![]() ![]() ![]() Published in Aisthesis ISSN 2035-8466 (Online) Publisher Firenze University Press Country of publisher Italy LCC subjects Language and Literature Philosophy. Benjamin, this Essay argues, refers to Focillon’s life of forms to conceptualise disharmonious and sudden changes of form. In this beautiful meditation on the art historical problem of style Henri Focillon 1881 1943 describes how art forms change over time Although he argues. This is not only a key to Benjamin’s concepts of Fortleben/Nachleben in the early Essay The Task of the Translator but also to the ‘dialectical image‘ outlined in the Arcades Project. Focillon’s idea of art history is based on the dynamis or potentiality of artistic shapes giving way to ever new figures and forms. The Essay locates Benjamin’s surprising reception of Focillon in their common interest in a life of forms, not so much in the sense of aesthetic liveliness as defined by Kant (‘Beförderung der Lebendigkeit‘), but in its productiveness of other forms. ![]() The book also contains a critical introduction by Jean Molino.In the preliminary work for his Theses On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin quotes a passage from Henri Focillon’s La vie des formes, using Focillon’s description of classical style for his own notion of the dialectical image. It has been superbly translated by Yale art historian George Kubler, whose book The Shape of Time was influenced by Focillon. ![]() The Life of Forms in Art remains one of the most brilliant and important reflections on the morphology of art. Focillon emphasizes the presence of nonsynchronous tendencies within styles that give artworks a manifold and stratified character. Although he argues that the development of art is irreducible to external political, social, or economic determinants, one of his great achievements was to lodge a concept of autonomous formal mutation within the shifting domain of materials and techniques. In this beautiful meditation on the art-historical problem of style, Henri Focillon (1881-1943) describes how art forms change over time. ![]()
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