Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism

Abstract

Formalism, more than a century after the term was introduced, can still spark acrimonious debate within many disciplines, from the philosophy of arithmetic to literary and art criticism, to say nothing of the various arts. The word has quite a different syntax in science, where ‘formalism’ is a symbolic device with well-understood properties. But wherever a basic subject matter is in doubt—for example, is set theory about mind-independent entities? Is language?—the reduction of those problematic inferred entities to observable data is generally called ‘Formalism’. To some it promises of a disenchanted account of that domain, to others it threatens a disastrous trivialization, a mere play with signs. The formalist project itself may be as crude as Hankel’s picture of arithmetic to a game akin to chess, or as sophisticated as Hilbert’s transposition of the axioms of geometry into number theoretical propositions amenable to consistency proofs. Why drag arithmetical formalism into...

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