СТИЛЬ В ИСКУССТВЕ

Style in Art

A historically derived and stable integrity of an imaginative system, the means and methods of artistic expression predicated by the sameness of the aesthetic and social content. This sameness is achieved on the strength of a definite creative method. Style reflects the socio-economic conditions of a society, as well as the peculiarities and traditions of the nation concerned. Take archaic, Hellenistic, Roman, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Empire, modern and other Styles. Each Style gains its fullest expression in some definite types of art.

A new Style appears in order to express deep-going social changes whenever a fundamentally new correlation emerges between the artistic form and the ideological content. Formalistic aesthetics produces either an exaggeratedly broad conception of Style, identifying it with the artistic method (which reduces, say, realism to one of the Styles), or an exaggeratedly narrow conception, identifying it with the artistic mannerisms of this or that artist.

The concept of "Style of the epoch" is also wrong, for it divorces Style from the world outlook and from the artistic method. There is always a variety of artistic methods in every epoch, and it is within the framework of these methods that various Styles develop, which, in turn, embrace artists of different artistic mannerisms and approaches. Multiplicity of Styles and mannerisms is a typical feature of socialist realism.