Word: formalistic
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There are, of course, dissenting views. In the '60s, Rauschenberg was loathed in formalist quarters and suspected in others. His taste was always facile and omnivorous, a fact somewhat masked by Hopps' careful choice of works in the show. But mainly, it was the man's variety and good humor that jarred. He did not give a fig for the lines of high seriousness imposed by the hardcore New York art world. His reputation would look after itself; he would not tend it. Besides, Rauschenberg was a natural dissipater. The sight of him in his porcupine-quill leather jacket, erect...
...bankruptcy of formalist criticism, the depth of its need for some reference to human values, is indicated by the eagerness with which the critical establishment has embraced the work of Harold Bloom. Bloom appears to inject some authentic excitement into criticism--his poets are animated by powerful emotions of anxiety, love and rebellion, but directed exclusively toward other poets. In this baroque system, the task of the critic is to celebrate the Oedipal process through which a poet matures by distorting and misreading his predecessors. The result is T.S. Eliot stood upside-down--instead of the artist's effacing...
...title was against the classicism of 18th century art, with its obsessive search for ideal form, its demand that artists find and paint such general moral principles as they could discern in nature and in history. As Clark suggests, totalitarian painting and scholarship must still obey these formalist principles. Though the romantic rebels would not have known about that, they did insist on the sanctity of the individual sensibility, their right to paint man and nature as they envisioned them...
...changed our perception of landscape more radically. This is an opportune show, coming as it does when American formalism is dead and an interest in content is reviving. For Turner was a master of meaning, and to see him as a modern artist (which he was) means leaving the formalist hierarchies on one side...
Moreau was Matisse's teacher, but he is not an artist who fits into the formalist canons of "modernism." Indeed, for 50 years it has been de rigueur to reject his work as florid and sickly, despite its demonstrable influence on surrealism and its frequently astonishing beauty. That beauty, however, is not in the structure; his nymphs have a way of looking like Delacroix houris, but boned, and one may look in vain-except in the hundreds of tiny and miraculously spontaneous oil sketches and color notes that fill the Musée Moreau in Paris-for that dynamism...