Idealism - 20c.

Idealism, in the context of art, refers to a stylistic departure from the realistic appearance of things in order to portray more accurately the ideal essence of things. In other words, the idealist artist is someone who ignores the flawed forms of things found in nature, and this permits him or her to grasp and portray the idea of things without flaws. In this way, the idealist artists seek to re-create the perfect ideational forms of things that nature has only imperfectly rendered. This approach to art is closely affiliated with Plato's philosophy, which maintains that tangible objects, as they appear in the world, are imperfect copies of the ideal forms of objects as they exist in the sphere of ideas. 

Of course, Plato ultimately came to denounce artists because their works were imitations of the forms found in nature, which were themselves only imitations of the ideal forms of things as they take shape in the mind. Hence, for Plato, art was the pale imitation of another pale imitation. But the tradition of idealist art attempts to short-circuit this chain of pale imitations. For the idealist artist, the goal is to imitate the ideal form of a subject directly, completely bypassing its natural form.

 

 Julius Evola 'Tendencies of Sensory Idealism' (1916-1918)