ABSTRACT
Formalism is an approach to art that stresses the significance of form over content as the source of a work’s subjective appeal. To a large extent, formalists consider that form is content. Roger Fry (1866-1934), the most influential formalist critic in early-twentiethcentury England, took the position that art has little or no meaningful connection with either the artist who makes it or the culture to which it belongs. His approach was thus ahistorical and focused on the emotional effects created by works of art. In this view, Fry echoed the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who discussed the nature of the aesthetic response to beauty and affirmed its significance as a product of the human mind.1 Like Plato, Kant believed in an essential ideal beauty, which is distinct from both nature and art. In Kant’s system considerations of utility, origin, context, and so forth interfere with the experience and judgment of an object’s aesthetic qualities. Writing in the tradition of Plato and Kant, Fry cites Plato’s opinion that the visual arts are mere imitations, although he notes that the visual arts have persisted, despite their exile from Plato’s ideal republic, because they are a basic human expression.2
