Love and Form, Part I
July 28, 2026 | by Emily Chun
The most important, most extreme, and most incurable dispute is that waged in us by two of our most basic strivings: the one that desires form, shape, definition and the other, which protests against shape, and does not want form.
—Witold Gombrowicz
The idea for this essay emerged from the realization that what I perceived to be the primary questions of love––how to calibrate the perfect balance of closeness and space, or how to ensure my autonomy while also indulging my desire to be engulfed and entwined––might also double up as problems of form. Relational problems, it turns out, are formal problems. This essay is a provisional attempt to flesh out this thesis of the isomorphic relationship between love and form. It is not concerned with works of art that illustrate love as its subject matter. Rather, I am suggesting a thinking of love through the impersonality of form, and how love can be thought via formal concepts like symmetry, line, and color. The brutal indifference of form to our projections, fantasies, interpretations, theories, and ekphrastic transformation––in other words, form’s seeming facticity––is what makes form both autotelic (autonomous, having an end in itself, totally independent from what can be said about it) and paradoxically, so vulnerable to being instrumentalized for external claims (about the artwork’s context, history, sociopolitical function, and so on). In making a case for how easily formal concepts lend themselves to love’s expressions, it seems I risk performing the latter, though in the examples that follow, I am not sure whether these artworks demonstrate precepts of love or that my theory of love simply proves to be intractably formal.
We often conscript form against content; they constitute an “old metaphysical opposition” as Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois put it in their 1997 book Formless. We see form as a vessel that transmits content or meaning but is not inherently meaningful in itself. One byproduct of formal analysis––the systematic investigation of visual elements in a work of art comprising the bedrock of art historical training—is that we inherit ready-made ideas of what form does, performs, carries, or stands for, i.e. form is that which we see—in a work of art—and which we then translate verbally. Form seems disarmingly uncomplicated in this way, but it stands as one of the most vexed questions in cultural history. Criticisms of formalism throughout the past century has, as Eugenie Brinkema lays out in her 2022 book Life-Destroying Diagrams, followed similar tunes: formalism tends toward bloodless abstraction (not just in the arts—the mathematician Ludwig Bieberbach wrote in 1919, railing against modern styles of mathematical thinking: “The tendency towards formalism must not cause us to forget the flesh and blood over the logical skeleton”); formalism retreats from political or ethical commitments, brackets itself off from the world and its messiness; or formalism is ahistorical (Barthes complicates this in Mythologies by stating, “I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from history, but that a lot brings one back to it”). “Greenbergian formalism” is regularly brandished by many who have never actually read Greenberg as a vibes-based shorthand to characterize any mildly dour, sanctimonious approach of privileging the visual elements first and foremost in a work of art. But it’s true, we have for too long swept the wonder and mystery of form under bland terms like “formal beauty.” Form, like love, is an end unto itself. Emotion and affect are often sublimated into form; is it possible to reverse-engineer, to read for love and intimacy in form?
I. Line
When I first saw Manet’s Olympia (1863) in an undergraduate class, I was struck by the outlining of the courtesan’s body. Since seeing this painting for the first time, I have read many masterful exegeses of this painting, but what remains most salient to me is still the odd, abrupt contouring of the nude body and Manet’s disregard of three-dimensional modeling. Manet’s jamming of the nude’s representational protocols, T. J. Clark writes, “breathed a kind of skepticism at the ways that likeness was normally secured.” Olympia was met with absolute outrage and confusion upon exhibition in 1865. Faced with utter indeterminacy in an image and unable to assimilate the painting into their existing models of knowledge, critics at the time accused Olympia of travestying Titian and art history writ large.
Clark beautifully describes the courtesan’s body as being “tied down by drawing, held in place quite harshly—by the hand, the black bootlace around the neck, the lines of charcoal shadow.” A body tied down by drawing—can form do that? Can line not just render a body, shepherd a body into material existence, but imprison a body, hold it hostage, bind it, by virtue of its inaugurating force? The certitude of the line that holds down her body has always felt to me a kind of visual confirmation of her autonomous personhood. As a 19-year-old feeling my way through college and life as an amorphous, formless glob, I wanted to be outlined with such certainty too.
So if visual delineation via line implies ontological autonomy (particularly against the background of the maid Laure, the other figure in Olympia), what does that mean for love? I find that desires for formal definition––for delineation––are central to relationships: where do I end, and where does this other person begin? Issues of interdependency, boundaries, and individuation in relationships are, at their core, issues of delineation, of contouring, of drawing lines. They bring into relief the contradictory demands of love. To what extent am I an entity distinct from this other person, though we are endeavoring to build a fully integrated life together?
In his 1955 book on schizophrenia, The Divided Self, psychiatrist R. D. Laing describes a person who experiences himself as “real, alive, and whole” as “ontologically secure,” whereas an “ontologically insecure” person possesses no such “firm sense of his own and others’ reality and identity as distinct from one another.” The ability to see ourselves as distinct—in identity, reality, and embodied form—is crucial to the condition of “ontological security,” though sometimes, in love, this distinction can (and perhaps should, to an extent) erode. This erosion happens because of the fundamental negativity of love in its requirement of surrender: Hegel writes, “the true essence of love consists in giving up the consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another self.”
II. Color
Color, maybe more so than other formal elements, is marked by its absolute relativity. Note the two small squares of the same camel color in this diagram by Josef Albers. The squares appear as two different colors depending on their neighboring colors: the top square looks like a lighter shade than its twin below. No color retains its identity for too long; every color is changed by the color next to it. Proximity, according to color theory, is transformation. This is also how love seems to function: my love manifests differently (or I sometimes feel like a different person altogether) depending on who I am with, who I am proximate to, who the recipient of my love is.
Many people have experienced at some point the profoundly unsettling experience of, say, being jealous in a relationship only to find out that with other lovers, they do not feel any jealousy. The explanation afforded by the endless pop-psychology discourse of attachment styles is that some people bring out different degrees of clinginess or avoidance in us by virtue of what our bodies are subconsciously feeling at the nervous system level, but I think the answer is simpler, i.e. that we, like color, are relative, and we are changed by the people we love and who love us. In its truest form, love is spiritually enlarging, if we let ourselves be tenderized and touched and changed through relation, like colors.
The relativity of color feels generous because it frees us from being obsessed with some mythic essence or ontology of color. Phenomenologically, color is not a thing or an essence but a form of composition, which is to say, a relation. (Emmanuel Levinas, in Humanism of the Other: “Man approaches man. He is stitched of responsibilities. Through them, he lacerates essence.”) Colors, by their nature, do not hold onto their autonomy; they are too fluid, too vulnerable, too open to being perceived as a literal different color depending on who they are next to, who they are in relationship with.
III. Symmetry
Morris Hirshfield’s Two Women in Front of a Mirror (1943) depicts two nude women combing their hair and applying makeup as they watch their reflections. In lieu of an actual mirror, though, is what looks like an ornamental frame or a proscenium arch that is not made of glass but is filled with strands of black hair. The drapes that frame this faux-mirror on either side, along with the vase in the middle of the foreground, form a symmetry that ensconces the two nudes, who share tenuous symmetry with each other (both the nudes’ feet are pointed inwards and their faces are both turned in) but who ultimately form their own self-enclosed symmetrical loops. Despite the two nudes’ differences in bodily comportment, face, and hair color, the general composition seems, on the whole, quite balanced and symmetrical.
What is striking to me about this painting is that perfect mimesis, mirror image, or geometrical symmetry is not necessary to invoke a general sense of symmetry. Symmetry could be achieved through asymmetry. This is comforting to me, a person who tends toward Thomas Aquinas’s model of romantic union based on “formal sameness,” in which two become one. Lovers’ union, for Aquinas, arises from formal likeness, or symmetry. Whether this symmetry translates to aligned modes of loving (similar “love languages”), equal efforts in nurturing the relationship, or congruent ways of seeing the world, it is constantly under threat, in Aquinas’s valuation, of permuting and losing center. But Hirshfield’s painting manages to maintain a sense of balance and symmetry despite—or maybe because of—the dissimilitude of its two figures. It is a symmetrical relation that does not demand complete homology but solicits, maybe even welcomes, chirality.
Byung-Chul Han cautions against the desire for absolute formal likeness with one’s lover, as it can flatten their otherness into what he calls the “inferno of the same.” Such a desire, Han writes, robs the loved one of otherness and “degrades [them] into a mirror. . . affirming the latter’s image.” If such perfect symmetry was possible, if I were to, for example, perfectly experience your grief as you experience it, such symmetry would obliterate your experience and your otherness.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the two nudes’ asymmetrical symmetry is how they somehow appear to be gazing at each other while at the same time gazing at their own reflections. Love is a kind of asymmetrical intimacy that allows you to meet yourself fully, repeatedly, through the gaze of the Other. Or as a mentor of mine likes to say, love and art are both processes through which you become who you always have been. You become the most honest and pure version of yourself. This sort of identification, as Barthes says in Lover’s Discourse, is not a psychological process; it is a structural or formal operation, one of placement and form and composition.
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One of the pitfalls of looking at a lot of art––even out of love––is that it becomes really easy to assume that just because something is available to my vision, it is immediately intelligible. But through protracted formal analysis (by which I mean returning to look at the same artwork over and over again), I am always shocked by the fact that an artwork which I was confident I knew intimately keeps revealing to me hitherto unnoticed formal elements. In this way, loving someone and formal analysis are alike: both require cultivating a kind of sensitivity, or an ego death that allows you to see the loved one or the artwork as they are, as worlds unto themselves, beyond what they serve for your own desires or needs.
My friend Parker recently introduced me to the philosophical work of Iris Murdoch through an essay she penned for The Point. She writes about Murdoch’s idea of “unselfing”: the discipline of “seeing the other in all their glorious particularity. . . How can I view this person lovingly? What about my own desires and motivations is blocking me from justly seeing the other? (The self, in this sense, can be just as opaque as the other.) This reorientation of the moral gaze is what Murdoch calls ‘loving attention.’” This is one of the best descriptions of both formal analysis and love I can think of.
About the Author:
Emily Chun is a writer in New York and a PhD candidate in art history at Stanford. Her writing about art can be found in Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, e-flux, Frieze, among others. She is also a member of the curatorial collective Below Grand in LES.