Christian Michel

UNEXPECTED ILLUSTRATIONS OF AYN RAND’S PHILOSOPHY OF AESTHETICS

Libertarians do not often tackle the subject of art at their meetings and in their publications. Yet, one of the great sources of inspiration for most libertarians is Ayn Rand, who did not hesitate to make such forceful statements as “Art is inextricably tied to man’s survival” and “Of all human products, art is perhaps the most important” (to this last statement she added “..and the least understood”).

Why is art so little understood by libertarians and why do we neglect art studies?  We libertarians write much about economics and the law, and certainly artists encounter the same types of problems we denounce in these two areas: confiscation of their work, censorship, all kinds of limits on their freedom of expression.  Outside these two areas, however, libertarians are mostly indifferent to the plight of artists, possibly for two reasons:  first, virtually all artists today lean towards collectivist/statist political inclinations, and secondly, most of what modern artists produce and profess to be “art” is considered by most people as trash, certainly when it comes to painting and sculpture. By the same token, artists have little time for libertarians, who they perceive (quite correctly) as a threat to state support of their activities.

Amidst this confusion on the art scene in our century, Ayn Rand offers an original theory of aesthetics. My intention with you today is to put this theory to the test, to see where it leads us to.  I shall focus on paintings and sculptures, and more specifically, I will examine how Rand’s aesthetics can help us to reassess certain artistic works that are for the most part spurned today, specifically art produced under the National/Socialist and Communist regimes. I propose to start by summarising Rand’s philosophy of aesthetics, and then I shall comment on a few slides of paintings and sculptures of the National/Socialist and Communist periods.

Ayn Rand’s philosophy of art is developed in several essays, which have been collected in a book entitled The Romantic Manifesto.

Before examining Rand’s view of aesthetics, however, let us begin with her epistemology. Rand believed that her philosophy was a fully integrated system, that all its elements -- aesthetics, ethics, epistemology -- were interrelated, and Rand’s epistemology is the foundation of her aesthetics.

In her epistemology, Rand draws our attention to the fact that we humans obtain our information about reality through a process of integration. We integrate from a lower level of awareness to a higher one:  from senses into percepts  and from percepts into concepts. The very first information we glean about our world comes to us through our senses:  an object is either hot or cold, light or dark, big or small. At this level, we function not unlike animals.  But where animals can go no further, humans can.  Humans can identify sensory data as objects and can put a name on them, i.e., humans can form percepts (these green and tall objects out there are trees, and “tree” is a percept), and then we can progress by integrating two or more single isolated percepts into a concept (these trees form a forest). Even if I cannot see the forest (for instance, it may extend for miles and I am not in a helicopter), I still know by process of abstraction that all these trees form something that I, and all of us, can identify as a forest.

Now, to make things a bit more complex, Rand differentiates between two types of concepts:  one type states the facts of reality: a forest, an orchestra... These are cognitive abstractions. They tell us what is. The other type deals with what ought (or ought not) to be. These are normative abstractions, for instance “beauty”, “truth”, “good”, “evil”. This is precisely what ethics is concerned with. Normative concepts are what we use to guide us in our actions and to set ourselves goals.

All of these concepts are integrated into metaphysical value judgements. True value judgements maintain unity and coherence in a man’s life. Rand poetically labels this inner personal coherence “A theme song of a person’s life.”

What has all this to do with aesthetics, and specifically with painting and sculpture ?

I have just stated that human cognition begins with the ability to perceive entities directly through our senses, mostly by touch and sight. However, to quote Rand “All the arts are conceptual in essence, all are products of, and addressed to, the conceptual level of man’s consciousness.”

This is a fundamental point because we have here Rand’s repudiation of all forms of abstract paintings. Abstract painting and sculpture do not attempt to deal with the viewer above the level of the senses, i.e., the animal level.

In her essay Art & Cognition, Rand states:  Whereas the essence of art is integration,  “the keynote and goal of modern art is nothing less than the disintegration of man’s conceptual faculty”. She goes on to say  “To reduce man’s consciousness to the level of senses, with no capacity to integrate them is the intention behind the reducing of painting to smears and of sculpture to slabs.”  Abstract art, therefore, is a war against reason.

Most people who do not have a vested interest in the abstract or modern forms of art disregard them. This is because their experience of modern art does not satisfy a profound need.

The profound need for art is to solidify for the viewer fundamental values, such that these can be grasped directly as if they were percepts.  This is a more convoluted way of saying: a picture is worth a thousand words.  If I say to you “This man is an Apollo,” even those of you unfamiliar with Greek mythology will have seen enough illustrations of statues of Apollo to know what type of man I am referring to. Art is the means by which an artist can summon into full conscious focus his view of the fundamental nature of reality.

So we can now begin to formulate the definition of art that Rand offers in Art & Cognition: “Art is a selective recreation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgements.”

Thus art is a concretisation of metaphysics. Few men, however, have an explicit metaphysics; few have a carefully-considered, systematically-integrated view of reality, and even fewer a complete philosophy. Art, therefore, is an embodiment not of an artist’s philosophy, but of the artist’s fundamental view of man and existence. This fundamental view is what Rand calls a “sense of life.”

I would like to explain this in more detail, because it is important for my thesis. One’s sense of life, Rand writes, is formed by a process of “emotional generalisation.” Unlike other types of abstraction, this process consists of classifying objects according to the emotions they evoke, of “tying together by association or connotation all those things which have the power to make an individual experience the same or a similar emotion.”

Rand illustrates this principle of “emotional abstraction” with this series of contrasts:

For a child, the contrasts are: a new neighbourhood, a discovery, adventure, struggle, and triumph ;

versus the folks next door, a memorised speech, a family picnic, a known routine, comfort.

On a more adult level, Rand offers the following contrasts:  a heroic man, the skyline of New York, a sunlit landscape, and pure colours;

versus a humble man, an old village, a foggy landscape, muddy colours, etc.

The emotions evoked by such images depend entirely on an individual’s estimation of himself. In Rand’s view, therefore, an individual who possesses self-esteem – be they child or adult -- will feel, I quote, “admiration, exaltation, a sense of challenge” in response to the first set of examples, and “disgust or boredom” to the second; whereas an individual lacking in self-esteem will respond with “fear, guilt, resentment” to the first set of examples, and relief, reassurance, and safety in response to the second.

A conscious philosophy does not take the place of one’s sense of life.

If art is required to communicate moral values, the primary focus of art is unethical. Rand states that “moral values are inextricably involved in art, only as a consequence, not as a determinant.” She further observes that a distinguishing characteristic of art is that it is an end in itself, serving no purpose other than contemplation. It is important to keep such statements in mind later as we consider the difference between art and propaganda.

Now that we have briefly revisited Ayn Rand’s aesthetics, let me take you through a few slides of paintings and sculptures to illustrate what I have just described.

The relationship between our mind and objects consists in how we think about the objects, how we form ideas about them. But there is always a distance between the idea and the object. The real object is always larger than the concept that is supposed to hold it. Yet human nature leads us to assume that reality is what we think of it.

When I saw the painting above by the Belgian artist René Magritte at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, there was a young American couple trying to figure out the meaning of the banner in French (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”).  So I confirmed to them that, yes, it means “This is not a pipe.” “But it is a pipe, right?” the young lady asked. By chance, I had a matchbox from my hotel in my pocket, so I handed it to her and told her to go ahead and light the pipe.

In a way, ideas are unreal. When we attempt to realise our ideas, what we really do is derealise them. They cease to be ideas, and instead become actions, events, objects, enterprises, paintings, etc.

A traditional portrait painter claims to be able to capture a real person on canvas.  In truth, what a portraitist does is to set down on his canvas a schematic selection -- decided arbitrarily by his mind -- of the infinite traits that make up a living person. This is precisely Rand’s definition of art: “A selective recreation of reality.” 

I do not know whether the two sisters painted here by Chasseriau were as boring in real life as they look in this painting. We can only hope for their sake that Chasseriau’s selective recreation of their reality captured only their dull moments.

Of course, this is the problem with art; it is only selective reality, it is not reality. There is always a gap which the artist can never hope to bridge.

Modern artists decided to throw in the towel altogether. Why bother to attempt to paint the real person when this always meets with little success?  If we decided instead to paint  our own idea of the person, the portrait would become the truth, and failure would no longer be inevitable.  Expressionism, cubism, abstract art; these artistic styles are based on this inversion of the traditional relationship between art and reality, as Rand advocates it. The painter ceases to paint objects, and instead paints ideas.

It is only an amusing coincidence that the women depicted by Chasseriau and Picasso (right) strike an identical pose. I have not seen any evidence that Picasso wanted to paint his own version of the relatively insignificant Chasseriau double portrait, as he did with Velasquez’s Meninas, for instance.

Rand wrote her four essays on art in the 1960s. So what she refers to as “modern art” is the art of, say, the previous 30 years; art produced between 1930 and 1960. In painting and sculpture, the big names of this period were Nolde, Kandinsky, Dali, Paul Klee, and Max Ernst, among others.  The common characteristic of all these artists is a real loathing for living forms,or at least the forms of living beings.

Throughout the history of art, there have been many examples of fads against depicting images. The iconoclasts in Oriental Christianity and the Moslem law against representation of human beings are just two examples. Even in prehistoric times, we observe that the living form was often abandoned, with artists stylising a serpent into a meander, the sun into a swastika, etc.  Modern art is obviously going through one of these iconoclastic surges.

But why the current hatred of human forms?  The trend may be changing now, but throughout the period between 1920 and 1970, there was a definite desire of artists to dehumanise art. Modern artists were motivated by an aversion to the traditional interpretation of realities, i.e. to the tradition handed down to us by the Greeks through the Renaissance, and to the classical cult of the beauty of the human body.

This painting to

the left is by Nolde

Most modern artists claim that they have no teachers, and when they do acknowledge an influence by any older artistic works, they mention prehistoric periods or savage primitivism. In other words, these artists find their inspiration in peoples lacking in any formal tradition.

When artists condemn any and all artistic styles that preceded them, what else can this mean but that the artists are turning their back against Art itself?  For what is art, concretely speaking, if not such art as has been made up to now?

(Left is a painting by Max Ernst)

I had some difficulty attempting to illustrate this presentation with slides of National/Socialist and Soviet paintings.  Most National/Socialist art was destroyed during the Second World War or immediately thereafter, and the little that remains is never exhibited. Same too for Soviet art. The Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, for example, had until 1991 an entire section devoted to Soviet paintings, and several other Russian museums displayed an impressive number of significant works, all of which have now been relegated to the basement storage rooms.

This is a portrait of Ekaterina Kruglikova by Mikhaïl Nesterov. Nesterov, was very active even before the Soviets came to power and actually specialised in paintings with religious themes.

This portrait dates from 1938. The artist used large brushstrokes, reminiscent of Frans Hals, but these draw our gaze towards the one element of the painting that is graphically precise, the animated face, and especially the single eye.  It is this eye that is the most important element of the painting. Kruglikova was an engraver, someone with a keen eye for detail. The view of St Petersburg on the wall is not accidental and is probably an engraving made by Kruglikova herself. The light in the room is the bright light of the Northern countries.  This light falling on the black of the dress makes the fabric seem almost alive.  This contrasts with the black of the piano which is wooden and stiff. The almost masculine hand holding a cigarette (the working hand of an engraver) is softened by the flower. The pose is totally unnatural, but it conveys a sense of purpose; this is a woman with a precise purpose to her life.

This is another portrait by the same artist, Mikhaïl Nesterov, and the sitter this time is the sculptress, Vera Mukhina. In the painting, we are witness to Mukhina at work. Unlike the Kruglikova portrait, there is no setting here, no accessories; these have instead been replaced by action. The figure of the sculptress and the model sculpture she is working on occupy the entire surface of the canvas in a close-up. As befits an artist, it is Mukhina’s creation that first attracts the viewer’s attention, and thanks to the direction of the movement, our eye is then drawn to the artist’s determined face. Thus the whole composition is an unusual  diagonal, which lends extraordinary dynamism to the painting.

The clay model of the sculpture on which Mukhina is working in this painting is called Boreas, an allegory of the North. Mukhina is famous for another sculpture which, more than any other work of art, has become a powerful artistic symbol of the Soviet Union.

Even if you have never heard of Vera Mukhina, you have most likely seen a reproduction of this monumental sculpture.  It was originally perched atop the Soviet pavilion at the Paris World Exhibition in 1937. It now stands on one of the garden rings in Moscow. Ayn Rand used to say how much she enjoyed MichelAngelo’s heroic works. Yet, Rand as we all know was a militant atheist, and almost all of Michelangelo’s crea­tions are of a religious nature. There are several possible interpretations of any work of art. We may be moved by the Pieta in St Peter’s in Rome, not because we see in it the Mother of God mourning the crucified Lord, but because we see a representation of both female beauty and universal sorrow. In this sculpture by Mukhina, we see the embodiment of pure energy.

In William Blake’s poem, “The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell”, the devil says “Energy is Eternal Delight.” Historically, the depiction of energy was the very first artistic subject. But originally, this energy was identified only with animals. When we look at the first paintings in Lascaux and Altamira, humans are ludicrously tiny figures compared to the muscular and powerful bulls or the racing antelopes.

It is only at the time of the Greeks that Man too came to symbolise energy. Through the sculptures of athletes and heroes, we can all relive this energy in our own bodies. And when we become conscious of it, this embodiment of energy becomes a source of deep artistic pleasure.

This is what “sense of life” means. In Nesterov’s portrait, we become acquainted with Mukhina’s character. The painter captured on canvas Mukhina’s focused expression, her determination. Here we see her own sense of life embodied in her work. Despite the political symbolism of the hammer and sickle, we need not interpret this sculpture as communism moving forward;  it represents the glorification of any worker and peasant, any human being as worker and creator.

Directly opposite the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition stood the German pavilion. Albert Speer was the architect. It was a huge edifice, the biggest building of the whole exhibition. The entrance to the main hall was flanked by two statues, each 7m tall. This is one of them; the sculptor was Josef Thorak. The sculpture personifies “Comradeship”. In the Mukhina sculpture, we saw energy in movement; the man and woman charging ahead. Here there is no movement at all. Since the ancient Greeks, artists have faced the difficulty of how to depict energy in a stationary figure.  Attempting to show movement in sculpture, itself an extremely static medium, could instead give the viewer a feeling of limitation. The Greek sculptor Myron, as you may know, solved this problem in his work, Discus Thrower, in which he shows the athlete at the precise moment when he completes his backswing before swinging forward with the discus.

In this sculpture, the two males are standing still. Yet a feeling of energy is still conveyed, not by the movement, but by the potential of the movement, and the mass of the muscles shows how powerful this movement will be when released. The art historian Kenneth Clark identifies a stylistic figure he calls the heroic torso. It is the nude torso that immediately attracts the viewer’s attention and projects this feeling of energy.

As we shall see (and the painting above by Lieberman is a good example), nude figures turn up everywhere in National/Socialist art.

And they are very nude figures indeed, as you can see from the above painting which hung in Hitler’s own living room in his private residence in Munich.

No fig leaves or idealised body forms here.  This is surprising from a regime that was so puritanical, and the complete opposite of Soviet art, where nude figures are almost never seen. The reason for this is obvious when you consider the ideology of each regime. A nude body reveals its racial purity, whereas clothing indicates belonging to a specific social class. The painting here, by Adolf Ziegler, represents the Four Natural Elements: Fire, on the left, depicted by a torchbearer; Water, a woman with a bowl; Earth, a woman with a bundle of wheat; and finally, by deduction, the woman to the right must be Air.

In the above painting, clothes tell the whole story; there is no need for a setting. The people portrayed are manual workers. Actually, the name of this painting by Victor Popkov is The Builders of Bratsk, Bratsk being a city in Siberia. These figures are not heroic, in the sense that the subjects are not meant to be superhumans. But we can see that these people have done strenuous work, and they have done it well, they are proud of it, and they are ready to start again.

Here too, clothes tell the story, and the story is one of class struggle. There is no need for further explanation. The concerned look of the factory owner, who understands the peril of the rising revolutionary movement; the driver (with the cap), a traitor to the working class -- he is grinning, blissfully unaware (unlike his master) of the danger that the future holds for him; the defiant worker; and finally the eyes of the other workers shining in the background.

Is this propaganda, you may ask?  Ioganson, the painter (and this work dates from 1950s) desperately wants to teach us something. The action is expressed too obviously in this painting. All the workers are positioned on one side, spatially and psychologically. You cannot understand this story unless you interpret it in the context of class struggle. It is like people showing snapshots of their vacation; you can only be interested if you are part of that story. Likewise, here, we have a private story of people involved in a class struggle, and unless we believe this is our story as well, we leave them to it. We are no longer involved. The painting closes in on itself; it wants you to see only one meaning. There is only one lesson to be taken from this story, but as Rand used to say: “The basic purpose of art is not to teach, but to show.”

And that is the difference between art and propaganda. I am not even going to mention the 22,000 statues of Lenin produced by the Lenin Statue Factory N°5,  the paintings of SS troops storming Warsaw, and all that rubbish. This cannot be considered as art, and therefore has nothing to do with my subject.

Actually, we even have unconsciously reverse propaganda. In an extraordinary sort of way, even under the most repressive political regime, official artists -- in other words, those who obtain government commissions and participate in public exhibitions -- still manage to express their own personal value- judgements in their work. As such, there is a certain ambiguity in their work, which saves these artists from being mere illustrators of the official ideology. 

This painting by Iuri Pimenov is dated 1927. With a title like “We Shall Build A Heavy Industry”, you expect the worst. But take a closer look:  The workers themselves are being engulfed by the very furnace they are feeding. The movement is awkwardly backward, from right to left.  The revolution is devouring its children. The energy, this time, does not come from the individual figures (their expression is meant to be naive, almost primitive), but from the collective, the brute force of the iron scaffolding, and more importantly from the vibrancy of pure colours.

There is a furnace in this painting too, but of a different kind. This is 1942. Constantin Eliseev shows us all these soldiers marching forward to an ominous fate. They are like robots under their steel helmets, and yet just here in the middle, look, there is a human being. 

The Nazis used to criticise the Soviets for portraying work of only the industrial kind, the work of the machine. National Socialist iconography shows work as the activity of huge, muscular men, of peasants -- and peasants not behind tractors, but behind large, muscular horses. Ecology was born under Hitler. It was the Nazis who began the Cult of Nature in its modern sense, what is referred to as “deep ecology”. The first government agency specifically organised for the protection of the environment was established in Germany in 1936.

This painting dates from 1938. It shows an idyllic landscape, a depiction of harmony and communion with the German Vaterland. But the artist, Werner Peiner, could not help but show menacing clouds on the horizon. And his intuition was, of course, correct. By their very sensitivity, artists perceive events that may not be clear to the rest of us. They are like scouts who travel to places where we have never been, and who return to tell us what they have seen.

The same intuition of a doomed future led Adolf Wissel to give an almost neurotic look to this German family. The date is 1939. It is as though these people know that they will never enjoy a happy family meal together. Note the superb painting technique, the clarity of the vision. It is precisely this type of technique that Rand appreciated in artists such as Vermeer.

The young Aniska, whose portrait

we see now, is a member of the Communist Young Pioneers organisation; you can tell by the red scarf she wears around her neck. What is moving in this picture is that the painter, David Sterenberg, has chosen to show the girl in the uniform of a collective organisation, while at the same time conveying a feeling of absolute loneliness.

The point I wish to make in showing you these paintings is this: an artist possesses a sense of life, as Rand describes. This sense of life finds its expression in the artist’s work, even before any specific political philosophy. Sometimes, this sense of life contradicts the official ideology so much that the artist cannot help but to introduce an element of doubt in the very political message he is delivering.

When Fritz Klimtsh sculpted this Galathea in 1939, the Nazis were certainly swift to proclaim this model as the embodiment of Aryan beauty. In my opinion, it is the embodiment of beauty, full stop. Any ideological content here is superfluous, whether it be for or against the work of art. Of course, beauty also has something cold about it; it is simply too perfect, and it lacks any vulnerability that would allow us to relate to it.