It is often said that art history as it is read and interpreted is a history of style. What is style, and what does it mean to read a style? What does it mean to have a style? To what extent are style and content separable? Since art history began to be formed as a recognized area of study in the late eighteenth-century, style has been seen as a way of monitoring the value of an artist or an era. To understand the history and theory of style is to begin to grasp the discipline of art history itself. It will also help understand Postmodernism, which is a period of a 'crisis of style'.

A Comparison to Kick-off

Édouard Manet did etchings of his friend Baudelaire that are reproduced below. They could easily be by two different artists.

Portrait of Charles Baudelaire Etching. By Edouard Manet. 1862. Via Pamono.eu

Portrait of Charles Baudelaire Etching. By Edouard Manet. 1869. Via Art of the print (http://www.artoftheprint.com)

One is conventionally Realist, the features recognizable, not setting out to make any overt visual challenges on the viewer. With next to no identifying markers, the other is executed with a few sparse lines, ethereal enough to seem to want to lift off the page. One captures an identity firmly (it was based on a photograph by Caspar Nadar), while the other, based on the criteria of the first, is non-descript. Instead, it captures a particular air (also found in his depiction of Baudelaire in Concert in the Tuilleries (1862). It is an impression.

Music in the Tuileries. By Édouard Manet. 1862. Via Wikimedia Commons

Manet’s other great supporter, Émile Zola, famously declared that style was 'nature viewed through a temperament'. Yet which one is the more ‘Manet’? Moreover, these works are etchings, and we may ask ourselves how the etching process, which is sharp and linear, compares to Manet's paintings, notable for their full and fluid handling of paint.

It is a lasting cliché of Modernism that an artist begins with detailed, conventional representation. It gradually evolves into his (with Modernism, it is almost always 'his') signature style that gradually becomes more simplified and abstract with age, as if the artist is converging with his true identity.

The list is long enough: Cézanne, Degas, Rodin, Matisse, Miro, Arp, Mondrian, and numerous others in the canon, all to a greater or lesser extent conform neatly to this paradigm. But in the above case, the more traditional portrait (1869) was executed after, the simpler and more abstract one (1862).

Throughout his career, Manet was a tireless visual pasticheur, or in today's parlance a riffer, someone who liked working in or through the style of others. He drew from a wide range of influences—including Velasquez, Ribera, Goya, Giorgione, Raphael, Titian, the brothers Le Nain, Chardin and Fragonard—some of whom are unmistakably evident in his painting as a kind of visual dialect with which he is choosing to inflect his message at a particular time.

In the case of the later etching, produced after the poet's death in 1867, Manet alluded the banner in Dürer’s famous etching Melencolia (1514) in the memorial banderole at the bottom of the image. Knowing of this allusion steers the viewer into yet another direction.

With this etching's posthumous nature, we can now hazard an explanation of its difference from the first. Working from a photograph added something to the picture's testimonial character, done in the absence of the sitter, its sombreness fitting to its role as a visual epitaph.

The first is more touched with life's fleetingness when the abstraction could be measured to the real. The second has the emblematic permanence of a restitution image when the real compensates for the absence of life. Ironically, the picture that appears more real is, in fact, the more imaginary.

To What Extent is Style the Bearer of Truth?

Each of these styles tells us something about the artist and of the sitter. But the relationship is tantalizingly variable from artist to artist, work to work. Their appearances were perhaps deceptive at first but benefited from being given a circumstance and a motivation. An explanation of why a work is how it generally gives us better access to how to experience a work of art. However, the intensity of that experience is as much a matter of our knowledge and responsiveness as it is a matter of the qualities within the work.

But it remains to be asked, to what extent is style the bearer of the so-called truth of the work of art? Is style something that can be separated from the form like the husk of a nut, or is it a quality of the essential quality of a thing?

One thing is certain: the discourse of style is tightly bound to the discourse of art history itself, and it is the theory of style that are the joists used to support art history until it experienced its ‘crisis’ in the 1980s, that is, at precisely the time when the visual arts in West no longer enjoyed a discernible set of styles.

Before this point, and somewhere before the non-objective abstraction became widespread as a result of Abstract Expressionism in the USA in the 1950s, Kenneth Clark observed that one could trace the history of Western art since the Renaissance through the male representation of the female nude, from Botticelli’s then Titian’s Venus to Rubens, Canova, Goya, then Manet’s Olympia through to Picasso.

This is so true that it was also one of the biggest grievances of feminist artists in the ‘70s and art historians in the ‘80s, who were rightfully indignant at the way the male artists were dismissive of female experience while using the female body as a shop dummy on which they could hang all their passions and anxieties. Is style owned? Is there are a universal style? What is stylistic truth? Art history begins once the concept of style is introduced as a serious theoretical issue. What we now call art theory as opposed to art history reflects the methods that art history has called upon to legitimate itself.

Style, History, Rise, and Decline

There is no convenient beginning to art history in that the novel can be said to have been born at the hands of French women courtiers in the seventeenth century.

Yet if there is anything, we might turn to the architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio whose classification of the Roman capitals, the shape and decorative details at the top of columns, is still in stock art historical currency, and is a foundation stone for the inferences to be drawn between style and historical period. De architectura, or The Ten Books of Architecture, is the only extant document of its kind of the period.

Here Vitruvius outlines three principles of architectural style: firmitas (the strong), utilitas (the useful), and venustats (the beautiful). Architecture, said Vitruvius, was inseparable from the movements and proportions of the human body.

When a work of architecture foregoes this fundamental relationship, it unfastens its relation to its basic principles and loses its purchase upon the beautiful. The three Greek orders—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—were not to understood relationally, in terms of their difference from one another and concerning the innovations in engineering that allowed for the development from thick to slender columns. Instead, they were also to be understood stylistically, as reflecting a particular mentality. The Doric is thick and austere, while the Corinthian is feminine, decorated, and thin. The Ionic was the harmonic unity between the two and represented a more refined, restrained expression of the beautiful.

From this stylistic topology, we now have the accepted subdivisions of Ancient Greece: Archaic, the rise of the culture, Classical, high point, and subsequently Hellenic, decadence and decline.

The tenacity of this model of stylistic development cannot be overstated. As I have already touched on in the discussion of the two etchings by Manet, we are used to looking at an artist's development through the same developmental lens and also culture.

This diagnostic model of people and societies' pattern culminated in Arnold Toynbee's magnum opus, A Study of History (1934-61), a survey of world civilizations that sought to account for their rise and fall. Toynbee's history was a far more serious version of the more dubious approaches by the classicist Otto Seeck (1850-1921) in his Decline of Antiquity, which influenced the nihilistic diatribe by Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), The Decline of the West (1917), both of which viewed decline in terms of social Darwinism, later to be taken up by the Nazis in their chilling effort to eradicate the avant-garde because it was 'Degenerate Art'.

Degenerate Art

The Nazi's systematic efforts to expunge the most experimental art of their time was spearheaded by the blue-collar tastes of Adolf Hitler, who at the rally to celebrate the 'Day of German Art' in July 1937 promised to wage an 'unrelenting war of purification […] against the last elements that have displaced our art'. The official art reflected the Nordic aspirations of the Reich and consisted almost exclusively of Aryan peasant families, highly posed nudes, and battle scenes.

They were all represented in a stylized classicism that made the figures appear soulless, pretentious, and numbingly effete—ironically, inhuman. (It is also curious to see the close similarity in official styles of other totalitarian regimes, from Fascist Italy to Stalinist Russia to Maoist China—the same stilted poses, the healthy faces, the same literalized obsequiousness. They purport to the good, promise pleasure and happiness, but the motives that bring synthetic official styles into being are a whole lot more sinister.)

The exhibit received a lukewarm response and was swiftly dubbed the ‘Palazzo Kitschi' while the exhibition of 'Degenerate Art' housed in less auspicious circumstances was frequented to the point of chronic congestion, with crowds over 2 million.

This historical episode is an invaluable example of the struggle of styles and ascendancy of an ‘organic’ or natural style over an artificial one. At least, in this case, it suggests that style is an extension of a social condition.

Disingenuous and cloying, the official Nazi-style also drew from this belief but turned it on its head. By depicting an Aryan, heroic people, they asserted the prior existence of what they were attempting to build through force. These images are today best viewed as exemplifying that force and the manipulation of the truth.

Styles have been encouraged and imposed by the religious institutions of antiquity to the Middle Ages and beyond. Their greater effectiveness is based on a consensus of beliefs whose evolution is gradual rather than abrupt. To accept a style is also to admit that it has a creditable relation to the one who made the work and its historical circumstance. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are seldom, if ever, wrought by violence.

The Renaissance

The stylistic standard of antiquity that marks the Renaissance essentially remade antiquity through adoption, adaptation, and rejuvenation of its forms. The classical or Greco-Roman style diminished the Roman Empire's decline from the fourth to the fifth century.

We refer to as the Byzantine and Medieval styles differ from the Classical since they are instrumental in communicating an external idea to the form, whereas the classical and Renaissance art, the ideal is by degrees internal to that form; form became more an end in itself.

Vitruvius’ treatises were revived in 1414 by the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini, and while Vitruvius, presence can be detected in the writings of Alberti, his writings did not become freely available until 1486, after which it became available in English, French, and German in the opening decade of the next century.

Working from this foundation, the growing list of writers shared was an inquiry into what made an artist and his style better to delineate a set of structural imperatives that would be a future assurance of good art. As with the burgeoning scientism in the Renaissance, art in its own way was treated as its own particular machine.

The incentive to these treatises was to speculate on the components of this machine, to lay down the base for the right instead of a wayward style to facilitate more consistently good art in the future. With the adoption of Greco-Roman models of form, and with strict rules of indenture of students to artist-masters, the Renaissance had, as we know, begun to achieve this.

The First Book with ‘History’ and ‘Art’ in the One Title

While the classical inheritance continued to be healthy, the next major theoretical watershed came in 1764 with the first book to have the words 'history' and 'art' in the same title, Johann-Joachim Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (History of Ancient Art), in which style and art are placed within moral, social, and anthropological contours.

Portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann by Angelica Kauffman. 1764. Via Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by the uncovering of Herculaneum and Pompeii in the mid-eighteenth century, Winckelmann (1717-68) set about trying to account for what he saw as the level of consistent excellence in the art of Ancient Greece, why things were not the same in his era, and why such art should and had been emulated.

Following his first book in 1755 and two small treatises on the discoveries of Herculaneum, Winckelmann’s groundbreaking study shifted the emphasis away from praise of Rome, then associated with the pinnacle of styles, toward Greece.

Greek art for Winckelmann projected an unsurpassed freedom, which, he held, remained unmatched. Winckelmann was also influential in the subsequent view that the art of the Baroque and Rococo was a corruption of ideals forged in Ancient Greece.—fluency and grandeur reduced to a series of gratuitous devices incongruous with the work of art's inner meaning.

Winckelmann’s crucial contribution was to suggest that the liberty that the Greek subject felt was reflected in the serenity of the object (Heiterkeit—serenity—is a word that German aesthetics would cherish for another hundred or so years).

In short, he surmised that the moral health of a nation was ramified in the excellence of its art. He viewed style as an index of its age, looking at art from an overarching sense of time and development as opposed to isolated categories of taste and quality.

Winckelmann was responsible for the term more commonly used in architecture and design, Greek revival, advising that it is through imitation of the Greeks that society could regain the personal sovereignty and the social truth that had since gone askew.

Reiterating the tripartite evolution of progenitorship (experimentation, early stages–incipience), zenith, and decline, ‘The History of Art’, Winckelmann wrote in his preface, ‘is intended to show the origin, progress, change, and downfall of art, together with the different styles of nations, periods, and artists’.

He singled out specific Greek works as epitomizing his theories, and his deductions were sometimes unconvincing, for, in his time, most of the antiquities were as yet undated.

Precursors

For an idea of the kind of watershed carved out by Winckelmann, we might look at one of his notable predecessors, Roger de Piles (1635-1709) who, in a peculiar book published a year before his death, The Balance of Painters (La balance des peintres), posited standards of measure according to four criteria of drawing, colour, composition and expression, scoring artists out of twenty, the highest mortal score being eighteen.

For composition, only Rembrandt and Guercino rated highest; Palma Vecchio achieving only five; Raphael top-scored for drawing while Michelangelo came second; for colour Titian and Giorgione did best while Michelangelo wooden-spooned with four; Raphael duxed expression while Rubens and Domenichino came second.

The Persian Sibyl by Guercino. Ca. 1647-48. Via Wikimedia Commons

Quaint as all this may sound to us today, de Piles’s taxonomies are useful as a gauge of contemporary taste. By contrast, Winckelmann dispensed with finicky itemizing and pushed the merits of an overall conception of beauty that sacrificed the details of individuality, which were bound to be idiosyncratic, not universal.

Herder

Among the challenges to Winckelmann was Herder, who rightly argued that the standard of value he offered was far from universal. It was specious, for instance, to judge Egyptian art by Greek standards since their art had different uses and was dominated by different myths.

Herder was indeed one of the principal spokesmen for ideas—to germinate more openly in the early decades of the next century—about the cultural specificity of form: each place and age has its own forms as it has the motives that drive them.

Herder states that language was not just an arrangement of signs that referred to one thing or another. It is the vehicle itself of consciousness. Words are not to be understood in terms of reference. They are manifestations of the very activity of human consciousness. The way we grasp things is through Besonnenheit, or 'reflection', which comes into being through a medium, such as language, and it is a people's language that is the expression of their essence.

When applied to the history of art, Herder's observations were to have profound consequences since, by extension, it identified art also as a language. As a medium of thought, art varied by how its makers communicated their beliefs, desires, and taboos. Art and language had a reciprocal relation to the culture from which it sprang.

Style could thereby be understood in organic cultural terms, referring to the truth of people in place and time.

Herder's ideas were to branch out into two irreconcilable directions. The first was to defend local styles against the imposition of dominant criteria, such as those of ancient art. According to Herder, a language or work of art ought to be evaluated according to standards proper to the very intellectual and spiritual workings that called it to be in the first place.

With this, we see the germ of cultural pluralism, which enjoys powerful sway amongst postcolonial theorists who are duly skeptical of judgments imported from outside that vitiate the work of art, the language, the law, or whatever it sets out to judge.

But the unfortunate extreme of this view, and this is the other side of the story, is a cultural atomism that says that any judgment from the outside is bound to be wrong. And to preach the virtues of local truth is to descend into a conservatism that results in paranoia that excludes its foes, often with recourse to violence to defend its purity.

As we have already seen, National Socialism, which took joy in perverting a lot of German thought to its own ends (Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and many others), was guilty of this. But beyond all that, the ethical and social defense of specificity is a vexed question in this age of globalization, of cultural confluence, where cultures are diversely convoluted. Styles considered purer than another is there for reference only, not as weapons.

To return to Herder, the questions to be asked was that if we place limits on styles and languages, why is it that we can still have enjoyable access to them, why do we think we sympathize with them, and, if they are divorced from the way we look at the world (Weltanschauung or ‘world view’) how do we bring ourselves to interpret them?

The theologian Freidrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), associated with the circle of early German Romanticism, is credited with having opened up the 'hermeneutic circle' from specialist pursuits such as philology. Interpretative practice, hermeneutics, could be used by a member of one culture to grasp another's experience.

Schleiermacher argued that we could try a kind of process of divination and empathy to the extent that we subordinate our interests to those with whom we seek to understand. While this could only ever be achieved in part, Schleiermacher helped to develop a psychology that brought things unfamiliar to us closer to hand.

Hegel’s Aesthetics

Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics in the1820s were an exhaustive elaboration on what had already been laid out in The Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) and the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1811-16; rev. 1831) and are the cornerstone of discipline of art history. Borrowing substantially from Winckelmann, Hegel expanded the theory of style into the broader gamut of art to attempt to theorize a systematic progression concordant with the enlightenment of man.

Hegel with his Berlin students. Sketch by Franz Kugler. 1828. Via Wikimedia Commons

What allowed Hegel to do this was a developed philosophy of history. Hegel sets history together with the progressive agency of the human spirit. Whereas there had been histories long before Hegel, they lacked a synthesizing structure made possible by a telos or objective endpoint.

Hegel regarded the isolated story as an incident in a succession of others whose sole purpose was to point out that history is no longer necessary and when spirit becomes absolute and self-aware. Unfortunately, Hegel was unable to say when this revelation took place or how we knew it was there. However, his supreme importance still lies in his painstaking efforts to give history coherence through positing reciprocity of time and thought.

To Hegel, the arts were important for being the first way in which the spirit becomes manifest, like a carapace from which it would, in time, burst. He divided art into three evolutionary phases, 'symbolic', 'classic' and 'romantic'.

Taking his cue this time from Lessing, who espoused the expressive particularities of the different artforms, Hegel argued that to each phase was a form corresponding to the encroachment or emergence of the spirit. The symbolic was the least developed state, evincing itself in heavy, somber works of architecture.

Hegel cites the pyramids of Ancient Egypt, where only general aspects of what the spirit expressed. In the 'classic' phase, epitomized in Greek sculpture, we find the most eloquent balance of form and spirit; the beauty of the human body seems comfortably at one with the ideal it conveys.

Finally, as we saw in the previous chapter, the 'romantic' was expressed through painting and music. Hegel sensed a struggle internal to the art of his era that he believed was deducible only to the desire of the spirit to escape its material shell. After that, art ends to find its next juncture in religion before it winds up in philosophy.

Hegel's thesis has many, mostly self-evident, shortcomings. Yet, it is still discussed today because it gives art prevailing purpose by combining it tightly with history, style, culture, and, not least, religion. Until at least the middle of the twentieth century, art historians and critics would continue to draw on Hegel’s evolutionism, unconsciously or in the conception of their own polemics, including Clement Greenberg. He asserted American abstraction resolution to an effort that began somewhere around the Renaissance.

School art textbooks are rife with pocketbook Hegelianism: the timeline view of art history, a history of art from style to style, from ism to ism, is merely a broad application of Hegel’s Aesthetics.

Through Hegel and his 'end of art' thesis, we can begin to understand Postmodernism, whose rhetoric is full of 'ends' equating to the rejection of a unitary purpose or understanding of the reflective organization of time, namely history. Curiously enough, once the historical unities that Hegel noted began to fall apart, styles become less coherent. Once history loses its mooring from consensus, styles diversify with mesmerizing rapidity.

Gottfried Semper and his Influence

When émigré Dresden architect Gottfried Semper (1803-79) visited the Crystal Palace in London housing the Great Exhibition in 1851, he made a prescient observation about the way designers and architects were using ornament.

Queen Victoria opens the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London. By Louis Haghe. 1851. Via Wikimedia Commons

While Victorian Britain flexed its imperial muscles, Semper observed that industrialization had increased art's range and availability in its undaunted manipulation of ornament in such products as wrought iron, wood, or wallpaper at the cost of its cultural relevance and aesthetic intensity.

For having to please a general public, mass-produced items made potentially everything a receptacle of ornament, which is used in an understandably generic and arbitrary way. But this upheaval, Semper argued, was more beneficial than destructive, for it caused 'the disintegration of traditional types by their ornamental treatment’.

The transept from the Grand Entrance, Souvenir of the Great Exhibition. By J. McNeven, William Simpson (lithographer), Ackermann & Co. (publisher). 1851. Via Wikimedia Commons

British contemporaries saw artists and designers choosing between conventional and naturalistic ornament, whereas Semper saw the disruption of art’s historical basis—‘art especially is being fatally hit’.

If this was a crisis in art, a style problem, for Semper, it was ultimately a good thing. It laid bare the fact that style’s function lay in ‘giving emphasis and artistic significance to the basic idea’, the absence of style in an object being a shortcoming that reveals the artist’s ‘disregard of the underlying theme’.

Semper introduced the view that nothing can be entirely styleless. The self-consciousness of style felt in its knowing manipulation is the West's normative process for artistic production. As Harry Malgrave has argued, Semper’s theory of style can be broken into three parts. The first is the work of art's underlying idea and intention. The second is the materials and techniques employed in the work's production. The third are external variables, whether national, personal or temporal. None of these 'coefficients', as Semper called them, are dominant or determinate. They exert pressure to one degree or another on the idea 'like a musical theme' guiding the production.

Take a portrait: the idea is the representation of a person through status and personality. Then the artist can choose whether this is rendered as a photograph, a digital animation, or a terracotta bust. Finally, how this be carried out is coloured by contemporary expectations, the languages to which the artist may want to conform, or reform.

Semper’s theories of style, embodied in his most famous text, Der Stil (1860), came to be read by several generations of thinkers influential in the theory of style, including Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), the architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933), and Alois Riegl whose first to books, Altorientalische Teppiche (Ancient Oriental Carpets; 1891) and Stilfragen (Questions of Style; 1893) both acknowledged their debt to Semper.

Wölfflin and Panofsky

In his most celebrated book, Principles of Art History (1915), Wölfflin expanded on Semper’s theories to say that style was something in its own right rather than an abstract entity. His primary interest was the Renaissance and the Baroque, which contrasted with the development of the linear to the painterly; the former favoured line, the latter colour.

Compositionally, the closed (tectonic) nature of Renaissance painting was compared to the openness (or a-tectonic) of the Baroque. These were tendencies which, to Wölffilin, were fundamental to the style and the meaning is conveyed. Taken at its most forceful, Wölfflin stipulated that the only way to read a work of art is through its style.

At its weakest, it could only be applied to a limited range of painting: Mannerism, which falls between the Renaissance and the Baroque, is not seriously dealt with, and his system all but falls apart with Modern abstraction in which the linear and painterly converge.

Wölfflin’s method lost its popularity with the rise of iconography, which as its leading proponent Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968) states, 'is that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form'. In his Studies in Iconology (1939), Panofsky distinguished between three tiers of subject matter: the primary or natural subject matter, say a Madonna and child which to a naïve non-Christian can be taken as just a mother and child; the second, or conventional subject matter, identifies this as the Mary and Jesus. Third, meaning and content, how the artist has represented the Madonna and Child and what had driven him to do so, be they personal or social pressures.

Panofsky's continues to be a dominant method in the academy and even more amongst curators who use it for explaining works for exhibition catalogues. As with his predecessor, the theory begins to founder when faced with non-objective abstraction and technical media, from photography onward.

Riegl, Shapiro, Worringer

In his seminal study, Stilfragen, Riegl aimed to extract the discourse of style from the realm of material and technique toward an inner, spiritual impulse, for which he coined the term, Kunstwollen (‘will to form’).

In what is perhaps a mystical humanism, Riegl averred that there were much deeper internal issues that drive humans and the forms they indicate the need for each epoch to make its particular imprint.

Taken as a collective, each style is a call by its time to be understood in its own way. Riegl’s intelligent arguments are somewhat lost in the present, whose worst habit is to make omnipresent claims to cultural context without accounting for anything like a collective will that desires to distinguish itself from the past.

Riegl admitted that material factors had to be considered, but it is a lot more stimulating to see the myriad ways the same material of family of materials are manipulated.

As Meyer Schapiro (1904-96) remarks in his essay on style, Riegl advanced the theory of style by doing away with the rise, high-point, decline triad, showing how periods in decline are better thought of as periods in transition, such as in late Roman art.

Moreover, Riegl did away with the Hegelian evolutionary schema and saw each phase as having its own problems of form and expression. ‘The history of art is, for Riegl, an endless necessary movement from representation based on vision of the object and its parts as proximate, tangible, discrete, and self-sufficient, to the representation of the whole perceptual field as a directly given’.

What Schapiro is referring to is Riegl’s assertion that art advanced in history from the haptic, or bodily, to the optic, something easy enough to sustain at the turn of the century with photography and the invention of the cinematograph. But with the invention of interactive gaming and immersive installation, the haptic and optic have conjoined.

From the point of view that art is an effect or modality of a spiritual will, Riegl’s influence was most heavily felt in the ideas of Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965), whose Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy; 1907) became one of the primary theoretical supports of Expressionism of the pre-WWI period.

Produced from a dissertation under the tutelage of Wölfflin, Worringer posited a new direction from that of the European and classical leaning of art history. He held that at its core, all art is subjective and intuitive.

Impressed by Henri Bergson’s conception of élan vital (vital energy) educed in the Creative Evolution (1907), Worringer became a spokesperson of his time for artists and writers who believed in a deep and communal wellspring of energy that fueled the creative urge. With so-called primitive art, so held Worringer, we have evidence of these inner energies whose omnipresence was only emphasized by the artists, alienated by industrial society, who were seeking solace in it.

Worringer filled a breach in studies of artistic style, enabling 'primitive' art to be considered a style in its own right and abstraction to be a serious subject for study.

Ornament and Crime

But when taken to an extreme, abstraction can always point to a vacuum as much as a plenitude. Embracing these extremes in finding a universal style was one of the grand projects of twentieth-century Modernist art, architecture, and design.

Where so many of his contemporaries at the end of the nineteenth century treated style, objectively stated within ornament, as unavoidable if not necessary, the Viennese architect, Adolf Loos, in his broadside against the Viennese Secession, ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908), advocated against any ornament whatsoever. Loos effectively ushered in the most lapidary statement of style since the French Revolution’s embrace of masculine classicism and its denigration of the ‘aristocratic’ fripperies of the ancien régime.

Affected by Semper’s discovery that industrialization had dislocated ornamental styles from their point of origin, and hence their social truth, Loos equated ornament with lax bourgeois philistinism.

The only viable option was to purge the object, in Loos' case the work of architecture, from the defilements of ornamentation altogether. Loos was responsible for the first buildings that at their most severe resembled toy-like geometric blocks (although the Looshaus in Vienna thankfully does not go that far).

The Looshaus at Michaelerplatz, Vienna designed by Adolf Loos. Photo by Thomas Ledl. Via Wikimedia Commons

Later echoed in the slogan of the architect-designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), ‘less is more’, Loos was also was instrumental in the dictum ‘form follows function’ proclaimed by his disciple, Le Corbusier, who remained faithfully hostile to architectural niceties. He went so far as to liken ornament to disease, unwanted excrescences, nodules, and pustules that marched the flesh's clear surface.

Universal Style

Loos' extremism was endemic of the change welcomed by Modernist design for a style freed from eccentricity or association. By removing all ornament altogether in designing objects for living, it was thought possible to come up with something resembling a style-less object linked neither to a people nor a time, which would imply that any person could use it at any time.

This dream, which began in the Bauhaus (1919-33), is to some extent fulfilled today. We now have a post-industrial 'international' style, pared down and sleek, to be found in tenements and villas alike.

At the same time, we accept that a styleless object is a myth. For, by default, the style that aims at non-style is itself a style, embodying the beliefs of the age, in this case, to be austerely universal. To modify Riegl’s mandate, its will is to be without form.

In the same era as the Bauhaus were two movements in art whose ambition was to be a definitive climax in the procession of style, Purism, and De Stijl, which touched all the plastic arts, which in Dutch means 'the style'. With the same penchant for geometry, the earlier, but provocatively named Suprematism, spearheaded by Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) in pre-Revolutionary Russia sought in the most simple forms, a cross, a square, the extent of all energies and all things.

Black Square. 1923. By Kasimir Severinovich Malevich. Via Artsy

One thing in common with all these 'ur’ or ‘supra’ styles was a reduction of form to the basic components of primary colours, hard, intersecting lines to eradicate form altogether.

Postmodernism and the Crisis of Style

At the end of his essay on style, Schapiro writes:

A theory of style adequate to the psychology and historical problems have still to be created. It waits for a deeper knowledge of the principles of form construction and expression and a unified theory of the processes of social life in which the practical means of life and emotional behaviour are comprised.

Now when this is applied to Postmodernism, it is next to redundant.

Postmodernism rejects ‘a unified theory of the processes of social life’ because it acknowledges, if not embraces, a lack of uniformity. Historical problems with Postmodernism have to do with its lack of coherence in comparison with the Hegelian model.

We now inhabit a time with differing conceptions of what that coherence may be, micro-histories, and histories that are as yet unwritten, or whose fit within the doxology of art history is inadequate.

The crisis, if it is (was?) a crisis, of Postmodernism in art was that no style is dominant. Postmodernism represents a lack of faith in what Lyotard calls the ‘master narratives’ of Modernism; styles could be had for any degree or purpose—Semper’s observations were prophetic. If one can take or leave styles without shedding a tear, they had perforce lost their integrity.

With only an ironic relation to style, Postmodernism must then be a movement in decline.

Craig Owens (1950-90), among a gamut of theorists since the late 1970s, prefers a different approach, arguing precisely that: Postmodernism requires a reformed way of interrogating its object, which is relative, not objective, suggestive rather than prescriptive.

In the essay for which he is best remembered, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism’, Owens claims that Postmodern works of art are hallmarked by the way they layer meanings derived from previous visual languages to arrive at a new meaning that supplements or eclipses the old one.

He calls to mind the artists of his generation in New York whose main practice is to reproduce other works of art: Troy Brauntuch, Sherry Levine, and Robert Longo. When artists appropriate images, the style is, to use the Duchampian term, readymade. Since allegory relies on overlaying several meanings—at the most basic, the surface and what lies beneath—it is constantly decentralized and is open to multiple viewpoints.

Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp). By Sherrie Levine. 1991. Via Artsy

Light Bulb. By Sherrie Levine. 2000. Via Artsy

Owens defends this role of allegory, arguing that allegory’s supplanting the previous model is its ‘theoretic significance’. Allegorical displacement is indeed the ‘coherent impulse’ of Postmodernism—the central feature of Postmodernism is its drive towards decentralization.

So, style must be seen in entirely different terms. The style of Postmodern art lies more in the approach to its content rather than embedded within the content. This relationship assumes an ironic relation to its subject matter. But the irony in the best Postmodernist sense need not be cynical but rather a plural consciousness that knows it is both part of a relationship as well as outside of it.

This stance has since been enormously useful to feminist artists, most of whom warn that women are forced to use a language shaped and dominated by men yet insist that they inhabit another world whose parameters ‘male’ language cannot describe.

If I return to the riddles faced at the beginning of this chapter and draw on some of the material I have canvassed, we can conclude that there is more than one way of accounting for changes in Manet’s style. Which is the true Baudelaire, and which is the true Manet? Is the second allegorical? Is the first a caricature, or does it use the style of caricature? It is good that works of art make us ask these questions.

We must not forget that styles are made by artists, as individuals or groups. It is uncommonly rare for an artist to set out to make a style when creating a work of art. The styles we consider to be the most resonant are usually honest emanations of real impulses, intellectual, emotional, ethical, religious, social.

We can never discount the role of individual will, even in the anonymous and devout artist who believes he performs a function for a king or a god.

We only need to turn to the delightful jokes and terrors left behind by the thousands of nameless sculptors of Gothic cathedrals. Minor exceptions to a rule, which to a later generation might be seen as seminal, help to create the slippages that keep generalizations about style from being fixed. Why did Manet alter his style so dramatically between the two portraits?

In Zola's words, Manet's vision was altogether genuine and sincere: 'This daring man who is ridiculed has a well-disciplined technique, and if his works have an individual appearance, they owe that only to the entirely personal manner in which he sees and translates objects'.

Manet himself may have had no better explanation than it felt right at the time—he willed it so. It made him feel good to do so.

References & Further Reading:

Alpers, Svetlana, The Art of Describing, Chicago and London, Chicago U.P., 1983.

Ashton, Dore and Denise Browne Hare, Rosa Bonheur, A Life and a Legend, London, Secker, and Warburg, 1981

Bauman, Zygmunt, Hermeneutics and the Social Sciences: Approaches to Understanding, London, Hutchison, 1978.

Blais, Joline and Jon Ippolito, At the Edge of Art, London, Thames and Hudson, 2006.

Blanxandall, Michael, The Eye of the Quattrocento, Oxford, Oxford U.P., 1972.

Bois, Yve-Alain, Painting as Model, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1990.

Bové, Paul, ed., early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays, Durham, Duke U.P., 1995.

Calinescu, Matei, The Five Faces of Modernity, Durham, Duke U.P., 1987.

Desmond, William, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics, New York, SUNY Press, 1986.

Focillon, Henri, Vie des formes, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1943.

Gablik, Suzi, Has Modernism Failed?, New York, Thames and Hudson, 1884.

Gombrich, Ernst, ‘Psychology and Riddle of Style’, introduction to Art and Illusion, London, Phaidon, 1972.

Hauser, Arnold, Mannerism, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard U.P., 1965.

Hegel, G. W. F., Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Trans. T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller, Oxford, Clarendon, 1971.

——, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford U.P., 1977.

——, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, New York, Dover, 1956.

Jones, Amelia, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1994.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), L’Art decoratif d’aujourd’hui, Paris, Grès et Cie, 1925.

Nochlin, Linda, Courbet, London, Thames and Hudson, 2007.

Panofsky, Erwin, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, Columbia, University of South Carolina, 1968.

——, Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Lavin, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1995.

Pater, Walter, ‘Style’, Appreciations, London, McMillan and Co, 1889.

Perry, Gill and Michael Rossington eds., Feminity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture, Manchester and New York, Manchester U.P., 1994.

Podro, Michael, The Critical Historians of Art, New Haven and London, Yale U.P., 1982.

Potts, Alex, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, New Haven and London, Yale U.P., 1994.

Riegl, Alois, Late Roman Art History, Rome, Giorgio Bretschneider, 1985.

Shiff, Richard, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, Chicago and London, Chicago U.P., 1984.

Sontag, Susan, Against Interpretation, London, Vintage, 1994.

Stangos, Nikos ed., Concepts of Modern Art, From Fauvism to Postmodernism, London, Thames and Hudson, 1994.

Stokes, Adrian, The Quattro Cento (1932), New York, Schocken 1968.

Taylor, Charles, Hegel, Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1975.

Thomas, Nicholas and Diane Losche eds., Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific, Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1999.

The Meaning and Relevance of Style in Art?