How to Appreciate Art for Beginners: Formal Analysis

If you are a beginning art collector, learning how to appreciate art is an excellent skill to develop. Once you understand how to appreciate art, you can more easily define your collecting philosophy, which is an essential component to creating an inspiring and valuable art collection.

There are multiple ways to look at a piece of art, and scholars spend years examining artwork through these different “lenses.” This article is by no means a definitive guide on how to appreciate art, and I will be posting additional resources that go more in-depth on each of these “lenses,” but for now, this is a simplified overview to help you get started.

When viewing art, many people immediately discuss the actual appearance of the work itself. Think back to your schooling days and learning the elements of art: line, shape, form, space, color, value, and texture. Ringing a bell? Perfect. When you discuss a piece of artwork based on these elements you are conducting a formal analysis. In the early 20th century, a scholar named Heinrich Wölfflin was very influential in developing many of the principles of formal analysis that we still use to analyze art today. Some art critics go so far as to say that form is the most important aspect of an artwork, and this school of thought is called Formalism.

Remember, that a picture, before it is a picture of a battle horse, a nude woman, or some story, is essentially a flat surface covered in colours arranged in a certain order.

– Maurice Denis

Homage to Cézanne, Maurice Denis, 1900

When appreciating art using visual analysis, the first step is to identify what you are looking at. Do not try and evaluate the art at this point, just assess the piece using declarative statements based on what you visually perceive.

• Is it a painting, a drawing, a sculpture, etc.?

• Next, dig a little deeper: is the piece representational or non-representational? Does the artwork contain imagery that you are able to discern what it is, for example, a painting of a horse or a seascape? Or does it not contain imagery—think Piet Mondrian’s Composition in red, yellow, blue, and black?

Then bring back in your elements of art.

• Line and Shape and Form- are they geometric (straight) or organic (curvy)?

• Space- how is the piece composed and how do the lines, shapes, and forms relate to each other?

• Remember the color wheel? The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. The secondary colors are purple, green, and orange. What colors are in the piece (Hue)? How light or dark is the color (Value)? Are the colors really bright or more muted (Intensity and Saturation)? How do the colors relate to one another (Color Theory)?

• Texture can be seen and felt. Can you visually detect if the surface is smooth, oily, hard, grainy?

All of this seems fairly straight forward but let us circle back to  Wölfflin, who was active in the late 19th and early 20th century. What had happened in the art world that required an outline of a relatively intuitive set of principles? The Impressionists.

In the middle of the 19th century, the now-darlings of art history rolled in with their revolutionary pre-made tubes of paint. Meaning the Impressionists could carry around the paint, bust it out in the middle of a picnic, and start capturing light on canvas using a series of rapid brushstrokes. For the following images, practice your formal analysis. 

Then Paul Cézanne came along and really complicated things by drawing attention to the fact that he was painting on a flat plane.

Montagne Saint-victoire, Paul Cézanne, c. 1890

It is nice that Wölfflin started to nail things down when he did because what happens next gets a little chaotic. After WWI and WWII, visual art kept evolving in so many ways: by building on itself, challenging its own principles, and deconstructing itself. There is so much more to unpack here, but we are just touching the surface.

Try out your formal analysis skills on these two works. Make declarative statements about what you can visually perceive.

Cloud Gate, Anish Kapoor, 2006

Black Square, Kazimir Malevich, 1924

From your declarative statements, develop a subjective statement. Are you impressed with how the artist created depth? Do you like how the lines are interacting with the shapes? Do the contrasting colors give you a jolt?

There, done. You have just appreciated art. You did not have to decide if it was good or bad, you just dissected it for what it is and created your own interpretation. When creating your collecting philosophy, you will find that you appreciate some pieces more than others and part of that why you appreciate pieces differently can derive from formal analysis.

Keep in mind, this is an overview, and I have skipped over and over-simplified a lot. Keep following ODA to learn more about art, art history, art appreciation, and creating your own art collection. Have a question or a topic you would like me to cover? Send me an e-mail at lindsey@owendecart.com.   

If you want to take a deep dive into art historians, I highly recommend Michael Podro’s, The Critical Historians of Art. I do want to note that many areas of art historical methodology are problematic because, for a long time, it was a bunch of old white guys congratulating other old white guys about their artistic endeavors. I will be publishing additional resources that promote scholarship and art outside of this tradition, so please subscribe to our newsletter to keep art appreciation moving forward.