Art and Form

“This book is a gem. It gives the most comprehensive and accessible account of the importance of form in the last hundred years of writing about art. It should be compulsory reading not just for art historians but also for aestheticians and anyone interested in visual culture.”

—Bence Nanay, author of Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception

“This is an exceptionally wide-ranging and successful study of a central topic in the history of modernism. Rose moves with enviable facility between archival research and historical concerns and a crisply incisive discussion of the status and integrity of the key ideas. The final section, which extends the story outward into new areas, will be an invaluable spur to future research.”

—David Peters Corbett, author of The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914

“It’s time we had a sophisticated account of form in the modern visual arts to replace the crude caricatures that have dominated the literature on so-called modernist formalism. Sam Rose supplies this with precision (in his careful readings of modernist texts that have too often been oversimplified) and imagination (in relating them to wider, sometimes surprising, contexts). Demolishing the notion that formalism must be escapist, he provides a cogent explanation for how the study of the Old Masters could go hand in hand with the theorization of a modern art. This lucidly written book not only challenges preconceptions about formalism but shows why we cannot ignore the question of form in discussions of the visual arts up to and including the present day.”

—Elizabeth Prettejohn, author of Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting

“A brilliant and timely account of aesthetic form and formalism. Debates about form are fundamental to modernism, and indeed to the story of the arts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, yet until now we have been lacking a sustained investigation of how this came to be. Art and Form is a great work of art history, and it will also prove indispensable to literary scholars, philosophers, and cultural critics.”

—Rebecca Beasley, author of Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism

“The greatest achievement of Rose’s book is to create a strong sense of dialogue among individuals, factions, institutions, and even publications—and to endow this dialogue with a sense of historical duration. Rather than presenting any individual or tradition as isolated or autonomous, Rose helpfully elaborates these views within the dialogue and shows how they are evolving.”

—Malika Maskarinec CAA.Reviews

“Sam Rose’s Art and Form is an illuminating study of the fortunes of form and formalism as guiding concepts in the development of British visual culture from 1910 to 1939 and beyond. Contesting the accretion of simplifications and caricatures that have led to the dominant association of formalism with solipsistic painterliness and even escapism, Rose makes it possible to think again, and anew, about the ethical and political motivations of those who endorsed formal analysis as key to the human and emancipatory potential of art.”

—Jeff Wallace Textual Practice

“Enjoin[s] us to appreciate the ambitions underpinning formalism and to take pains to understand how it has been caricatured.”

—Matthew Bowman Art History