FORMAL ANALYSIS​

• What do we mean when we talk about the formal?

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• A visual description as an explanation of visual structure. So no need for a discussion here on subject or historical  or cultural context.

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• The British art critic Roger Fry played an important role in developing the language of analysis.

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• As with sociology at this time there was a positivist desire to be scientific in the presentation of non-scientific processes and subject areas. Believing that given constant conditions then a response world be constant so removing any sense of the subjective.

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• So what are the key elements when we break down an artwork?

  • Like de Piles’s system, Roger Fry’s method of analysis breaks a work of art into component parts. The key elements are (in Joshua Taylor’s explanation):

  • Color, both as establishing a general key and as setting up a relationship of parts; line, both as creating a sense of structure and as embodying movement and character; light and dark, which created expressive forms and patterns at the same time as it suggested the character of volumes through light and shade; the sense of volume itself and what might be called mass as contrasted with space; and the concept of plane, which was necessary in discussing the organization of space, both in depth and in a two-dimensional pattern. Towering over all these individual elements was the composition, how part related to part and to whole: composition not as an arbitrary scheme of organization but as a dominant contributor to the expressive content of the painting.

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