ABSTRACT
Greek in its origins, style once referred literally to an implement or tool (a stylus) for making a mark and thus implies a handmade inscription. Now the term has a very general sense: in art^ history referring to a distinctive, recognisable pattern or form. There can be many – as well as simultaneous – authors, or producers, of a style. The term is used to characterise both individual mark-making (for instance, Michelangelo’s, Pablo Picasso’s, and Auguste Rodin’s styles of painting and sculpting) and a collective, social patterning (for instance, those styles called mannerist, neoclassical, and expressionist). If the term once denoted marks made by a single person using a pencil, nib, brush, or carving knife (thereby maintaining a direct physical connection between an individual human^ body and the surface upon which the mark is made), it has now been extended to include all forms of visual^-representational^ media, including those inherently collective in nature, so that it is commonplace to refer to, say, the ‘style of Woody Allen’s films’ or the ‘style of Harold Pinter’s stage-direction’. In all these cases, however, remains the assumption that style refers to characteristic and relatively-fixed visual patterning and compositional devices and effects that originate from that person or group identified as its producer. The art historical study of style and its constitutive elements (in
literary studies called ‘stylistics’ or ‘poetics’) tends theoretically to place visual-formal analysis at the forefront of its concerns, sometimes – usually unintentionally – making peripheral or secondary questions of meaning. This distinction – sometimes posed as an antagonism – between form and content springs from this analytical procedure. The Panofskian method of iconography which starts with the identification of so-called ‘pre-iconographic’ visual matter (colour, forms, lines, tone, compositional devices, etc.) appears to suggest that the meanings (symbols and cultural context) ‘come later’, both analytically and experientially, as if the artists themselves had maintained a distinction in their heads between their visual forms or styles and the meanings that would or could be attached to them (by the artists and others). The term subject^ matter, though certainly vague in itself in some ways, has the potential advantage of avoiding this disabling distinction in stylistic analysis between something called ‘the visual’ and something called ‘the conceptual’. Consider the issue of this distinction in relation to very different kinds of artworks, such as a painting with a recognisable iconography
(e.g.: Titian’s Concert Champetre (c. 1510)) and one that doesn’t appear to refer at all to material things in the world (e.g.: Mark Rothko’s Light Red over Black (1957)). Are these two artefacts stylistic in the same kind of way? Style remains one of the most contested and complicated ideas in
art history, yet it seems indispensable within any attempt to explain an artist’s work and the place or meaning of that work in a specific historical context. Some of the most influential attempts to define style as a historical category – mapped over centuries and even thousands of years – have resorted to very controversial claims. For example, Heinrich Wo¨lfflin asserted in The Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (1915) that an impersonal epochal sway, or dialectic, between ‘linear’ and ‘painterly’ phases could be discerned in art. This theory bolstered mid-twentieth-century modernist^ critics’ beliefs that painting, for example, had an intrinsic, internal logic or order of development – leading to abstraction – that had worked itself through over the centuries.
