Edward Winkleman – What Is Style?

In this post Edward Winkleman recounts a personal experience that brought up the eternal question of how one can define style, and whether or not any artist can truly claim a style as his or her own. An excerpt:

“An example: I take a ball . . . if this ball is drawn by Leonardo, by Ingres, by Degas, by the Douanier Rousseau or by a normally gifted student of the Beaux-Arts, it will have a good chance of being presented with the same features . . . What style, then, are we able to attribute to these different artists?

True style . . . is set forth so skillfully and effectively as to become invisible . . . Greco makes a show of style . . . Velásquez has no style.

. . . We have all been able to imitate Lautrec, Cézanne, Renoir or the Negroes . . . No one has ever risked imitating Velásquez.”

—Fragments of a Conversation with Derain recollected by Georges Hilaire, 1944, May 1960

Rather shocking today the way Andre lumped all of African art together, but his declaration, while fabulous, prompted this memory buried deep in my mind…a voice back there somewhere coughed into its hand and said, “Uh, well, actually…someone did imitate Velásquez, and I’m not talking Picasso or Bacon’s recreations, but an actual daring daylight theft.”

Then of course, I couldn’t stop thinking about it until I recalled who had done so. So I revisited the Velásquez’s I knew and this work seemed to be the missing link:

“That’s the one!” the voice proclaimed. “Someone dared to imitate that painting.”

My brow furrowed at this point. Derain didn’t claim that no one had repainted the same subject matters…but that no one would risk trying to imitate Velásquez’s style…because it was so refined that you’d fail.”

Click here to read the complete post.

Image in the post is of the Valezquez painting that Winkleman discusses in his post.