Word: formalistic
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...Kumin says that Sexton “gave me the courage to write openly about my feelings—I think I had been a rather academic, Latinate poet.” Kumin had become a formalist in part from her experience selling light verse to glossy magazines. As Sexton helped Kumin unwind, Kumin helped Sexton “see where she needed structure...
...given piece, the harder it becomes for you to simply regard that piece as a transparent vehicle for conventional meaning. The ultimate problem with formalism, however, was that its emphasis on formal qualities did not amount to genuinely granting a work of art autonomy when discussing meaning. True, formalist critics had thrown out social conventions of meaning in favor of formal analysis, but they then proceeded to use their discussion of form as a platform for the construction of abstract interpretations. Consider what happened with one of the classic formalist darlings, the painter Jackson Pollock. Formalist critics raved about...
Contemporary critics have long since grasped this problem with the formalist approach, and have begun to focus more on the ways in which the work itself actively constructs meaning rather than falling into the pre-formalist and formalist traps of proposing that meaning exists in abstract externalities foreign to the work. Artists, too, have begun to create work that explicitly called for this new kind of critical analysis. Minimalist sculpture, for example, took a kind of phenomenological or experiential approach to meaning, attempting to force an examination of the ways in which the viewer’s interaction with...
...been shown as an export product for the West." Instead, the exhibit begins with a series of dark images, such as sketches of bombed-out Dresden after the war by Wilhelm Rudolph, who wandered among the ruins with notepad in hand. Then there is a collection of formalist drawings and paintings with winding lines and bursts of color, not only surprising because of their contrast to Rudolph's work, but also because they defied the Communist Party's diktat against abstraction. Arbeitspause (Break from Work), from 1959, an early painting by the controversial Willi Sitte, typifies the work...
...maybe we have forgotten. Grasping the essential character of the beautiful has long been the object of philosophical and theoretic interest and finds expression through this exhibit's formalist regard. In recent years, there has been a revival of aestheticism; witness the Regarding Beauty exhibition last year at the Hirshhorn. Recent literary investigations also suggest an atmosphere of palpable eagerness to explore beauty topically. The revival is a kind of return to beauty for art's sake, liberated from any service or subordination to a social or political climate of interpretation...