The Life Of Forms In Art

The Life of Forms in Art

In this text, Focillon insists that art and its meanings are an inherently dynamic system and that the history of art is one of instabilities, fluctuations and discontinuities. Artworks are never static empirical entities or pure optical presences but rather the virtual traces of a ceaseless process of becoming.

The Life of Forms in Art

What is form in modern art? How could a work of art achieve its organic life in a world increasingly dominated by mechanism, by new technology? In this new book, Brandon Taylor proposes that biology and the life sciences themselves supplied many of the analogies and metaphors by which modern artists were guided. For the creative giants of the period - Picasso, Miró, Kandinsky, Strzeminski, Dalí, Arp, Motherwell and Pollock, as well as less-known figures such as Taeuber, Erni and Kobro - questions of 'living' form loomed large in studio conversation, in the press, and in the writings of the artists themselves. In a book rich in new research and fresh thinking, a well-known art historian proposes six modalities of organic and vital life that pervade the radical experiments of modern art: the organic, the biomorphic, the ambiguous, the monstrous, the dialectical, and the liquid.

The Life of Forms in Art