The Elucidation of the Concept of Kant's Aesthetic Form and Its Relation to Roger Fry and Clive Bell's Thought

Kant is known as the pioneer of artistic formalism. Art critics and commentators on Kant's works have also confirmed this claim. Kant discusses the form first in the critique of pure reason and then in the third moment of the critique of the power of judgment. According to Kant, what is universal in the judgment of the beauty and could be expected from all people is the form. Unlike the form, the sensory perception of an object varies depending on the perceptual ability of people. Roger Fry and Clive Bell, as formalist critics and artists, put forward Kant's concept of form in the 20th century, and by emphasizing it as the only act of beautifying works of art in the modern era, they played an irreplaceable role in the expansion and development of Kant's view on the concept of form in modern art. This article aims to investigate the relationship between this concept in the thought of formalists and in Kant's aesthetics. It was determined by the conducted investigations that, although formalists consider form to be a kind of temporal-spatial arrangement of the sensuous intuitive manifolds, in terms of their emphasis on the emotional expression of form in contrast to Kant's emphasis on the purposiveness without purpose of the form and the creation of the free harmony of imagination and understanding, there is a great difference between Kant's thought and Fry and Bell's formalist thought.