Artistic style

5. Style and personality

Most of the theories of style discussed so far have considered style from the historian’s point of view. It is, for example, a third-person viewpoint which treats Beethoven as working within certain constraints and as making certain choices. A different approach has been taken by Richard Wollheim (Lang 1987), who argues that there is an important theoretical distinction between the individual style of a particular artist and such general style categories as school style (the style of the school of Giotto), period style (Baroque concerto-grosso style, Augustan poetic style) and universal style (the geometric style, the heroic-epic style). General style categories are the invention of historians, who try to organize a body of knowledge according to their own interests and purposes. By contrast, an artist’s individual style has ‘psychological reality’ and can be captured only by a ‘generative’ conception of style that picks out and groups together elements of the artist’s work which are ‘dependent upon processes or operations’ characteristic of the artist’s acting as an artist. Wollheim restricts his theory to pictorial style, since he is thinking of style processes not only as psychologically dependent on the artist but also as physically embodied in motor habits and motor memory. However, the theory can be generalized to the other arts if style is thought of as a way of doing or making something which is expressive of the artist’s character, qualities of mind, attitudes and sensibility.

This way of thinking about style is reflected in Arthur Danto’s maxim that style is ‘what is done without art or knowledge’ (1981). On this view, artists, in developing their individual styles, do not literally ‘choose’ among alternatives. Being of a certain character, the artist is able to paint or write only in accordance with that character. By the same token, a forgery of a painting, even one that cannot be distinguished from the original, cannot have style. It is a deliberate imitation of an already existent work or style, whereas the original is a genuine expression of the artist’s self. For the same reason a forgery has no genuine aesthetic significance, for having a formed style is a precondition of expressiveness and hence of aesthetic interest (see Artistic forgery).

The theory that style is a way of doing something that expresses the artist’s unique personality, character and ways of thinking and feeling explains many of the puzzles surrounding the concept of style. It explains why not all formal features of a work or oeuvre are stylistic, why subject matter can but need not be a feature of style, and why a feature can be a stylistic feature in one work or oeuvre and not in another: in every case it depends on whether the feature is expressive of the artist’s character or personality. Similarly, the theory explains the unity of style in terms of the unity of the personality expressed and it explains the difference between style and signature: a recurrent feature of an artist’s oeuvre is not stylistic unless it contributes to the expression of the artist’s character. Thus a literal signature is not usually a feature of style.

However, the theory is unattractive to those who think of style as irremediably conventional, as the result of operations performed by readers. Some writers have argued that style is a function of the operations performed by the ‘implied author’ of the work, as constructed by the reader or viewer. Michel Foucault takes a more extreme position (1979). He argues that the notion of a unified style is simply one of the principles that identify the ‘author-function’ of a work, this function being characteristic of works which have a certain status and are designed to be received in a certain way. On this view style has no reality at all; it is just a social construction.