In art historical discourse, Kant and Greenberg are often held responsible for “formalism.” [1] Here “form” or “formal qualities” are taken to mean line, shape, and colour and the relationships among them, while “formalism” is cursorily reduced to an approach that “emphasizes the autonomy or primacy of formal qualities” [2] and is then conflated with “Modernism.” Even the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics entry on “formalism” identifies Kant’s influence: “An important philosophical source” for the thesis that “all artworks are to be primarily valued for their formal properties…can be found in the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant.” [3]