How Style Became Famous and Irrelevant at the Same Time

Abstract

The article is concerned with the theoretical issue of the status of style in visual arts, aiming to demonstrate that – within art history – stylistics acquired its disciplinary autonomy in the late 18th century when, J. J. Winckelmann was the first to detach stylistics from rhetoric, thus expanding the field of stylistic competence to the history of art. It was also the time when, under the influence of early Romanticism, the entirely opposite tendencies originated, those of the emphasized individuation of art. Therefore, parallel to the birth of theoretical notion of “the styles of the eras”, romanticists not only paved the way for Modernism, but also thwarted the application of a newly risen stylistic methodology concerned with the cultural codification of style. The disagreement between the “classicists”, and “romanticists”, eventually culminated in the schism of the Paris Salon and the emergence of a wide range of new trends, heterogeneous conceptions and avant-garde movement, all in a very short space of time. The concept of “the style of epoch” has been staggered by the challenges of the 20th century. The function of culture within the stylistic characteristics of the 19th century art production was appropriated by artists, whose artwork acquired total objectual autonomy. The cultural and stylistic codification of of historical periods conceived in the 18th century could no longer be applied to the heterogeneous art produced during the Modernist era. By affirming the obviousness of the visual, Modernism eluded all the semantic, functional, utilitarian, narrative and symbolic burdens of earlier periods. This article endeavours to show how, subsequent to the epoch of Modernism, style can be discussed exclusively at a level of the apparent expressed features of an artwork. Codification which follows the principle of temporal “anchoring” in the cultural context of the Modernits era of Modernism remains both risky and ineffective stylistic strategy.