Artistic style

4. Style and expression

The Hegelian idea that a period style expresses the collective spirit of an epoch or country and that the style of a particular work of art is a symptom of that spirit has been roundly criticized by twentieth-century art historians. Meyer Schapiro (1994) has urged that we should not extrapolate from a single painting to cultural attitudes in general: one-to-one correlations usually hold only between single aspects of a painting and the culture from which it originates. Erwin Panofsky (1955) has shown how we cannot tell what general attitudes are expressed by a painting unless we can place the picture in the history of style and the history of iconography. We can interpret what Tintoretto’s Last Supper expresses only if we know the history of renderings of the Last Supper. The picture has to be seen as a response to and a rejection of previous Last Suppers, such as Giotto’s and Leonardo’s. Ernst Gombrich (1960) has made a similar point with respect to works within a painter’s individual style: what a painting expresses is a function of its place within the artist’s ‘language’ or repertoire. Van Gogh’s painting of his room at Arles is relatively serene in the context of Van Gogh’s oeuvre, whereas if it were (per impossibile) by Cézanne it would express much greater turbulence and distress.

Deterministic theories of style change have also been criticized. All such theories treat style as inevitably moving towards some goal, but artists cannot be striving to achieve a perfection that has not yet come about and of which they cannot be cognizant. Style change is the result of individual artists responding to many influences, including the challenges posed by the art of the past, and should be thought of, says James Ackerman, not as ‘a succession of steps towards a solution to a given problem, but as a succession of steps away from one or more original statements of a problem’ (1963). Nevertheless, certain patterns of development do recur in the history of art, for example in the development of sculpture in Ancient Greece and the Renaissance. Ackerman suggests that this is due to a similarity in the way that the problems facing sculptors were conceived, as well as a similarity in the solutions they found. Thus both ancient and Renaissance sculptors were struggling with the same problem of how to create beautiful human forms out of blocks of stone, and there is the same development from a ‘blocky’ archaic style to the ideal Classical solution, and from that to the development of a freer, more dynamic style.

If style change and the expressiveness of style can only be understood as the result of individual artists responding to the art of the past and implicitly either accepting or rejecting specific alternatives, then it might seem as if style entails choice: in developing a style an artist chooses one particular form of words or configuration of lines in preference to others, depending upon what they want to express. Leonard Meyer, for example, defines style in music as a ‘replication of patterning… that results from a series of choices made within some set of constraints’ (1989). For example, given the constraints on the style of the classical sonata, Beethoven’s decision to begin his piano sonata, ‘Les Adieux’, with a deceptive cadence is an unexpected stylistic choice that permits the opening phrase to express an uncertain, plaintive quality. On the other hand, the word ‘choice’ may be misleading if it implies deliberation and conscious decision-making.