autonomous’ (Smith 2007: 42). But style, not beauty per se, is the visual element essential to art-historical classification. In this regard, Heinrich Wölfflin is recognized by Smith as developing the first coherent and systematic theory of the formal development of art history (Smith 1998a: 48). The Formalesque follows this tradition; it is described as the latest episode in an unfolding history of period styles.

Smith argues the Formalesque is fundamentally necessary for art-historical reasons. Firstly, the art of the 20th century cannot take its place in the story of art history as long as it is viewed as being perennially modern. For modern art is modern by virtue of being contemporary. When the art of the 20th century ceased to be modern, in the temporal sense, it became an historical phenomenon, like the Romanesque and the Baroque. The Formalesque shares a deliberate morphological and conceptual association with these established period styles. As Smith explains: ‘Since art historians continue to find the period style concept useful for all other periods that they study, there is no reason why it cannot be applied also to our own so-called modern period, when that period becomes no longer modern’ (1998a: 5). Secondly, art history is not viable without period styles. Indeed, ‘period style is to art history what genus is to natural history’ (Smith 2001: 68). As well as providing the building blocks essential to art history’s narrative and chronological structure, period styles guarantee the discipline’s intellectual integrity. There is, says Smith,

a strong sense in which history is a seamless web, if it is thought of as the abyss of time past, but the discipline of art history cannot be sustained without periodisations. The time has come to periodise the twentieth century. If it is to survive as a distinct discipline, art history will have to retain confidence in its capacity to create those generic period styles which have served it so well in the past: Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo, and so forth. (1998a: 5)

Although the specific terms of this argument are too simplistic – that the time has come to periodize the art of the 20th century, as Wölfflin had periodized the art of the 17th century – the premise of Smith’s case cannot be lightly dismissed. Smith contends that the period style of the Formalesque is art-historically necessary. This argument presupposes a structural connection between the Formalesque and the disciplinary practice of art history. For, art history ‘found that the formal constituents of artefacts, their shape, size, texture, colour and so forth, provided invariables by means of which they could be classified systematically and arranged historically’ (Smith 1998a: 94). The Formalesque is defined as both a self-legitimating and stylistically coherent period style, autonomous to the extent that it possesses an independent history and aesthetic identity of its own. Relatively independent of extraneous social determinants, and irreducible to political and economic standards, the art movements of the Formalesque were free to follow their own aesthetic preoccupations. In the case of abstract art, this would result in solipsistic self-absorption and the negation of reality altogether. But as a consequence of autonomy, the Formalesque was rendered impotent in the face of political challenge. This was not the case with the anti-Formalesque avant-garde.

In rejecting autonomy, Dada, Surrealism and the Neue Sachlichkeit remained overtly political in orientation. And yet, importantly, the target of their radicalism was not necessarily the apparatus of state control. Art itself was the principal opponent of the avant-garde; that is, the aesthetic ‘institution’ of art. As mentioned, Smith’s construct is heavily indebted to Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-garde. This argument follows the logic that art cannot participate in revolution as long as it is consigned to a passive position of relative autonomy. Bearing this in mind, the first objective of Bürger’s historical avant-garde was to transgress the aesthetic niche imposed on art by society. On this matter, Smith concurs:

During the twentieth century the Formalesque revealed little desire to transgress the boundaries of the relatively autonomous art world that it had done so much to establish during the previous century. By contrast, Surrealism, the child of Dada, is characterised by its transgressions. It begins, like Romanticism, as a literary movement and, like Dada, did not produce a distinctively visual style. (Smith 1998a: 134)

Thus, set in dialectical opposition to the Formalesque, Dada and Surrealism, in particular, attacked the institutions of art world autonomy. Most importantly, by virtue of not possessing a generic visual style, these movements could not be easily co-opted by the Formalesque and reduced to a surface form, empty of radical content. Henceforth, the connection between the Formalesque and academic art history becomes deeply problematic.

Regarded as outcomes of neo-Kantian aesthetics and 19th-century historiography, the Formalesque and art history share more than a common theoretical lineage. They also share a common interest in preserving their respective independence. Therefore, if the autonomy of art history is historically related to the autonomy of art, on what terms can art history accommodate subversive programmes like Dada and Surrealism, which seek to undermine art’s very autonomy? This has consequences for Smith’s model of an autonomous art history, based on successive period styles. Since, if the Formalesque is analogous to art history’s dominant paradigm of stylistic independence, is not Dada analogous to the discipline’s own radical orientations – especially those pluralistic priorities that strive for critical dialogue with socially engaged disciplines, like anthropology, feminism and sociology? On the one hand, Smith applauds the avant-garde’s challenge to the autonomy (and hegemony) of the Formalesque, yet on the other he desperately defends the sovereignty of art history as a discipline of autonomous styles, since ‘to refuse to do this is to abnegate the independence of art history as a discipline and allow its peculiar insights to become dissolved into social, political, cultural or psycho-sociological history’ (Smith 1998a: 9).

Furthermore, to what extent is the discipline of art history responsible for the globalization of the Formalesque? Although the Formalesque’s hegemony ends in the 1960s, Smith’s version of art history remains beholden to the continuity of period styles, of which the Formalesque is the latest episode. In other words, if the Formalesque manifests the desire to create a universal art with an authentic European look, a formal art globally negotiable among the heterogeneous cultures of the world (Smith 1998a: 29), is this not, to a large extent, also the project of art history? Art history and modernism are concomitant developments. Some years before Modernism’s History Smith expressed an awareness of this phenomenon, placing the emergence of academic art history, in Australia, within the historical context of modernism. Writing about the circumstances that led to the discipline’s inauguration in Australian higher education, he described ‘the introduction of art history into Australian universities as a by-product of the modernist debate’ (Smith 1984: 46).

Also, if the Formalesque represents a European imperial programme, do the universal tendencies of art history express a similar Eurocentric worldview? As was noted by Ursula Hoff, Smith’s academic colleague at Melbourne, the Australian art-historical course of study was based on established European models, heavily derived from the Viennese School and the Warburg Institute (Hoff 1983). Smith critiques the European imposition of the Formalesque on global artistic traditions. Yet he advocates for the intellectual traditions of a deeply Eurocentric discipline, despite the regional implications. In the realm of art, Smith’s historical model accepts the radical agenda of the avant-garde and their opposition to the hegemony of the Formalesque. But in the academy, when the integrity of art history is challenged by the same ideological impulses, he invokes the ideals of aesthetic autonomy and advances the periodization of style as a means of safeguarding disciplinary autonomy.

As an art-historical construct, the Formalesque displays a strong conceptual bias for the linear. It is diachronic in the sense that it is historical in dimension. It is syntagmatic in the sense that it is horizontal in direction, a single stylistic unit in a successive chain of period styles, dating from antiquity to modernity. Universal in scope and progressive in orientation, modernism and art history share a common narrative structure, based on the history of style. In the hands of Greenbergian critics, the chief promulgators of this pattern, the complex totality of a work of art is reducible to its formal attributes. Leo Steinberg’s critique of this tendency is especially incisive: ‘in the formalist ethic, the ideal critic remains unmoved by the artist’s expressive intention, uninfluenced by his culture, deaf to his irony or iconography’ (Steinberg 1972: 66). For Steinberg, who was an art historian as well as a critic, the stripping down of artistic value to the single determinant of formal organization was a 19th-century attempt to discipline art history in the manner of scientific experiment. The same could be said of the Formalesque. As a criterion, however, this determinant has little relevant bearing on the art – and art history – of the late 20th century. In the wake of modernism, art history, as a discipline, has acquired a greater self-awareness of its historical relationship to modernism. As Elizabeth Mansfield explains:

The history of modernism circumscribes the history of art history. Equally responsive to post-Enlightenment aesthetic and cultural debates, to the economic and social revolutions of the nineteenth century, and to the entrenchment of these once radical challenges, modernism and art history have followed parallel courses. Any exploration of modernism, then, produces a historiographic echo. (Mansfield 2002: 12)

Smith’s work on the Formalesque belongs to this history, since it partakes in a discussion about the discipline’s intellectual and institutional origins. Although his specific contribution to this discussion is weakened by the narrow theoretical terms and rigid historicism of the Formalesque, Smith’s broader interest in this matter is significant.

The Formalesque and the end of the history of art

Smith’s art-historical model is based on the continuity of period styles. But because the movements that supplanted the Formalesque defy clear visual analysis, as distinctive styles, is there a logical successor? Dada and Surrealism were driven by a desire to develop and maintain a new role for the imagination in modernity, not by stylistic imperatives (Smith 1998a: 133). And yet, these are the harbingers of the movements described as postmodern, conceptual art and pop art in particular. The Formalesque, which by Smith’s own account ends in 1960/70, has not been succeeded by a new generic style. This raises three possibilities. First, Smith’s art-historical model has reached its internal limits and has effectively ended with the conclusion of the Formalesque. Second, the global art forms dominating the cosmopolitan art worlds since the 1960s – conceptualism, pop, photography – are historical anomalies in the grand history of style. Third, the metanarrative that encompasses the Formalesque, the story of universal art history and unidirectional stylistic development, is no longer feasible. The third prospect will dominate the final part of this paper.

Smith’s historical outlook is developmental and universal. It is also perennial. The history of art, according to Smith, does not possess an endpoint: ‘History has no conceivable end. It is not teleological. That was the central mistake made, among others, by Hegel and perhaps by Marx’ (Smith 1998a: 16). Even so, Smith’s historicism was Marxist in orientation, in the general historical materialist sense. It was also predicated on the necessity of temporal and critical distance (Beilharz 2013) and, by some accounts, evolutionary, possessing Darwinian tendencies (McLean 2005). Despite this analysis, Smith never advanced his own theory of history. However, an impression of his historical understanding can be discerned from the Formalesque thesis.

To avoid the pitfalls of vulgar Marxism, Smith uses Pierre Bourdieu’s field of cultural production as an empirical framework. According to this model, art’s autonomy is defined by virtue of its efforts to disavow the values and interests – both political and economic – of the field of power. In other words, art asserts its relative autonomy by resisting the encroaching interests of the dominant social field. Bourdieu’s model also provides a sociological theory of high art. In this realm, the producers of art – artists, critics and curators – produce for the esteem of their co-producers, competing for prestige and consecration, rather than monetary reward and conventional fame (Smith 1998a: 199). Bourdieu’s aesthetic field is animated by the competitive actions of its members, especially the generational incentive to usurp the efforts of predecessors. But while position-taking helps to explain the machinations of the art world, as a motor of progress it cannot provide a total theory of art history.

The concept of immanence is alluded to throughout Modernism’s History. Though not clearly defined, this notion refers to an impetus intrinsic to art, an impetus not contingent on external determinants or arising from the competing interests of the field of restricted culture. This suggests there might be more to art history than Bourdieu’s model can adequately explain. Or to use Jonathan Gilmore’s term, this raises the possibility that ‘the life of a style’ might actually possess an internal dynamic of its own (Gilmore 2000). Early in Modernism’s History, Smith talks of the Formalesque’s immanent drive towards abstraction. Later, he elaborates:

This would lead one to suspect that there is an immanent component working within the traditional high arts by means of which they sustain a measure of independence, interdependence and historical momentum in the face of external contingency. This is not to assume an immanence unfolding through the centuries, such as Hegel’s symbolic, classical and romantic modes of art do, nor a ‘will to form’ in the Riegl manner, but an immanence nonetheless that offers resistance to external contingencies while remaining vulnerable to them. (Smith 1998a: 234)

For fear of idealism, Smith is tentative in his usage of immanence. And as a means of explaining the history of the Formalesque, this concept is not explored in any significant detail, though he does describe its misuse at the hands of Greenbergian critics, who ‘propelled the immanent potential of synthetic Cubism towards a post-cubic painterly abstraction’ (Smith 1998a: 240). However, the idea that art possesses certain intrinsic features, unique to itself, does not have to result in deterministic outcomes, like the inextricable drive towards pictorial flatness. Ernst Gombrich, one of Smith’s art-historical role models, described the history of pictorial representation as a process powered by artists, whose efforts to perfect the illusion of reality was built upon the achievements of their forerunners (Gombrich 1977). Yet, while the agency of the artist is central to Gombrich’s account of the history of representation, as investigated in Art and Illusion, there is little consideration of the role of the artist in Modernism’s History. Instead of an internal history of artists and artworks, the Formalesque is an extraneous construct. In this regard, the constituent art of the Formalesque is a fabricated generalization, imposed on the diversity of 20th-century art and artists. Not just artists, but also the groupings to which they were affiliated, for ‘the limits to the style of modernism are not identical to the limits of the movements of which modernism consists’ (Gilmore 2000: 122).

The demise of the formalist ethic affected the epistemology of both modernist art criticism and scientific art history. Approaching this predicament from an art-historical perspective, Hans Belting provides an astute analysis of the contemporary situation, where ‘both the artist and the art historian have lost faith in a rational, teleological process of artistic history, a process to be carried out by the one and described by the other’ (Belting 1987: ix). It is surprising that Smith does not acknowledge Belting’s work in Modernism’s History. His key theoretical treatise, The End of the History of Art?, was published in English in 1987 and received widespread critical attention. Belting is not listed in the bibliography and receives only a passing mention in The Formalesque (Smith 2007: 43). This could be an oversight or a deliberate omission, for Belting’s analytical art historiography constitutes a profound challenge to Smith’s project. Not because they are opposites, but because they share so much common ground. Like Smith, Belting identifies aesthetic autonomy as the precondition for distinguishing art history from social history or cultural history of a general type (Belting 2003: 117). And similarly, Belting recognizes the role of style as being fundamental to the construction of art history as a human science, in the classical academic sense. In Belting’s words:

The new axiom of history as an explanatory paradigm allowed the exercise to contemplate art as a privileged manifestation of history and to understand the changes in art as an index of the temporality of history. The new respective discipline, as a latecomer within the humanities, was expected to demonstrate the course of history in the mirror of art. This intention implied the isolation of art’s form as ‘style’ and the analysis of the individual work as a mere item of style in the collective sense while anything else that also distinguishes art definitely received less attention. (Belting 2003: 137)

While Smith and Belting pursue a common interest in art history’s historical and disciplinary characteristics, their respective conclusions differ remarkably. Smith’s project involves the creation of a 20th-century period style. To achieve this aim, he upholds the continuity of a style-centric art history. Belting, conversely, questions the viability of this fundamental structure, and its relevance to contemporary art practice: ‘I spoke of the farewell to the guiding model of an art history with an internal logic, which was favoured in describing shifts of style from one period to another’ (Belting 2003: 7). According to Belting, contemporary art practice, since the 1960s, has outgrown the art-historical framework of stylistic development inherited from the 19th century. In modernist art, as exemplified by Greenberg and his disciples, this narrative was theorized in terms of progressive formal refinement, and described as the ineluctable flattening of pictorial space. When these objectives ceased to motivate artists, the critical and historical edifice of formalism effectively collapsed. It is therefore not coincidental that the crisis of modernist criticism overlaps with the crisis of art history. For Belting, the end of modernism has had far-reaching implications for the writing of art history more generally:

The history of art, which always had framed what happened in art, was a master narrative of this kind and it also applied to modernist art, as the latter followed the lines of evolution and progress. The crisis of modernism therefore also affects the practice of writing art history and the confidence in an unbroken continuity of art. It is not sufficient to reserve this practice for the past including modernism since art is continuing and therefore needs continuous description. It thus poses the question whether it still can be viewed in historical terms. After these terms became obsolete, they also appeared questionable in retrospect. (Belting 2003: 115)

Because post-1960s art cannot be viewed in historical terms consistent with the Formalesque, as an all-encompassing period style, did art history end with the Formalesque? This prospect threatens to implode Smith’s entire thesis, since the point of his period style was to insure the continuity and autonomy of art history, not account for its ending. It therefore might seem paradoxical that a thesis propounding perennial art history accords with a discourse propounding the end of the history of art. Not so. There are clear synergies. Belting’s argument is chiefly concerned with revealing the historical and theoretical limitations of an art historiography represented by the Formalesque. Art has not ended, but this type of narrative model has. Art history, free from the prescriptions of style, continues, but with a different set of priorities. This is the basis of Arthur Danto’s controversial argument concerning the end of art. When he provocatively proclaimed the end of art, Danto was not saying that art making (or history) had finished. Art continues to be made, more so than ever, but the imperatives of art are no longer historical imperatives, as was the case when an artwork’s material elements were wedded to the stylistic characteristics of its period or movement (Danto 1986).

Consigned by modernity to its own social sphere, art’s condition of autonomy compelled the modernist project to abandon the representation of reality and investigate instead its own ontological nature. Thus, driven by internal necessity as much as external exigency, modern art ‘began to probe its own identity’ (Danto 1997: 125). Art history ended, according to Danto, when art became a philosophical enterprise, acquiring self-understanding. That is, when ‘the further evolution of art could henceforth take place only on the level of philosophy’ (Danto 1986: 206). Danto’s historiography is unapologetically Hegelian in conviction. Theoretically, his thesis is a response to the challenges posed by conceptual and pop art of the 1960s; contextually, it emanates from the postmodern, pluralistic art world of the 1980s. But Danto’s thesis is important for the purposes of this argument because it raises the possibility that modern art was a different type of art. For Danto, ‘modern art’ is not a temporal indicator, meaning what is happening now. Rather, the shift to the period it names is not just another shift to a new period: it is a shift to a new kind of period. Modernism, says Danto, marks a kind of crisis (Danto 1986: 205).

And yet, in his efforts to defend the Formalesque, Smith grew increasingly committed to the idea of a comprehensive mode of art history. This history is universal and abiding – so much so that, as the latest of a succession of period styles, the art of the 20th century follows the same historical logic as the art of earlier epochs, including the Romanesque.

I have noticed that even those who have commented upon my book favourably doubt whether the word ‘formmalesque’ [sic] has much hope of being adopted. Certainly, in the short term, it is an ambitious venture. After all the period style that dominated the art and architecture of Western Europe from the 10th to the 12th centuries was not described stylistically as Romanesque until a thousand years after it came into existence. So perhaps I must be patient. However, if the logic of history is on my side, and I believe it is, I see no reason why I should not continue to present my case. (Smith 2001–2: 65)

Smith’s case is based on an art-historical anachronism. Belting, in particular, would find this argument deeply problematic. Firstly, there are crucial differences separating the sacral art of the Middle Ages from the secular art of the 20th century, differences far greater than style. Furthermore, modernism was conscious of its own historical purpose; that is, the avant-garde was cognizant of its historical mission, of its role in either making or destroying art history. Conversely, the art of the so-called Romanesque predates the ‘era of art’, when ‘art took on a different meaning and became acknowledged for its own sake – art as invented by famous artists and defended by a proper [art-historical] theory’ (Belting 1997: xxi). In other words, the art described by art historians as Romanesque was produced without any idea that it was fulfilling the course of art history (Belting 2003: 8). Smith’s historical logic lacks reflexivity. This analytical limitation undermines his key arguments and, ultimately, his principal thesis.

It has not been the objective of this paper to rescue the Formalesque from art-historical obscurity. Nor, necessarily, have I sought to defend, or bury, its central thesis. This paper has sought to demonstrate a critical dialogue between Smith’s Formalesque and the end of the history of art, a discourse that brought the relationship between art history and modernism into sharp analytical focus. Unwittingly, Smith’s work on the Formalesque adds to the literature on this topic, insofar as it touches on issues concerning art history’s post-modernist future. Finally, it is impossible to conclude a discussion of the Formalesque without a last note on the concept of period style. Like Bernard Smith, Meyer Schapiro professed a Marxist view of art history, which also stressed the value of period styles. Had the Formalesque been a more refined typology, and less a formulaic characterization of modern art, modernism’s history might indeed look quite different. With this point in mind, it is appropriate to end with a salient quote from Schapiro’s essay ‘Style’, first published in 1953:

The characteristics of styles vary continuously and resist a systematic classification into perfectly distinct groups. It is meaningless to ask exactly when ancient art ends and the medieval begins. There are, of course, abrupt breaks and reactions in art, but study shows that here, too, there is often anticipation, blending, and continuity. Precise limits are sometimes fixed by convention for simplicity in dealing with historical problems or in isolating a type. But the single name given to the style of a period rarely corresponds to a clear and universally accepted characterization of a type. (Schapiro 1994: 53)

References

Anderson

(2008) Bernard Smith and the Formalesque. Quadrant 52 (7–8): 90–95.

Beilharz

(2013) Bernard Smith: The quality of Marxism. Thesis Eleven 114: 94–102.

Belting

(1987) The End of the History of Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Belting

(1997) Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Belting

(2003) Art History after Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Brauer

(2001) Hegelian history, Wölfflinean periodization and ‘Smithesque modernism’. Art History 24 (2): 449–456.

Bürger

(1984) Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Danto

(1986) The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press.

Danto

(1997) After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

10.

Gilmore

(2000) The Life of a Style: Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

11.

Gombrich

(1977) Art & Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 5th edn. London: Phaidon.

12.

Hoff

(1983) Observations on art history in Melbourne, 1946–1964. Australian Journal of Art 3: 5–9.

13.

McCaughey

(1998) Bernard Smith’s ‘Modernism’. Best Australian Essays: 278–286.

14.

Mcdonald

(1998) The art of radical cheek: Bernard Smith’s ‘Modernism’s History’. Sydney Morning Herald, 15 August: 6.

15.

McLean

(2005) Hegel or Darwin?: The role of tendencies in Bernard Smith’s historiography. Thesis Eleven 82: 54–61.

16.

Mansfield

(2002) Art history and modernism. In: Mansfield

(ed.) Art History and its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline. London: Routledge.

17.

Schapiro

(1994) Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society. New York: Braziller.

18.

Smith

(1945) Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art since 1788. Sydney: Ure Smith.

19.

Smith

(1960) European Vision and the South Pacific: 1768–1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

20.

Smith

(1962) Australian Painting, 1788–1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

21.

Smith

(1984) Art historical studies in Australia with comments on research and publications since 1974. Australian Academy of the Humanities Proceedings, 1982–83 : 45–73.

22.

Smith

(1998a) Modernism’s History: A Study in Twentieth-century Art and Ideas. New Haven: Yale University Press.

23.

Smith

(1998b) The last days of the post mode. Thesis Eleven 54: 1–22.

24.

Smith

(2001–2) More on the Formalesque. Third Text 15(57): 65–70.

25.

Smith

(2005) On writing art history in Australia. Thesis Eleven 82: 5–14.

26.

Smith

(2006–7) History business: An interview with Bernard Smith by Christopher Heathcote. Art Monthly Australia 196: 15–19.

27.

Smith

(2007) The Formalesque: A Guide to Modern Art and its History. Melbourne: Macmillan.

28.

Steinberg

(1972) Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.