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ALEXEY LOSEV ABOUT THE MYSTERY OF ART STYLE
Abstract
Style is a fundamental category of aesthetics and the study of art: it is easily defined but hardly lends itself to theoretical research. Alexey Losev (1893–1988), a Russian philologist, philosopher and musicologist, presented some examples of the most comprehensive consideration of style as an aesthetic category within the broadest notional context in his main work on this topic “The Theory of Art Style.” However, Losev's idea about an aspect of style that is not divided by any components requires some special explanation. According to Losev, the whole specificity of art lies in the perfect coherence between the plane of expression and the plane of content as well as between the idea (or the image) and the means of its evocation. An impact of the Neoplatonic paradigm that Losev used to fully share in his works written during the 1920s is clearly conceived here; therefore, the prototype he implied is analogous to the All of the Neoplatonists which reduces the wholeness of the existence to an indivisible point. However, unlike the Neoplatonists and in compliance with some twentieth-century trends of the humanities (e.g. Henri Bergson), Losev interpreted the art form prototype as the process that is gradually developing together with the very form. Therefore, style is seamlessly interfaced with the art form prototype which is the most elusive phenomenon of the creative process. However, on the one hand, style itself stands as the principle of creating the whole potential of an artwork (and thus, as an essential plane of its prototype); whereas, on the other hand, it delivers the finalized structure. Unlike its prototype, style is beyond the scope of any particular artwork and, in many aspects, undertakes the functions of both language and technique as the system of an important means of expression.
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