Educating the eye: Formal vs Contextual Analysis

The art of looking & learning with your eyes

If you have taken an art appreciation or art history class particularly if you have been in an upper-level art history class, you'll have learned about formal and contextual analysis. If you have not, it is good idea to understand what these concepts are and how to evaluate a work using both those methods. I don't necessarily think that one way is better than the other but as a collector you should be able to do both.

Art appreciation is truly subjective. The personal nature of perception is very much an individual point of view, impression, and preference. Ultimately, both types of art analysis serve to provide a more structured way of evaluating artwork. The formal analyzer in an art museum will be the person who's spending most of the time standing in front of, moving around the work to see it fully, and who only glances at the information about the work. They will be the person walking by a lot of artworks without looking too hard at them because they know what is worth looking at to them. Contextual analyzer will likely be the one who is coming up to every artwork looking at it for a minute, then glances at the information about the work for longer than they look at the artwork itself.

Pluralism, Social Media, and the death of Newspapers has all but destroyed the role of critical judgment in fine art criticism. Global art fairs, international biennials, online galleries, and international art auctions have reshaped the art world in the last 30 years. Art criticism has almost completely disappeared and historical awareness of the discipline is terminal. We no longer need art to be explained or made sense of by academically trained art critics, or even art gallerist. Which is freeing because there is no critic telling you what is good art and what is bad art. If you know about Clement Greenberg–arguably one of the most influential art critics of the 20th century–you will be grateful. Not to harsh all art critics, but I only can recommend one Christopher Knight.

Today market value shapes discourse in the global art market. Now artwork is good, if it is expensive. The auction price of a work sets the trends in contemporary art. Dealers, curators, and wealthy collectors have replaced the art critics, all of those actors are in it to make money for themselves. It is Adam Smith’s invisible hand/ hyper-capitalist art market, that is setting the top and the bottom of the art market and art values. Where the artist lands in those auction prices is the only official good or bad art barometer. Rich Private collectors hire critics has hype-men, generate positive criticism by curating exhibitions and promoting their collections in fancy art publications. This is why it is so important to for amateur art collector’s figure out what an Artists work is actually worth/value to them and a formalized method of analysis can help.

Understanding The Esoteric

Contextualism or contextual analysis is the story behind an artwork, the artist, why, and what the work is supposedly about according to the artist. Forms of contextual analysis will be artist statements, artist talks, art historian talks about an artist, and a lot of written narratives about an artwork with a focus on the artist rather than the work. The art professional’s role in contextual analysis is the how and why is an artwork a significant work of art by connecting an artwork to its place, purpose, influence and/or meaning within a culture, the art market. Modern, Installation, Conceptual and Performance art are really very integrated with Contextualism. Modern art criticism was really the birth of Contextualism as major form of art analysis.

Formalism or Formal analysis is a detailed and analytical way of looking at the artwork itself. This method of art examination is through analysis of its form and the artists use of the elements of visual work in terms of design elements, such as color, shape, texture, line, lighting, mass, and space. This is where we get terms of description like representational or non-representational, realistic, and abstract. For your purposes as a collector this is a formalization of the act of actually looking at the work, using the elements of formal analysis, and spending time in front of it. It can exist in written forms in evaluations of a single work by an artist is usually written by an art historian or art history student.

The focus on technique, color, material use, size, perspective, and any quality of intrinsic to work that is based on execution. I am a formal analyzer; I personally don't care about what the artist is trying to convey, I care about what is present in the artwork itself, the feelings an artwork evokes in me, and my associations with it visually. Not to say that contextual analysis and historical connections is totally unimportant to me. I do think that they have value, especially in conceptual art, but I do not place them above the visual aspects of an artwork. To me the contextual aspects of an artwork is only valuable for understanding a little bit more about what I'm seeing as opposed to how the artist wants me to see it. It’s nice that formal analysis does not require research about the artist or work but that should be a part of your process as a collector.

I will not attempt to teach in detail about this as there are a number of useful resources that do this already.

• Formal Visual Analysis: The Elements

• Introduction to Art Historical Analysis - Khan Academy: For a deeper dive into the Contextual

• How to do visual (formal) analysis in art history - Khan Academy

• Understanding Formal Analysis by the Getty

• Video: Introducing Formal Analysis: Landscape - by Getty

• Introducing Formal Analysis: Still Life - by Getty

• Lumen learning Art Appreciation course - A complete 101 class - if you have the time.

There are some elements and principals of design in particular that I have found are very helpful my evaluation of an artwork and if it’s a good fit for my collection. These will likely be different for you as they are the element or design principals you are most drawn to in a work according to your taste and preferences.

• Color differentiates and defines lines, shapes, forms, and space. Even black and white images have a huge number of different shades of gray.

• Value is the degree of light and dark in a design. It is the contrast between black and white and all the tones in between. Value can be used with color as well as black and white. Contrast is the extreme changes between values.

• Balance - is created in a work of art when textures, colors, forms, or shapes are combined harmoniously. 

• Unity is created when the principles of analysis are present in a composition and in harmony. Some images have a complete sense of unity, while some artists deliberately avoid formal unity to create feelings of tension and anxiety.