ABSTRACT
This chapter considers formalism, an approach which privileges composition, technique and media, as the bases upon which the people should respond to and value art. Dannatt followed a particular tradition of geometric construction which typified aspects of avant-garde art practice from the 1920s and 1930s onwards. Regardless of the critical objections to Greenberg's formulation of modernism, the White Cube idiom has become central to public and commercial exhibitions and gallery curation. Modernist theory was largely superseded by the advent and eventual dominance of non-painting-based, conceptual art practice which increasingly characterised the late 1960s and 1970s. The chapter explores how formalist analyses and vocabulary can be used to consider compositional and technical concerns within narrative and abstract art. However, whatever the limitations of his modernist theory, Greenberg initiated a serious critical discourse which underlined the durability and continuing attraction of formalist ideas in responding to art and aesthetic experience.
