Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism

Description

How the works of Henri Matisse and Henri Bergson reveal contemporary problems of representation and reality. Against Affective Formalism confronts modernism's dissatisfactions with representation. As Todd Cronan explains, a central tenet of modernist thought turns on the effort to overcome representation in the name of something more explicit in its capacity to generate affective experience.

Todd Cronan is assistant professor of art history at Emory University.

"Todd Cronan's juggernaut is several books in one. In the first place, it historicizes a crucial question in contemporary esthetics, whether or not a beholder's experience of a work of art can properly be understood as affective rather than as cognitive. Second, it offers a strong rereading of various writings by Henri Bergson-whose philosophy has often been associated with the art of Matisse-with respect to that and related issues, showing in the end that although Bergson was continually tempted by the affective position, he never quite definitely succumbed to it. Third and most important, Cronan tracks the interplay between the affective and cognitivist viewpoints in the theory and practice of one of the great painters of the twentieth century, Henri Matisse; this sets Cronan on a collision course-from which he does not flinch -with the almost uniformly affective bias of recent Matisse criticism. Against Affective Formalism is a major achievement, and I look forward with fascination to its reception by a field that is likely to be transformed by it." -Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University "Matisse knows that sensations belong to - or alas have been detached from - particular human occasions, ways of being, forms of life. But the exacerbation of colour in Matisse speaks, dialectically, to the lack of particularity that makes us 'modern'. This to and fro of contraries is dealt with powerfully in a new book by Todd Cronan, Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism. Colour, for Matisse - pure sensation, the stuff of the senses - will make, will be, a form of life. And at the same time it will enact the extremity - the uncanniness - of the wish." - T. J. Clark, "The Urge to Strangle," The London Review of Books