The Life of a Style: Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art

What does it mean to say that a form of art is "exhausted", that an artist has brought his or her work as far as it can go, that modernism began with Edouard Manet, or that cubism reached a natural ending in 1914 (even if members of that movement continued to paint in a cubist style)? Contemporary theories of art history tend to treat such issues as matters of narrative form, of the manner in which history is represented -- with beginnings, turning points, and endings belonging to the narrative itself, and not constrained by historical fact. In The Life of a Style, Jonathan Gilmore claims that such narrative developments inhere in the history of art itself.By exploring such topics as the discovery of perspective, neoclassical models of composition, the end of cubism, and the evolution of Jackson Pollock's paintings, Gilmore proposes a way of understanding how artistic styles develop in an internal or organic fashion and how their development relates to their social and biographical contexts. In Gilmore's view, there are intrinsic limits to a style, limits that are present from its beginning but that emerge only as, or after, it reaches the end of its history.