The Life of a Style: Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art

by Jonathan Gilmore

What does it mean to say that a form of art is "exhausted", that an artist has brought his or her work as far as it can go, that modernism began with Edouard Manet, or that cubism reached a natural ending in 1914 (even if members of that movement continued to paint in a cubist style)? Contemporary theories of art history tend to treat such issues as matters of narrative form, of the manner in which history is represented -- with beginnings, turning points, and endings belonging to the narrative itself, and not constrained by historical fact. In The Life of a Style, Jonathan Gilmore claims that such narrative developments inhere in the history of art itself.By exploring such topics as the discovery of perspective, neoclassical models of composition, the end of cubism, and the evolution of Jackson Pollock's paintings, Gilmore proposes a way of understanding how artistic styles develop in an internal or organic fashion and how their development relates to their social and biographical contexts. In Gilmore's view, there are intrinsic limits to a style, limits that are present from its beginning but that emerge only as, or after, it reaches the end of its history.

157 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Nat]

Leave it to a philosopher to ask some tough, possibly unanswerable questions about what's going on when art historians talk about movements or styles beginning or ending at certain times, like saying that cubism begins with Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon or ends with Braque going off to war in 1914. Gilmore's answer first takes the notion of the artist's "brief" from art historian Michael Baxandall, which is:

the problems a painter faces, described in a way that captures the painter's own, not necessarily unique, understanding of the nature of the problems (p. 47).

An artist's style is formed in response to the brief, consisting of:

certain procedures or techniques are discovered or appropriated that seem to respond to or fit with what those representations of means and ends require (p.82).

Style sets limits on what an artist, or movement, can achieve:

The limit to the development of the painter's work is the point past which the painter in that style—with those internalized procedures cannot go. The painter cannot go past a given limit in that style if the intentional descriptions of the action involved in going past that limit would be incompatible with the contents of the painter's brief. (p.82)

Gilmore says part of the brief of cubism was that it was "a figurative art" (p.69), so when it "threatened to become abstract", it ran into a stylistic limit. A style ends when working within it can no longer hope to accomplish the brief, and it begins when "the style is formed fully enough to have its limiting effect" (p.107).