Form and content revisited 
Lars-Olof Ählberg 
O body swayed to music, 
O brightening glance, 
How can we know the dancer 
from the dance? 
- W.B. Yeats 
1. Introduction 
Both the history of the concept of form as well as the linguistic background of the term »form« is interesting and complex. Raymond Williams, 
commenting on the uses of the word in the 14th and 15th century, notes that 
»form spanned the whole range from the external and superficial to the 
inherent and determining«.1 On the one hand »form« refers to »a visible or 
outward shape«, on the other hand it denotes »an essential shaping principle«.2 
Both uses are prevalent in aesthetics. The following are some of the senses of 
the term »form« listed in The Universal Dictionary of the English Language: 
(1) Relative grouping of the parts of a thing; configuration, outline, contour, 
shape, figure, etc., (2) Method of arrangement, way in which parts of a whole 
are grouped or interrelated, (3) style, mode of expression, manner of 
presentation, artistic shape, (4) Particular mode of existence, for example form 
of government, art forms, (5) Type of life or structure, for example forms of 
animal and vegetable life, and (5) which is said to be the philosophical sense of 
the term, the intrinsic, essential, ideal character of a thing, the intrinsic, 
essential, ideal character of a thing, the collection of qualities, the internal 
constitution, which make a thing what it is.3 
Both in and outside philosophy »form« has many different, though often 
related meanings. We can do things for form's sake, words can be different in 
form but identical in meaning, there are income tax forms to be filled in, the 
Vienna Philharmonic often play at the top of their form, a horse can be in 
good form, the Aristotelian formal cause of this conference is the problem of 
form, which makes it into a conference on form, and there are the 
Wittgensteinian forms of life we all participate in. 
The concept of form is one of the most complicated concepts in the history of 
philosophy and in aesthetics and art criticism. In general philosophy this 
concept has had a rich and variegated history - from Aristotle's analyses of 
1. R. Williams, Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed., Fontana, London 
1983, p. 138 
2. Ibid. 
3. »Form«, The Universal Dictionary of the English Language, ed. Henry C. Wyld, Routledge 
& Kegan Paul, London 1952, p. 446. 
10 Lars-Olof Ahlberg 
the relations between form and matter to the early Wittgenstein's search for 
the logical form of the sentence. 
Form plays an important role in many different theoretical frameworks, 
critical ideologies and programmes in the aesthetic field. The ambiguous legacy 
of the concept, the many uses it has been put to, the difficulty of making it 
respectable by defining it once and for all and the unquestioned dualism that 
seems to be involved in it, are some of the factors that account for the 
scepticism if not the outright repudiation of the concept in much 
contemporary aesthetics. »/T/he concept of form, like those of expression and 
imitation /.../, is infinitely elastic« writes Francis Sparshott.4 The concept may 
not be infinitely stretchable, but it certainly has been employed in a great 
variety of meanings and contexts. 
The dichotomy of form and content seems to be a good candidate for 
deconstructive treatment. While remaining sceptical of aesthetic theories in 
which form is the key concept and thinking that many confused ideas are often 
associated with it, I believe the concept, like so many other vague and loose 
concepts in this field, is useful and perhaps even necessary when analysing and 
trying to understand the arts and their function in the web of our culture. 
The purpose of my paper is twofold. Firstly I want to discuss some influential 
analyses of the concept and the role of form in the arts. Secondly I wish to 
remark on the role »form« and its cognates has played in evaluating art. 
One way of approaching the concept of form and its role in aesthetic discourse 
in general and in aesthetic theorizing in particular is to explore what form is 
contrasted with. This method of contrast, as we may call it, was recommended 
by William James in his Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious 
Experience (1901-2) where he claims »that it always leads to a better 
understanding of a thing's significance to consider its exaggerations and 
perversions, its equivalents and substitutes and nearest relatives elsewhere«.5 
There may not be any room for speaking about exaggerations or perversion as 
regards form, but it is certainly possible and fruitful to investigate the 
equivalents and substitutes of »form«. 
Before discussing specific aesthetic uses of the concept I want to mention some 
dichotomies outside aesthetics where »form« and »normal« occur. Formal logic 
deals with valid forms of reasoning, with the structure of deductions and 
arguments and does not pronounce on the factual correctness of the premises, 
it does not deal with the »content« of an argument. Therefore formal logic can 
be contrasted with what may be called a logic of content, if there is one and 
the relationship between formal and dialectical logic has been a subject of 
heated controversies in the history of Marxism. Yet another contrast is the one 
4. F. Sparshott, The Theory oi the Arts, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton 1982, p. 93. 
5. W. James, The Varieties oi Religious Experience A Study in Human Nature, The Giftord 
Lectures 1901-2, Fontana, London 1960, p. 42. 
Form and content revisited 11 
between formal and informal logic, the latter being regarded as an autonomous 
discipline.6 In other contexts the dichotomies will obviously be different. The 
opposite of formal dress is casual dress, not dialectical dress or dress with 
content. A formal request is contrasted with an informal and inofficial one, a 
formal visit with a private visit and so on. 
2. Form in aesthetics 
In aesthetics we encounter the following conceptual pairs: form/matter, form/-
subject-matter, form/materials, form/expression, form/emotion, form/-
representation, form/meaning, form/structure and form/content. Before 
discussing a few representative views on form and its role in art, I want to 
suggest that when using the term »form« and when theorizing about form we 
are easily misled by the metaphor that seems to underly the dichotomy of form 
and content. According to the picture that is suggested by an unsophisticated 
use of the contrast between form and content, form is like the shape of the 
container in which the content is to be found. If anyone doubts that metaphors 
can have a very powerful hold over our imagination and that they are capable 
of shaping and informing a philosophical tradition and its problems, let me just 
refer to the question of the existence of the external world, a problem that 
trades on the metaphorical contrast between the inner and the outer. In 
classical empiricist epistemology the mind and its collections of impressions 
and sense-data and what not, is the inner world and the problem then becomes 
to understand how the contents of the container can correspond to what is 
outside the container - the outer world.7 
I do not claim that the metaphorical overtones of the terms »form« and 
»content« somehow make them useless or that the attempt to render them 
more precise through analysis and stipulations is futile. I just want to make the 
point that the metaphorical character of these terms adds to the difficulties. 
The term »form« easily leads to a static conception of the relationship between 
form and content, as if form were a mould into which a content has to be 
forced. There is, to be sure, a sense in which »forms« are static and can be said 
to express a theme and to have a content etc. Think of the sonata form or the 
sonnet for example. But in other contexts »form« is conceived of as a dynamic 
principle structuring all features in a work of art. 
Form in a work of art is often said to be the way something is said or done, the 
content consisting of what is said in the work of art. The distinction here is 
between the how and the what. Sometimes this distinction can readily be 
6. A survey of the field is given in Douglas N. Walton, Informal Logic. A Handbook for 
Critical Argumentation, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 1989. 
7. In one of his lectures in 1930, Wittgenstein having granted that thinking sometimes may 
»involve images and these we think of as being 'in the mind'« remarks that »This simile of 
'inside' or 'outside' the mind is pernicious« (Wittgenstein's Lectures, Cambridge 1930-2, ed. 
Desmond Lee, Blackwell, Oxford 1980, p. 25). 
12 Lars-Olof Ahlberg 
applied, sometimes not. It makes sense to ask how two works sharing the same 
form, two sonnets or classical tragedies for example, differ in themes, plots etc. 
In other cases it is very difficult to see that the distinction between form and 
content makes sense. The formal devices in a classical symphony, for example, 
can be described in purely musical terms, but what could possibly be the 
content over and above these formal features? Also there are works of art 
where it is difficult, if not impossible, to speak of »form« at all, although the 
works in question may have a theme, express ideas and so on. I am thinking of 
some works of conceptual art which do not seem to have any physical or 
material features at all, at least not in any usual sense. 
A notable feature of the term »form« is that it often is used evaluatively. It 
shares this feature with stylistic terms like »realism« or »expressionism« and 
aesthetic predicates like »graceful«, »sublime« or »tragic«. The evaluative use 
of »form« implies that we are unwilling to speak of »form« and »formal« 
features in a work of art if the work in question falls below certain standards, 
if the form and the formal features of the work aren't interesting enough. 
When new styles and modes of expression which repudiate traditional ways of 
writing, painting and composing enter the artworld, art critics who dislike the 
new developments or are shocked by them express their attitude by claiming 
the new art to be formless, disorganized, and incomprehensible. They may 
even say that the new revolutionary art isn't art at all. 
When saying that »form« can be used and is used evaluatively I am of course 
relying on a distinction between the evaluative or normative- and the 
descriptive. There is, however, no agreement as to how this distinction should 
be drawn and there is no generally accepted theory of the meaning and 
function of value judgments. We may even suspect that the distinction itself 
rests on questionable assumptions which are however difficult to unearth.8 I 
am not altogether happy with this distinction so it is with some reluctance I 
invoke it here. Even if no theory satisfactorily accounts for the differences 
(and the similarities) between description and evaluation it is not so difficult 
in practice, I think, to apply this distinction. It is easier to reach agreement on 
what kinds of statements are to be counted as evaluative and normative than 
to agree on a theory which explains the distinction between description and 
valuation. 
It is instructive to consider Hegel's use of the form-content dichotomy from 
this point of view. A pervasive theme in Hegel's aesthetics is the unity of form 
and content. In Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1817) we 
8. Hilary Putnam has pointed out that the discussion »whether values are 'objective' or 
'subjective' /„./ is still trapped in the categories fixed by Hume« (H. Putnam, »After 
Empiricism«, in Post-Analytic Philosophy, eds. J. Rajchman & C. West, Columbia Univ. Press, 
New York 1985, p. 29). This issue is closely bound up with the discussion of the distinction 
between the descriptive and the evaluative, between facts and norms. 
Form and content revisited 13 
find an illustration of the inseparability of form and content taken from the 
field of art. He speaks of books that lack form because they are clumsily 
written, but they don't lack form altogether though, what they lack is an 
adequate form and he goes on to say that this correct or adequate form 
(»Diese rechte Form«) »ist so wening gegen den Inhalt gleichgültig, dass diese 
vielmehr der Inhalt selbst ist. Ein Kunstwerk, welchem die rechte Form fehlt, 
ist eben darum kein rechtes, d.h. kein wahres Kunstwerk«.9 In true works of 
art form and content are identical he claims. In fact the identity of form and 
content occurs not only in art according to Hegel, this identity is in all fields of 
human endeavour the precondition of truth and solidity. In the introduction to 
his Ästhetik (1835) Hegel states that in valid art the spiritual and the sensuous 
form a unity, and this is the reason why he doubts and sometimes even seems 
to deny that music is an art form at all.10 In any case music lacks, according to 
Hegel, a determinate content and in so far as it is art it has little value in his 
eyes. 
The form-content dichotomy and the unity of form and content has a similar 
evaluative function in the Marxified Hegelianism of Lukäcs. In his Ästhetik 
(1963) he claims that 
die Wirkung des Werks /.../ führt die ästhetisch gereinigten und ästhetisch 
homogen gemachten Lebensinhalte zur Formvollendung, zur Identität von 
Inhalt und Form, zur Ausgipfelung des Inhalts in die konkrete Form des 
Werks; jene leitet mit Hilfe der das Formsystem unterbauenden und 
ermöglichenden homogenen Mediums dem Rezeptiven in die Welt des Werks: 
die Form schlägt hier in Inhalt um.11 
The last sentence in this quotation is taken almost verbatim from Hegel.12 
Nevertheless Hegel has to be turned upside down materialistically as Lukäcs 
puts it in his essay »Kunst und objektive Wahrheit« (1954) and form as well as 
content have to be interpreted as reflections of reality, not as abstract 
principles or spiritual processes.13 To turn Hegel upside down, to rescue the 
rational kernel, the dialectical method, is an undertaking more demanding 
than Lukäcs ever realized. In any case such an undertaking presupposes that 
form and content can at least in some cases be separated and that a 
philosophical method can be isolated from its applications and its results. It 
9. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften 1, Die Wissenschaft der 
Logik, Werke 8, Hrsg. Eva Moldenhauer & Karl Markus Michel, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main 
1970, p. 266. 
10. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik 1, Werke 13, p. 62; Vorlesungen über die 
Ästhetik 3, Werke 15,148-9. Werke 15, p. 148-9. 
11. G. Lukäcs, Ästhetik, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen, 1, Werke 11, Luchterhand, Neuwied 
1963, p. 803. 
12. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 1, p. 265. 
13. G. Lukäcs, »Kunst und objektive Wahrheit«, in Probleme des Realismus 1, Essays über 
Realismus, Werke 4, Luchterhand, Neuwied 1971, p. 626. 
14 Lars-Olof Ahlberg 
seems to me that this is often quite impossible to achieve. Could Plato's 
philosophy have been expressed modo geometrico, could Heidegger's 
meditations on the essence of language have been expressed in the semantics 
of Carnap, could Russells's views on our knowledge of the external world have 
been expressed in the form of philosophical remarks and jokes? 
It seems to me that the principle of the unity of form and content and the 
dialectical relationship between them, for Hegel and Luk^cs, function as 
evaluative principles. Failing to show, or not feeling the need to show, what 
these principles amount to in practice, in the analysis of concrete works of art, 
they remain obscure. It would have been nice to know how form and content 
can be identical and at the same time transformed into one another in for 
example Hamlet. 
The conceptual opposition between form and content cannot be applied to all 
art forms and to all individual works of art in the same manner. »Form« and 
»formal elements« may well mean very different things when applied to 
different art forms and the distinction between form and content could differ 
in function and purpose depending on whether we think of literature, painting 
or music. Too much aesthetic theorizing assumes, consciously or unconsciously, 
that what applies to one art form applies to all art forms. The belief that the 
key concepts in aesthetics have a constant meaning regardless of which art 
form they are applied to is the semantic counterpart of this attitude. 
Susanne K. Langer warned us more than thirty years ago against the 
temptation to overgeneralize. She pointed out that 
/w/hen we talk about »Art« with a capital »A« - that is, about any or all of 
the arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, the potter's and goldsmith's and 
other designers' arts, music, dance, poetry, and prose fiction, drama and film -
it is a constant temptation to say things about »Art« in this general sense that 
are true only in one special domain, or to assume that what holds for one art 
must hold for another.14 
Langer herself may be accused of succumbing to this temptation when she 
developed her own theory of art as »the creation of forms symbolic of human 
feeling«.15 Her theory was originally conceived as a theory of significance in 
music and then expanded to cover all the art forms. Her view that music -
through its dynamic forms - reveals the hidden structure of human feeling and 
is expressive of the dynamic nature of sentient life is the most interesting and 
plausible part of her philosophy of art.1® 
14. S. K. Langer, Problems of Art. Ten Philosophical Lectures, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 
London 1957, p. 13. 
15. S. K. Langer, Feeling and Form. A Theory of Art Developed From »Philosophy in a New 
Key«, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1953, p. 40. 
16. See S. K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key. A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and 
Art, (1942) 3rd. ed., Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1974. 
Form and content revisited 15 
Be that as it may, in order to avoid empty and uninformative generalizations it 
is prudent to follow Langer's advice, if not her practice. Therefore I shall now 
discuss a few representative views on form in literature, painting and music 
respectively, before discussing form as an artistic value. 
2.1 Form in literature 
René Wellek and Austin Warren write in their classic Theory of Literature 
(1949) that the terms »form« and »content« are »terms used in too widely 
different senses for them to be /..../ helpful; indeed, even after careful 
definition, they too simply dichotomize the work of art«.17 They propose to 
replace them by the terms »materials« and »structure«. These latter terms, 
however, are not regarded by them as »a simple renaming of the old pair, 
content and form«.18 »Materials« stand for »aesthetically indifferent 
elements« while »structure« includes »both content and form so far as they are 
organized for aesthetic purposes«.19 It is difficult to see that this view is an 
improvement because the terms »form« and »content« themselves can 
certainly be given the meaning Wellek and Warren attach to »materials« and 
»structure«. Moreover the terms »materials« and »structure« are no less 
ambiguous and problematic than the original pair »form« and »content«. 
Wellek's and Warren's discussion of form and content illustrate the point 
made by Arnold Isenberg, in an article written in 1944, that everybody is 
dissatisfied with the distinction between form and content, but that nobody is 
happy to dispense with it .2 0 Isenberg's point was probably truer at the time he 
made it than it is today, but it certainly applies to Wellek and Warren, because 
in Theory of Literature they also use »form« to refer to »the aesthetic 
structure of a literay work - that which makes it literature«.21 Furthermore 
they claim that form organizes matter and that »/i/n a succesful work of art, 
the materials are completely assimilated into the form«.22 
The concept of structure introduced earlier is absent and their view of the 
relationship between form and content appears to be the traditional one, 
namely that a work of art is formed content. 
In one of the passages quoted from Wellek and Warren, they try to explain 
»form« in terms of »structure«. This is not an unusual procedure. In Cuddon's 
^ Dictionary of Literary Terms (1979), for example, under the entry »form« 
it is asserted that »/w/hen we speak of the form of a literary work we refer to 
17. R. Wellek & A. Warren, Theory of Literature, (1949), 3rd ed., Penguin, Harmondsworth 
1963, p. 28. 
18. /fai/, p. 141. 
19. /bid, p. 140-1. 
20. A. Isenberg, »Perception, Meaning, and the Subject Matter of Art« (1944) in A. Isenberg, 
Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism. Selected Essays, ed. William Callaghan et. al, Univ. 
of Chicago Press, Chicago 1973, p. 36. 
21. Wellek & Warren, p. 241. 
22. Ibid. 
16 Lars-Olof Ahlberg 
its shape and structure /..../ as opposed to its substance or what it is about«.2 3 
Although »/f/orm and substance are inseparable« according to the same 
source, »they may be analysed and assessed separately«.24 Clearly there are 
problems with this view. How two elements that are inseparable can be 
analysed and assessed separately is left in the dark. And in Roger Fowler's A 
Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms (1987) Allan Rodway contrast »form« 
with »'paraphrasable content'«, »the way something is said in contrast to what 
is said«.25 And for good measure he adds that »even though form and content 
may be inseparable for the 'full meaning' of a work, the paraphrasable content 
may nevertheless be used to enable the concept of form to be discussed«.26 He 
further claims that »form must /my italics/ be either structural or textural, the 
one being large-scale, a matter of arrangement, the other small-scale, a matter 
of impressionism«.27 Again it is far from clear why form must be of only two 
kinds and what »structure« means here. 
A different view of the relationship between form and structure in literature is 
advanced by Anne Sheppard in her book Aesthetics. An Introduction to the 
Philosophy of Art (1987). She notes that »the range of features which count as 
'formal' is exceedingly wide«28 and instead of trying to give a general 
definition of form and formal features she proceeds to give examples of formal 
features in different literary genres. The metre used for verse is one example, 
the interweaving of plot and sub-plots in certain novels is another. »Despite 
the diversity of what counts as 'formal'«, she says, »there is one thing which all 
these examples have in common: in every case relationships between features 
are involved«, adding that »in every case it is the ordering of the formal 
features which matters«.29 
However, there are many things outside the field of art where »relationships 
bewteen features are involved« and there are works of art where no 
relationships of this kind seem to be involved. Think of Walter de Maria's 
Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, which is literally in the earth and 
cannot be seen or of Robert Barry's »works« which consist of pure thought, 
like the piece All the things I know of which lam not at the moment thinking 
-1:36 P.M.; 15 June 1969, New York (1969). These are of course extreme 
examples and it could be denied that they are works of art because there is no 
23. J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms, rev. ed., Penguin, Harmondsworth 1982, p. 
277. 
24. Ibid. 
25. Allan Rodway, »Form«, in R. Fowler, ed. A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, rev. & 
enl. ed., Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1987, p. 99. 
26. Ibid. 
27. Ibid. 
28. A. Sheppard, Aesthetics. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, Oxford Univ. Press, 
Oxford 1987, p. 39. 
29. Ibid. 
Form and content revisited 17 
art object at all.30 Nevertheless, whatever we may think of the value of 
conceptual art as art, it presents a conceptual challenge to our discourse about 
art. Moreover conceptual art was, in the words of one commentator, »probably 
/.../ the largest, quickest-growing and most genuinely international of all 
twentieth-century art movements«.31 
2.2 Form in painting 
There are no doubt various formalist positions in the aesthetics of painting. 
Many discussions of form and formalism in painting in Anglosaxon aesthetics 
take their starting point in the writings of the English formalist critics and 
theorists, Roger Fry and Clive Bell. In 1910 and 1912 Fry organized two 
important exhibitions of what he called the »post-impressionist« painters, 
which he distinguished from neo-impressionists like Seurat and Signac. In Fry's 
terminology C6zanne, Gaugin, Van Gogh and Matisse were post-impressionists 
and their works dominated the first exhibition. Fry's exhibition caused a 
scandal, but can still be said to have been a great succes. Fry's influence on 
artistic taste in Britain was considerable, he exerted in the words of Harold 
Osborne, »a revolutionary influence on the taste of his day«.32 
Now both Fry and Bell employed an informal method of formalist analysis of 
painting and were at the same time the champions of a new taste in painting. 
Fry claimed that what matters in the art of painting are the plastic values, line, 
colouring and the relations between them. He distinguished between two kinds 
of painting, »real« painting where the plastic values dominate and 
representational painting where design and the plastic values primarily serve 
illustrative and non-artistic purposes. Matisse belongs to the former group and 
Rembrandt, whom Fry regarded as a great psychologist, to the second. The 
30. Ben Tilghman denies that Barry's »work« is a work of art on these grounds. His main point is 
not that it lacks many of the properties works of art normally has, but, he says, taking away 
the art object itself and leave only the idea (whatever that means) may be going too far. If it 
is going too far, it is not merely because there are too few properties in common with the 
paradigm, but because what has been stripped away are all those things that seem to give 
point to calling something a work of art, such things as beauty, a celebration of some aspect 
of our life, a view of the world, and so on (B. Tighman, But Is It Art? The Value of Art and 
The Temptation of Theory, Blackwell, Oxford 1984, p. 91). I think the issue here is partly 
normative and partly descriptive. While agreeing with Tilghman that the things he mentions 
make art valuable, it can be objected that Barry's work and similar conceptual works are a 
celebration of some aspect of life and that they indeed express a view of the world. If we are 
not willing to call these »works* art, what are they then? Tilghman seems to think that it is a 
misuse of language to call them art, but conceptual art certainly belongs to the art world and 
is treated by many as art. We seem to be faced with the choice between calling them non-art 
because they cannot fulfil some of the functions we expect art to fulfil or we can accept 
them as works of art and deny that they are very interesting or valuable. 
31. Roberta Smith, »Conceptual Art« in Concepts of Modern Art, rev. & enl. ed, ed. Nikos 
Stangos, Thames and Hudson, London 1981, p. 262. 
32. H. Osborne, »Fry, Roger«, in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Art, ed. H. 
Osborne, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 1981, p. 208. 
18 Lars-Olof Ahlberg 
normative nature of Fry's distinction is obvious. Fry may have thought that 
this distinction was based on a sound descriptive theory of what painting really 
is, in fact he showed the public of his day how to approach works of art they 
found utterly formless, disorganized, and even perverse. Instead of discovering 
the real nature of the art of painting, Fry and his follower Bell, introduced 
new criteria for the appreciation of painting. The following quotation from 
Fry bears out this point: 
/.../1 venture to say that no one who has a real understanding of the art of 
painting attaches any importance to what we call the subject of a picture -
what is represented. To one who feels the language of pictorial form all 
depends on how it is represented, nothing on what. Rembrandt expressed his 
profoundest feelings just as well when he painted a carcass hanging up in a 
butcher's shop as when he painted the Crucifixtion or his mistress. Cézanne 
who most of us believe to be the greatest artist of modern times expressed 
some of his grandest conceptions in pictures of fruit and crockery on a 
common kitchen table.3* 
And Bell, who distinguished between »descriptive painting« and »pure 
painting«, claimed that »a realistic form may be as significant, in its place as 
part of the design, as an abstract«, adding that »if a representative form has 
value, it is as form, not as representation. The representative element in a 
work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant«.34 
It is clear that both Fry and Bell thought that a precondition of a real 
understanding of painting is that no importance is attached to the 
subject-matter of the painting. The artistic value of a painting, they believed, 
is decided solely by the formal qualities and relations present in the painting. 
In the words of Isenberg, they thought that »it is not important that a work of 
art should have an important subject«.33 So artistic value and artistic greatness 
in no way depends on the importance or relevance of the subject-matter or the 
theme of the work. Instead of speaking here of »subject-matter« I prefer to 
speak of »thematic properties«. The phrase is borrowed from Ian Jarvies 
Philosophy of the Film (1987) where the thematic properties are properties 
that »look past the form of the work /.../ to the subject matter or, rather, to 
what it says about the subject matter«.36 Jarvie here assumes that a work of 
art can say something about its subject matter, and he adds that »the question 
arises, is what /the artist/ is saying: true or false, good or evil, banal or 
33. R. Fry, The Artist and Psycho-Analysis, The Hogarth Press, London 1924, p. 16 
34. C. Bell, »The Aesthetic Hypothesis«, in C. Bell, Art (1913), Doubleday, New York 1958, p. 
27. 
35. A. Isenberg, »Formalism«, (1955) in A. Isenberg, Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism. 
Selected Essays, p. 28. 
36. I. Jarvie, Philosophy of the Film. Epistemo/ogy, Ontology, Aesthetics, Routledge & Kegan 
Paul, New York 1987, p. 182. 
Form and content revisited 19 
profound?«.37 While accepting the idea that a work of art can say something 
and that truth is involved in some oblique and obscure way, I don't think it is 
easy in any particular case to say what a work of art says or suggests. 
What do Fry's and Bell's statements about the irrelevance of the thematic 
properties of a work of art imply in a particular case? Let's consider a few 
examples. Delacroix' famous painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) has 
been described as »a document of the intimate union of revolution and 
Romanticism« and as conveying »more powerfully than any other early 
nineteenth-century painting the political temper of revolutionary Europe«.38 
If we accept the description of this work as »an allegory of revolution itself«39 
the revolution as well as Delacroix' attitude are thematic properties of the 
work. When judging the artistic value of the work it is surely impossible not to 
be influenced by the thematic properties of the work. Or consider Picasso's 
Guernica (1937). An integral feature of the work is that it refers to the 
bombing of Guernica during the Spanish civil war and that it is an expression 
of Picasso's attitude towards that event. Consider finally the Soviet painter 
Gerasimov's portrait of Stalin at the funeral of a fellow revolutionary whose 
death more than likely had been precipitated by the subject of the painting 
himself. It would be strange, if not perverse, to try disregard the thematic 
properties of this work. Our attitude to Stalin certainly affects our judgement 
of the painting. 
The view that the thematic properties of a work are irrelevant to its artistic 
value is very narrow and completely overlooks that relevance to human 
concerns is a legitimate source of artistic value. 
The formalist perspective presupposes that we can isolate the formal feautures 
in a painting and judge them for themselves. That this approach involves great 
difficulties is inadvertently admitted by Bell when he says that »significant 
form« includes »combinations of lines and of colours« on the grounds that 
»/t/he distinction between form and colour is an unreal one« because we 
»cannot conceive a colourless line or a colourless space«.40 Similarly there are 
not two separate things, form and representative content or expression, but 
one configuration with properties of different kinds that can be separated only 
in analysis. This view, which to me seems to be correct, is well expressed by 
Gene Blocker: »Just as you cannot separate experience of things that are 
organized from their organization, so you cannot separate form from 
representational and expressive elements organized in a work of art.«41 And 
37. Ibid 
38. Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 6th ed., rev. by Horst de la Croix & Richard Tansey, 
Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, New York 1975, p. 675. 
39. Ibid. 
40. Bell, p. 19. 
41. G. Blocker, Philosophy of Art, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1979, p. 145. 
20 Lars-Olof Ahlberg 
he adds that »this organized whole is precisely what we mean, or ought to 
mean, by the »form« of a work of art«.42 I don't think this is the only thing 
that ought to be meant by »form« and I would also like to add a consideration 
that is lacking in Blocker's discussion. It is often assumed that it is easy to 
pinpoint the formal properties or elements in a work of art. In fact there is no 
agreement as to what counts as a formal element, moreover what is a formal 
element from one perspective and in one analysis may not be a formal element 
when seen from a different perspective. 
The structuralist attempt to find and define the elements of meaning, the 
»atoms« of meaning as it were, in the arts and their subsequent failure to do 
so, should make us see that there are no elements in an absolute sense. In other 
words what we regard as an element is subject to change and dependent on our 
theoretical and practical interests. To overlook this leads to bad theorizing and 
to boring criticism. 
Contrary to Fry's contention understanding a representational painting 
presupposes that we attach importance to the subject-matter, simply because 
subject-matter and thematic properties are integral to the work. Roger Scruton 
is entirely right in saying that »the very suggestion that one could understand 
Rembrandt's Nightwatch, for example, while being indifferent to, or ignorant 
of, its representational status is absurd«.43 I suppose Scruton refers to Fry and 
Bell when he adds that »/t/he suggestion has, of course been made, since every 
conceivable abusurdity has at one time or another been entertained in the 
theory of art«.44 A formalist could retort that if Rembrandt's painting cannot 
be seen as a pure formal configuration, this only shows that Rembrandt's work 
is an illustration and not a work of art. Such an argument is very 
unconvincing, it only betrays the normative character of the formalist 
definition of art as significant form. 
2.3 Form and music 
»/O/f all the arts music is the one where formal features are most clearly 
dominant« writes Anne Sheppard45 and even those who are not formalists in 
regard to literature or painting have often espoused a formalist view of music. 
Eduard Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) remains to this day one 
of the most influential and consistent formulations of the formalist position. 
According to Hanslick music, that is instrumental music, is incapable of 
expressing any specific emotions or feelings. Moreover music cannot represent 
anything ouside itself, because it lacks conceptual and linguistic powers. »The 
content of music is tonally moving forms« is the major thesis of Hanslick's 
42. Ibid. 
43. R. Scruton, Art and Imagination. A Study in the Philosophy of Mind, Methuen, London 
1974, p. 210. 
44. Ibid 
45. Sheppard, p. 42. 
Form and content revisited 21 
treatise.4® Music as an art is akin to architecture and dancing, because they 
also lack any content apart from formal relationships.47 It may be strange to 
say that the formal features in a work of art is the content, as if we never 
could talk about forms without content. However Hanslick insists that »/t/he 
concepts of content and form mutually determine and complement each 
other«,48 and he furthermore thinks that music in contrast to literature and 
the visual arts »possesses form and content inseparably« whereas the latter art 
forms »can represent /.../ thoughts and events in a variety of forms«.49 He 
mentions the story of Wilhelm Tell which figures as the theme in novels, 
dramas and epic poems. If music cannot represent any particular events or 
particular feelings and emotions, it can nevertheless according to Hanslick 
represent and suggest the dynamic features of feelings. These dynamic features 
can be represented in virtue of similarities in formal patterns between the 
dynamics of feelings and the dynamics of music. 
Susanne K. Langer's philosophy of music is in some ways a development of 
Hanslick's point. For she claims that music is »formulation and representation 
of emotions, moods, mental tensions and resolutions - a 'logical picture' of 
sentient, responsive life, a source of insight«.30 The function of music is 
cognitive, but the insights musical forms can impart cannot be formulated or 
named. Some things can be known which cannot be named, she says, and 
»music articulates forms which language cannot set forth«.51 Langer's theory 
goes far beyond Hanslick's formalism, but her analysis can still be regarded as 
a variety of formalism, »formalism with an explicitly expressionist basis« as 
Sheppard puts it.32 
I think Langer's semi-formalist view has its attractions. It is certainly possible 
to listen to instrumental music as if it were a musical analogue to our 
emotional life and I suggest it is much better to think about music in this way 
and to listen to it in this spirit than to assume that music has magical powers of 
representing non-musical reality, be it concrete things and events or the 
essence of reality. Musical forms can »correspond« to our experience and our 
emotions in a variety of ways, a fact which may account for the conviction 
that music can impart knowledge about reality. 
Forms can, however, be significant and expressive without signifying or 
expressing anything in particular. Some people reject all formalist analysis of 
46. E. Hanslick, On The Musically Beautiful. A Contribution Towards the Revision of the 
Aesthetics of Music, 8th ed. (1891), transl. Geoffrey Payzant, Hackett, Indianapolis, Indiana 
1986, p. 29. 
47. Ibid, p. 78 
48. Ibid., p. 80. 
49. Ibid. 
50. S. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 222. 
51. Ibid, p. 233. 
52. Sheppard, p. 49. 
22 Lars-Olof Ahlberg 
»the meaning of music« because they feel that when the cognitive function of 
music is being denied, its importance and significance goes over board as well. 
Also there is widespread feeling that in order for music to be expressive it 
must express some definite feeling, mood or emotion. There is however an 
intransitive use of »expression« and »express« which does not require an object 
and this intransitive use of these expression is important in aesthetics.53 
The failure to understand the intransitive expressiveness of music is 
responsible for many mistaken ascriptions of content to particular musical 
works. Consider for example the following description of Liszt's Ballade in B 
minor: »It is less passionate and more full-blooded /than the ballades of 
Chopir./; concerned, as it were, less with personal suffering than with great 
happenings on the epical scale, barbarian invasions, cities in flames - tragedies 
of public more than private, import«.54 These words were written by the 
English eccentric Sacheverell Sitwell, but similar nonsense abound in the 
writings of more sober musicologists. 
In contrast to Sitwell, who obviously thought that instrumental music can 
describe and suggest real world happenings, Deryck Cooke in his book The 
Language of Music (1959) thought that musical forms express definite feelings 
and attitudes. He thinks for example that the minor third »in the 1-3-5 
progression /is/ expressive of an outgoing feeling of pain - an assertion of 
sorrow, a complaint, a protest against misfortune«.55 Cooke tries to 
reconstruct the vocabulary of musical forms, assigning a specific meaning to 
every form in isolation as if the musical forms had an inherent meaning to be 
discovered by analysis. The formal features like intervals, chords, harmonies, 
rhythmic patterns etc. can of course be described in expressive terms and the 
expressive vocabulary is perhaps the only vocabulary we can use when 
53. For the intransitive sense of »expression«, see Scruton, ch. 14. The concept of intransitive 
knowledge and its role in aesthetics is developed by Kjell S. Johannessen in his contributions 
to Culture; Language and Artificial Intelligence, eds. M. Florin & B. Gôranzon, Berlin, 
Springer 1989 and to Essays in Pragmatic Philosophy, vol. 2, eds. H. Hôibraaten & I. Gullvâg, 
Universitetsforlaget, Bergen 1990. 
54. S. Sitwell, Liszt, (1955) Dover, New York 1967, p. 193. 
55. D. Cooke, The Language of Music, Oxford Univ. Press, London 1959, p. 122. For a more 
extragavant reconstruction of a musical vocabulary consider the programme for Chopin's 
Prélude No 9 in E minor, written by Hans von Biilow (he wrote programmes for all the 
Préludes), Here Chopin has the conviction that he has lost his power of expression. With the 
determination to discover whether his brain can still originate ideas, he strikes his head with 
a hammer (here the sixteenths and thirty-seconds are to be carried out in exact time, 
indicating a double stroke of the hammer). In the third and fourth measure one can hear the 
blood trickle (trills in the left hand). He is desperate at finding no inspiration (sixth measure); 
he strikes again with the hammer and with greater force (thirty-second notes twice in 
succession during the crescendo). In the key of A flat he finds his powers again. Appeased, 
he seeks his former key and closes contentedly. (Quoted from Harold C. Schonberg, The 
Great Pianists from Mozart to the Present, Simon & Schuster, New York 1963, p. 129). It is 
remarkable that one of the leading musicians of the the second-half of the nineteenth 
century, the pupil of Liszt and Wagner, the pianist and famous conductor von Biilow could 
write things like that. 
Form and content revisited 23 
describing our reactions to music. But it does not follow that musical forms as 
such have a definite, statable meaning. 
The expressive properties we ascribe to a piece of music apply to the general 
character of the piece, not to any particular, isolated formal features. To 
describe Liszt's Ballade as happy and gay would betray a misunderstanding of 
the piece; to say that is dramatic, tense, wild, feverish and excited would be 
more to the point and it is this impression Sitwell wants to get across with his 
fanciful and absurd description. 
Consider the expressiveness of a human face which is in some ways is to 
expressiveness in music. Expressiveness in a human face depends on a great 
variety of imperceptible and in themselves inexpressive features, like 
eye-movements, posture of the head and so on. Similarly, the expressiveness of 
a passage in music is dependent on a number of factors which in themselves 
may be inexpressive. When »the air of majesty« of the first themes in a 
Bruckner symphony is thought to depend on the the fact that they »are clearly 
defined in harmony and /that they/ are usually based on fifths or octaves«56 
this cannot be the whole truth. This claim is sensible only if we presuppose a 
certain orchestration, a definite volume, a particular rhythmic pattern and 
tempo, a musical context, in other words the context provided by Bruckner's 
score itself. For imagine one of these Brucknerian themes being played on a 
flute accompanied by a tuba, or imagine them being played piano pianissimo or 
presstissimo and the air of majesty vanishes into thin air. The total expressive 
effect of a work depends on the total relationships of the formal features and 
it is a fruitless task to assign meanings - expressive or descriptive - to single 
forms and isolated passages. The expressiveness of a certain passage depends 
on many factors, no isolated formal features are expressive just by themselves. 
2.4 Form and artistic value 
Many formalists not only think that the formal features of a work are 
responsible for its status as an art work, its art-making features, they also tend 
to believe that formal features are the source of artistic and aesthetic value. A 
non-formalist need not of course deny that there are formal values and that 
they contribute to the overall artistic value of a work. A non-formalist can 
even admit that in some works of art formal features and formal values 
dominate at the expense of all other artistic values. 
John Hospers, who is certainly no formalist, distinguishes between three kinds 
of values that are important in art, sensuous values pertaining to the texture, 
colours and shapes, formal values which have to do with the overall 
organization of a work of art, and what he calls life values. While sensuous 
and formal values in Hospers' view are mediumistic in the sense that »they are 
56. H. Ulrich & P. Pisk, A History of Music and Musical Style, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 
New York 1963, p. 551. 
24 Lars-Olof Ahlberg 
concerned with what the work of art contains in its very medium« the life 
values he says »are not contained in the medium but are conveyed through the 
medium«.57 Hospers expresses these distinctions in a rather mechanistic way 
and the idea that some things are contained in the medium and others 
conveyed through the medium is questionable. Nevertheless his distinctions 
are, I think valid. Hospers introduces these three kinds of values under the 
heading »aspects of works of art«. There are, however, many more aspects of a 
work of art and several other dimensions of value than the ones discussed by 
Hospers. 
Goran Hermerdn distinguishes between no less than five different components 
or criteria of artistic value. These components are (1) skill and craftsmanship, 
(2) aesthetic value, (3) communication of feeling, (4) relevance and (5) 
originality.58 I will comment on the notion of aesthetic value and its relation 
to artistic value and say something about the notion of relevance involved 
here, but let me just add that treating artistic value in this way enables us to 
understand how works with entirely different characteristics, purposes and 
origins can possess artistic value. Some works possess all these features, others 
have several of them and there are works of art which possess only one of 
them. Some avant garde works which lack a perceptible surface cannot have 
aesthetic value in the sense under discussion. If we dislike them and think 
them pointless they have little or no relevance but they could still be 
artistically valuable in virtue of their originality and there are people who 
think that originality is the supreme artistic value which makes up for much. If 
the concept of art is primarily a normative concept, as I believe it is, the 
possession of at least one of these values is a necessary condition for being an 
art work. 
»The aesthetic value of a work depends«, according to Hermer6n, »on the way 
the surface of that work looks or appears: the way the work is composed, how 
colors and shapes are distributed on the canvas - and analogously in the other 
arts«.59 The term »aesthetic value« has certainly been used in a variety of 
ways and it is not uncommon to give it a wider application than Herm6ren 
does. »Aesthetic value« is sometimes used as a synonym for »artistic value«, 
but it is sensible and desirable to distinguish between the two. When we speak 
of the aesthetic value of something, not necessarily an art work, we consider 
says Hermer6n »the 'sensuous' and the 'structural' properties of X, including 
its expressive emotional qualities: its unity, complexity, balance, and harmony 
as well as its sadness, joyfulness, happiness, melancholy, or monumentality«.60 
What Hermerdn counts as »aesthetic values« is a mixed bag and it is 
57. J. Hospers, »Aesthetics, Problems of«, in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol 1, ed. Paul 
Edwards, Macmillan, New York 1967, p. 44. 
58. G. Hermer6n, Aspects of Aesthetics, Gleerups, Lund 1983, pp. 62-73. 
59. Ibid, p. 64-5. 
Form and content revisited 25 
problematic to treat the sensuous and the structural properties as well as the 
expressive qualities of a work of art as being of the same kind, viz. as 
aesthetic. Some of the properties on Hermer6n's list are properties that have 
been called »formal«. Both the sensuous and the structural properties could be 
regarded as formal properties of a work of art and it is in fact these features 
that are close to the formalists heart. The formalist then, is interested only in 
some of the aesthetic features of a work of art and believes that these are the 
only sources of artistic value. 
The category of relevance in Hermer6n's list of dimensions of artistic value 
also contains rather heterogenous things. Here belong »ideas with more or less 
obvious moral, political and religious overtones«61 he says, and if we are 
interested in answering questions pertaining to the relevance of a work of art, 
we typically ask ourselves to what extent the work in questions says or reveals 
something important and significant about some aspect of reality. Formalists 
often explicitly deny that the artistic value of a work of art depends in any 
way on the relevance of the work. However, even avowed formalists find it 
difficult to avoid the issue of relevance altogether. 
Roger Fry wrote the following remarkable passage where he clearly speaks of 
something that cannot be subsumed under the concept of aesthetic or formal 
value: 
/T/he emotional tone /of a work of art/ is not due to any recognizable 
reminiscence or suggestion of the emotional experiences of life; but I 
sometimes wonder if it nevertheless does not get its force from arousing some 
very deep, very vague, and immensely generalized reminiscences, ft looks as 
though art had got access to the substratum of all the emotional colours of life, 
to something which underlies all the particular and specialized emotions of 
actual life.62 
We may compare this with the position of a formalist of a very different 
complexion, Viktor Shklovsky, who in his famous essay »Art as Technique« 
(1917) claims that the purpose of literature as of all art is to reawaken our 
sense of reality, to make us see reality anew and to help us to break away from 
conventional ways of seeing an feeling. This is achieved, Shklovsky thinks, 
through certain formal and defamiliarizing techniques. Now his view of the 
purpose of art may be unduly narrow, but his brand of formalism explicitly 
affirmed the relevance of art to life. 
3. Conclusion 
It is as crippling to champion just one artistic value as it is illusiory to believe 
that form in the arts is always one and the same thing. There are many 
60. Ibid, p. 65. 
61. Ibid, p. 66. 
62. Fry, p. 19. 
26 Lars-Olof Ahlberg 
concepts and conceptions of form. We can certainly create a more or less 
precise concept of form which can be useful for certain purposes, but to 
believe that we can find the concept of form rests on an illusion. So a pluralist 
account of form is combined with a pluralist view of artistic value. 
In contrast to Fry and Shklovsky and a host of other formalists and 
non-formalists I don't believe art has a purpose, it has many different 
purposes. But one important purpose of art is to say something about reality 
and hence I think relevance is an important, though not the only, source of 
artistic value. 
What a work of art says about reality and how it says it is mostly inexpressible. 
As Wittgenstein once wrote about a poem by the German poet Ludwig 
Uhland: »And this is how it is: if only you do not try to express what is 
inexpressible then nothing gets lost. But the inexpressible will be -
inexpressibly - contained in what has been expressed«.63 
If works of art could say nothing about life and reality, art would be irrelevant 
to our deepest concerns as human beings and if what a work of art art says 
could be conveyed discursively, art would be superfluous. In this sense both 
form and content are necessary and inseparable. 
63. P. Engelmann, Letters from Wittgenstein, Blackwell, Oxford 1967, p. 7.