ABSTRACT
This chapter advances the hypothesis that identifiable defensive processes give meaning to the formal qualities of the visual arts. According to this approach, it is the formal, as opposed to pictorially descriptive, elements of the visual arts that arouse in the reader the highest, most intense experience of aesthetic beauty. In aesthetics, representation becomes the descriptive subject matter of the visual arts, while the form is embodied in the arrangements of colours, shapes, perspectives, and their relationships that organise that representation, whether of objects, scenes, or actions. During the first half of the twentieth century, the Paleolithic cave drawings of Northern Spain and the Dordogne valley of South West France were of great interest as they provided evidence of an early burgeoning of creativity in the visual arts. Freud’s aesthetic theory is diametrically opposed to formalism. The present chapter follows up that argument by tracing the origins of formalism in art interpretation to the “rational animism” of Plato and Aristotle.
