Size in art is often treated as a technical decision. Yet format has always been tied to what becomes public, what remains intimate, and what is taken seriously. Perhaps surprisingly at Curat House 50% of our conversations revolve around format, and the impact it has on the audience. We’ve been talking it through with Daniel López del Rincón, an Art History PhD and professor at the University of Barcelona and president of the Ibero-American observatory of Bioart.
Beyond his work heading up the TEIDE and TIEMPHA research groups, Dani is someone who sees the hidden context in every canvas. In conversation with him, we explore how scale isn't just aesthetic: it's cultural and political.
As an audience we intuitively understand large formats in large places, in churches or palaces, where works need to be seen from afar. Is large format always meant for museums?
Format usually begins with function. Large-scale works tend to appear when something needs to be communicated publicly — when the artwork is meant for a crowd, not a single person.
If you think about Romanesque mural painting, for example, it was there to convey essential truths to the population. Visibility wasn't secondary — it was the whole point. So scale becomes inseparable from purpose. And those were always commissioned works.
What's interesting is that this starts to shift with modernity, when artists gradually loosen their dependence on commissions and begin working more autonomously.
Was it just a natural evolution to move away from monumental work towards smaller format?
As we said, large format often grows out of architectural necessity — it's conceived with a specific site in mind.
But one of the biggest shifts in scale arrives in the seventeenth century, when domestic painting begins to take hold. With the rise of a Protestant bourgeois culture, paintings start entering the home. And homes, of course, are not palaces. That shift alone changes how we think about scale. Before that, artworks largely belonged to courts or churches — places with both the money and the need to make a statement.
Let's take an example of modern art that is in a large format… say Guernica, which could never fit in a home. Is the theme here dictating the scale? Was it always meant for a museum?
Guernica is a very different case — precisely because it is modern and yet commissioned. Picasso was given two very clear conditions: the painting had to be enormous — roughly three by seven meters — and it had to be political.
Tell us more.
The Spanish Republican government wanted to attract international attention to the Spanish Civil War during the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, especially at a moment when fascist forces were receiving visible support. And they happened to have the most famous living artist in the world: Spanish, politically aligned, globally recognized. It was, frankly, very strategic.
Often large format emerges from architectural thinking — the work is imagined for a particular space before it even exists. But practicalities could work the other way too. Take the Impressionists. People often imagine those paintings as monumental because they're so famous. But when you encounter them in person, many are surprisingly modest in size. Quite simply, they needed to carry them outdoors. Portability shaped the format.
What about format differences within the same movement, such as Abstract Expressionism. European abstraction existed too, yet American works seem gigantic by comparison. How do we explain that difference?
It's hard not to see politics in this. After the Second World War, the United States didn't just emerge as a political power — it also became a major guardian of European avant-garde art. Much of that work had been persecuted by the Nazis as "degenerate," and a significant number of pieces eventually entered American collections. So artists in New York could encounter the avant-garde without needing to travel. That's part of what produces the New York School.
Meanwhile, Europe is physically and emotionally devastated. It makes sense that much of its postwar art feels more restrained, more inward-looking.
There's also a broader cultural atmosphere to consider in American art — a kind of national optimism, especially in the early Cold War years. That confidence translates visually into painting that feels expansive, even heroic.
Is scale ever neutral — or has it historically functioned as a way of assigning who and what is allowed to occupy public space?
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon comes to mind immediately as a use of format to rebel convention. People often assume the shock lies in the subject — these nude figures who are not mythological but prostitutes. And yes, that mattered. But what truly unsettled viewers was the scale.
Images of sex workers already circulated in bohemian Paris. The difference is that they usually appeared in modest formats, which were for subjects considered less important. It was an unspoken agreement.
Picasso breaks that rule on purpose. It feels like a provocation — almost a declaration. And there's a material reality behind it as well: larger canvases cost more. Picasso was not financially secure at the time, so committing to that surface was itself a kind of risk.
Many other artists were deeply uncomfortable with the painting. Braque was one of the few who recognized what was happening.
Again, format tells us something about social structure.
Scale then allows us to understand not just the artwork, but the society that produced it.
Scale is never innocent.
You can look at it through a gender lens. Historically, masculinity has tended to occupy public space — monuments, expansion, symbolic presence — whereas the feminine has often been associated with the private, the interior, sometimes even the invisible.
Take Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner — they were married. Pollock's canvases are bold, physical — you feel the movement, the aggression, the bodily engagement. He spoke about painting from the unconscious, almost as if he were pouring himself onto the surface.
Lee Krasner, working alongside him, often uses smaller formats. Even their working environments reflect this difference: Pollock spreads his canvases across the floor of a barn, while Krasner paints inside a room.
So questions of scale are never purely optical. They are spatial, social, and political at once.
A sketch might once have functioned almost like a private notebook. Enlarging it, exhibiting it — these moves push it into public space. Suddenly it feels important, authoritative, almost heroic.
Are there other examples where format radically alters meaning?
Think about Dürer's studies of hands. These were working documents — never intended for display. The moment you frame one, however, you elevate it. You grant it the status of an artwork. A sketch might once have functioned almost like a private notebook. Enlarging it, exhibiting it — these moves push it into public space. Suddenly it feels important, authoritative, almost heroic.
Claes Oldenburg understood this beautifully when he monumentalized everyday objects — matches, stamps — giving ordinary things an unexpected presence.
Pop artists remind us that scale is not just bigger — it's better, more important.
Which leads to an unavoidable question: what does it mean when we decide an image deserves monumentality?
Exactly. Scale commands presence… and you're deciding how much the subject matters.