Robert Campbell on denunciation in Randland

[Brant Gaede]

"Let them starve!"? I don't believe she said this. Reference?

--Brant

[Ellen Stuttle]

A few points answering Robert.

(Jonathan, I haven't read all of what you said. I figured you'd wax lengthily. I might get around to reading the details later; I don't know if I'll answer. As usual, I notice that for all your disclaimers of getting upset by Rand on aesthetics, you sure write a lot objecting.)

I largely agree with Jonathan on Rand vs. Parrish.

Ayn Rand was, well, fairly articulate. If she wanted to render her personal opinion of Maxfield Parrish's work, she could and would have labeled it as such.

Not necessarily. You've already acknowledged in a post to Phil that, yes, Rand did make snap remarks on occasion.

Do you -- or does anyone else here -- have the exact wording of the question she was asked? I don't remember, only that I took the question as the questioner's wanting to know if she liked Parrish (and expecting a yes answer).

On what grounds has anyone concluded that Ayn Rand didn't want to be regarded as an authority on art? If there is evidence to that effect, I'd like to see it.

An "authority" in what sense, Robert? She expected her theories of art to be taken with seriousness. This isn't the same as expecting to be taken as a dictator of tastes, if the latter is what you mean.

In the early 1970s, I knew some Objectivists who liked Maxfield Parrish. The first person I can recall talking about Parrish (to whom I hadn't paid much attention; I'm not a visual art person anyway) was Robert Bidinotto. Bob (as he was then known) seemed to have his own reasons for liking Parrish. I didn't get the impression that he put reproductions of a couple of Parrish's illustrations on the walls of his apartment because he thought Ayn Rand liked Parrish's work. Nor, to my knowledge, did he make a bonfire of his prints after Ms. Rand delivered her one-word dictum. I suspect that Henry Scuoteguazza (an old friend of Robert B's) was being a little sarcastic in his references to such bonfires.

I wouldn't suspect Robert Bidinotto of copycatism. However, there were a number of NY O'ists whose Parrish prints I'm sure were on their walls because of their belief that they were choosing the right art according to Rand. I got into discussions with a few of these people in which I told them that they were probably misassessing how Rand would react to Parrish. There weren't, of course, literal bonfires lit; Scuoteguazza was speaking metaphorically. However, there was a radical diminution in the number of Parrish prints on NY O'ist walls. I was amused in a sort of gallows humor way -- gallows humor because I hated the whole thing of the copycatism.

Ayn Rand's complaints (in letters, etc.) that her fans mistakenly sent her things they thought she would like never struck me as a way of saying, "Don't try to figure out what I would like, because you shouldn't treat me as an authority and therefore what I would like should not be of any personal importance to you." I interpreted them to mean, "Don't try to figure out what I would like, because I am probably more discerning than you are, and your sense of life will definitely not measure up to mine."

I don't read the remarks either of those ways. I read them, the ones I recall seeing, as meaning what they said, that she felt an odd sense of embarrassment when people made her these gifts, so often getting it wrong. I know of two actual instances. One of them, I was there and saw her expression as she politely refused the gift.

I'm not saying that she didn't give people close to her a hard time over their tastes which disagreed with hers. The Blumenthals are the prime example. She became increasingly upset over not being able to convince them of her "sense of life" (i.e., moral) assessments regarding certain painters, especially Rembrandt, and certain musicians, especially the "3 Bs" and Mozart. I suspect she was becoming worried she was wrong.

There were other times when she became angry, when she blew up over one of her close friends expressing "sense of life" judgments she didn't share. But I've never gotten any impression from any of the accounts I've read or heard that she was expecting a change of opinion because she said so. And I don't credit any of the stories of her kicking anyone out for having tastes which weren't hers.

--

I put "sense of life" in quotes because I don't think the term identifies something which is what I call a psychological "real" -- an actual psychological process and/or dynamic and/or gestalt. I think that what Rand meant by the term is sort of descriptive -- and one can sort of get what she meant -- but that the idea falls apart on close examination. I decline to get into a discussion of the point, just explaining my use of scare quotes.

--

Phil, a detail re Rembrandt and the "too dark." I think with a number of his paintings the darkness was because of accumulated dirt, and the paintings have been cleaned up. I heard this on a music program -- the connection being a Mahler composition which references a Rembrandt painting which the conductor, David Zimmerman, said had been cleaned up along with other Rembrandts.

Ellen

[Philip Coates]

I think you're right about Rembrandt, Ellen. Here's something from Wikipedia at least about the famous "Night Watch" : "For much of its existence, the painting was coated with a dark varnish which gave the incorrect impression that it depicted a night scene, leading to the name by which it is now commonly known. This varnish was removed only in the 1940s." I saw it in Amsterdam and still felt it was too unnecessarily dark. I've seen photos of other paintings by Rembrandt, as I recall, and have felt the same. Sort of like film noir which has been filmed all at night or in the rain as a fake way to create moodiness. Invest in a floodlamp or some more candles, dude.

Now, Capuletti doesn't have that problem. Sometimes, in fact, I think some of his canvasses could benefit from some gradations, some darker shadings.

By the way, a stupid conservator can damage or remove shadings and gradations. That was done with Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling. They removed some grime, but they also removed some shadow and shadings and some of the figures have been made more two-dimensional and look as if they were bleached. I've compared them side by side and, as a non-religious person I can shout "Sacrilege!" (Now, of course, Jonathan the Shadow Troll, who stalks my posts will probably do a line by line refutation of my thoughts and I'll probably ignore him as usual.)

Edited October 4, 2009 by Philip Coates

[Jonathan]

Johathan -

Curious as to why you say Parrish is "much more famous than Rand" (#41). While I have no hard data, my intuition is just the opposite. Can you cite any hard numbers?

Yeah, somewhere around here I've got numbers on the sales of Parrish's art, as well as some other stuff on his popularity and exposure. I'll post them if I can find them.

J

[Jonathan]

Now, of course, Jonathan the Shadow Troll,

Please, Phil, enough with your childish food-fights, vendettas and name-calling.

who stalks my posts will probably do a line by line refutation of my thoughts and I'll probably ignore him as usual.)

No, I'm not going to do a line-by-line this time. I would be interested, though, in hearing about your education in the visual arts. You frequently talk about the importance of learning subjects by properly studying them systematically. Have you taken and passed any post-secondary courses which cover color theory, perspective, composition, proportion, etc.? Do you think that having such knowledge of the visual arts is relevant to appraising paintings and the skill levels of the artists who created them?

J

[Ellen Stuttle]

I'll answer a couple of Jonathan's points/queries -- out of order.

On the "Parrish The Thought" thread, you asserted that Rand disliked Parrish for the same reasons that she disliked The Sound of Music. You say that she thought his work showed a fairy tale world, and that she believed that such stuff wasn't actually benevolent. Could you provide details about how you came to be so certain about the reasons that she disliked Parrish? In that discussion, were you also claiming that Rand thought of Parrish's figures as being androgynous, or did you mean that that is your opinion of his work, and that you feel that Rand would have shared your opinion?

How I came to feel (fairly) certain about her reasons was through one or another of "the usual suspects" telling me. Since I didn't hear it directly from Rand, I'm only fairly certain, not entirely certain. (Never mind that "certain" might not be considered to admit of degrees.) I'm not sure with which of the usual suspects -- i.e., persons who knew her well -- the subject came up. What was the date of the Q&A? That might help with my remembering who. I kinda think it was X during a dinner conversation, but that dinner might have been too early.

I'd already anticipated that people who expected her to be enamored of Parrish were probably wrong. A hunch, based for one thing on her own writing style, for another on hints, such as her general dislike of "fairytaleishness" (my word, not hers), her not liking the story of "The Sound of Music," and things she said about the paintings she did like.

I, too, think a lot of Parrish's figures are androgynous. Maybe only in a small fraction of his work, but, Jonathan, on what basis would you assume AR had seen more than a small fraction of his work?

(I know, I know, how dare she evaluate on only a small fraction! Horrors. But just maybe that is what she was doing.)

--

As to her judgment of Capuletti's technique, I'm not finding the words "sheer perfection of workmanship" in the article about his work. Maybe they're there and I'm missing them even reading through, pretty quickly, twice.

She does, though, highly praise his technique:

"Capuletti"

The Objectivist

Volume 5, Number 12

December 1966

pg. 13

A dramatic economy of means, selectivity, precision and bold, pure colors are the dominant attributes of his style, made by a technique of such disciplined power that it appears effortlessly simple.

There are no smears, no blurs, no dissolving shapes, no messy brushstrokes. The subtlest gradations of color are broken into distinct areas with discernible boundaries: one does not see them, at first glance; one sees only the effect of unusual clarity; but look closer, if you wish to observe a virtuoso technique.

If conceptualization consists of organizing an indiscriminate perceptual chaos in terms of essential characteristics, [*] then Capuletti's style creates and imparts to his viewers a conceptual method of vision: the ability to see in terms of essentials -- an unobstructed, unwavering, incisive power of sight.

[*] "indiscriminate perceptual chaos"? That doesn't fly even in terms of her own theory of concepts, which she was publishing at the very time she wrote this piece. But never mind.

I think that makes clear what she's talking about. Does it occur to you that maybe the features which to your trained eye make him "mediocre" are ones she didn't even notice? That the issue might not be her confusing technical excellence with her liking the work but her not having the kind of technical background in regard to painting which you have?

(How dare she render an opinion then! She wasn't qualified. Well, no, she wasn't. Not on painting. Horrors.)

(She wasn't qualified on music either, though as best I'm recalling at the moment, the only opinion of technical merit she expressed which was out of line -- wildly out of line -- with expert opinion was her calling Mozart "pre-music." Her being generally in line with expert opinion, however, doesn't mean that she knew the whys. I.e., she might have acquired her opinions about technical merit in music through being told by teachers and others. One thing I'd be interested to know is what sort of training in music especially, but also in painting, she was given at the school she attended -- the "Stounin"? sp? Apparently the school was prestigious and the teachers were considered good ones. They'd have had little if any by way of recordings of classical music back then -- and the grammophone sound is awful for classical music anyway. So I suppose teaching would have been based on scores and going to live performances. Plus one of her sisters, the middle daughter, studied to be a concert pianist, so Ayn would likely have heard piano works of major composers live at home.)

Ellen

Edited October 4, 2009 by Ellen Stuttle

[jeffrey smith]

I think you're right about Rembrandt, Ellen. Here's something from Wikipedia at least about the famous "Night Watch" : "For much of its existence, the painting was coated with a dark varnish which gave the incorrect impression that it depicted a night scene, leading to the name by which it is now commonly known. This varnish was removed only in the 1940s." I saw it in Amsterdam and still felt it was too unnecessarily dark. I've seen photos of other paintings by Rembrandt, as I recall, and have felt the same. Sort of like film noir which has been filmed all at night or in the rain as a fake way to create moodiness. Invest in a floodlamp or some more candles, dude.

Now, Capuletti doesn't have that problem. Sometimes, in fact, I think some of his canvasses could benefit from some gradations, some darker shadings.

By the way, a stupid conservator can damage or remove shadings and gradations. That was done with Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling. They removed some grime, but they also removed some shadow and shadings and some of the figures have been made more two-dimensional and look as if they were bleached. I've compared them side by side and, as a non-religious person I can shout "Sacrilege!" (Now, of course, Jonathan the Shadow Troll, who stalks my posts will probably do a line by line refutation of my thoughts and I'll probably ignore him as usual.)

Phil--have you been able to see the Sistine Chapel in person since the conservation work was done? I saw it immediately after it was completed (including the Last Judgment), and found it impressive because it was so free of dark. In terms of shadings, etc. it seemed to match the painting of the Holy Family in the Uffizi, which I saw about two days later, close up and at eye level--and which seems to be just about the only other painting by M. we have. It probably is important to remember that that was at least the second dose of conservation work (possibly more) done on the Sistine frescoes, not counting the guy who painted the breeches soon after Michelangelo's death, which were removed by later conservation; also important to remember that M. didn't consider himself primarily a painter, and that he was doing this as a fresco, which probably had a bearing on how much shading and gradation he might be able to do (not to mention how much of it he did on his back). I think, everything considered, that the result of the conservation work has resulted in something reasonably close to what M. painted. (I have, it should be remarked, no idea of what the conservation history of the painting in the Uffizi might be.)

One painter who definitely did not deal in shadows was El Greco. I've walked into a gallery not knowing one of his paintings was there (Edinburgh National Gallery), and realized that I was seeing an El Greco just looking across the room because of how brilliantly it shone compared to the rest of the paintings in the room: it was rather like light turned into something durable, in comparison to the rest of the paintings in the room (including a Rembrandt that probably could have used a good cleaning itself).

[Philip Coates]

> Phil--have you been able to see the Sistine Chapel in person since the conservation work was done? I saw it immediately after it was completed (including the Last Judgment), and found it impressive because it was so free of dark. [Jeffrey]

If you are seeing it from ground level, it is so high up and you are so far away any shadings would be harder to see than in photographs in art books, which is what I've seen before and after. Pre-cleaning the Sistine ceiling blew me away, I was rooted to the ground. I don't remember what year they 'cleaned' them but I remember in particular a woman's arm as one striking example. If you see a painting of an arm, often the front is brightly lit by room light or sunlight or whatever, while it shades off as you go around the arm. My recollection is that that was true of the original arm (maybe it was one of the Sibyl's?), but after the cleaning, the entire arm was all the same shade. That was only one example, but it's the one that has stayed in my recollection.

" [some] such as the art historian James Beck of ArtWatch International, have been extremely critical of the restoration, saying that the restorers have not realised the true intentions of the artist. This is the subject of continuing debate." -- Wikipedia

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/4576 ---> "The philosophically all-important details, plus the original glorious orchestration of chiaroscuro effects, are gone from the cleaned sections." OTOH--> (") These vanished marvels never existed, their expungers insist, except by accident. To quote the restoration director's circular reasoning: "The cleaning of the frescoes has led to the surprising conclusion that the kind of suggestive painting by shadows for which Michelangelo was admired until a few years ago was essentially the product of candle-smoke and…glue varnishes." (")

I do recognize the difficulty of removing centuries of varnish and dirt and restoring those brilliant colors (good job!) without removing any shadings or subtleties or any bleaching-like effect. I would prefer the subtle gradations or shadings and less vibrant colors, if that had to be the choice.

Edited October 5, 2009 by Philip Coates

[Brant Gaede]

Restorers have always been destructive in their arrogance and ignorance. Why didn't they consider the matter first, for another 100 years? Because they'd be dead and gone so get to work NOW!

--Brant

no desire to see it anymore

[jeffrey smith]

> Phil--have you been able to see the Sistine Chapel in person since the conservation work was done? I saw it immediately after it was completed (including the Last Judgment), and found it impressive because it was so free of dark. [Jeffrey]

If you are seeing it from ground level, it is so high up and you are so far away any shadings would be harder to see than in photographs in art books, which is what I've seen before and after. Pre-cleaning the Sistine ceiling blew me away, I was rooted to the ground. I don't remember what year they 'cleaned' them but I remember in particular a woman's arm as one striking example. If you see a painting of an arm, often the front is brightly lit by room light or sunlight or whatever, while it shades off as you go around the arm. My recollection is that that was true of the original arm (maybe it was one of the Sibyl's?), but after the cleaning, the entire arm was all the same shade. That was only one example, but it's the one that has stayed in my recollection.

" [some] such as the art historian James Beck of ArtWatch International, have been extremely critical of the restoration, saying that the restorers have not realised the true intentions of the artist. This is the subject of continuing debate." -- Wikipedia

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/4576 ---> "The philosophically all-important details, plus the original glorious orchestration of chiaroscuro effects, are gone from the cleaned sections." OTOH--> (") These vanished marvels never existed, their expungers insist, except by accident. To quote the restoration director's circular reasoning: "The cleaning of the frescoes has led to the surprising conclusion that the kind of suggestive painting by shadows for which Michelangelo was admired until a few years ago was essentially the product of candle-smoke and…glue varnishes." (")

I do recognize the difficulty of removing centuries of varnish and dirt and restoring those brilliant colors (good job!) without removing any shadings or subtleties or any bleaching-like effect. I would prefer the subtle gradations or shadings and less vibrant colors, if that had to be the choice.

Hmmm. The Sibyls were meant to be stand ins for a sculptural framework, weren't they? Which would imply Michelangelo would have painted them in a way that suggested the light source was the natural/candle light of the Chapel itself, as opposed to any part of the painting itself--which would mean your observation about how arms appear in most paintings would not necessarily apply to the Sybils.

Naturally, it is more than a little bit hard to actually view the ceiling frescoes in the Chapel itself--especially when you're doing it package tour style, at the height of the summer tourist rush. My chief impression was of the Last Judgment, the one done last by the conservators, with the gigantic Christ and (more importantly to this discussion) everything in vibrant color. (This was in 1994, just after the completion of the conservation work.)

And I did have a good chance to examine the Holy Family, which is exhibited as a normal painting--eye level, on the wall, viewpoint standing in front of it with access not impeded by other tourists or barriers--in the Uffizi. The use of shadows, etc. seemed to match what I saw in the Sistine.

[Philip Coates]

Unfortunatly, though I'm not seeing Holy Familty that way - at least from art photos, this is one of those debates that it's hard to have without slides, a projector, and a pointer.

I'm dubious that MSK is going to buy those things for me, no matter how enormously high I am in his esteem. B)

Edited October 5, 2009 by Philip Coates

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Phil,

I might be convinced to buy you a "Holy Familty" if I knew where to get one...

Michael

[Jonathan]

As to her judgment of Capuletti's technique, I'm not finding the words "sheer perfection of workmanship" in the article about his work. Maybe they're there and I'm missing them even reading through, pretty quickly, twice.

The "sheer perfection of workmanship" comment was about a painting called El Muro, which is the image of a cracked plaster wall with keys hanging on a ring above a pistol. It's the image about which Rand rather arbitrarily excused subject matter for which she would have denounced other artists if they had included it in their work.

She does, though, highly praise his technique:

"Capuletti"

The Objectivist

Volume 5, Number 12

December 1966

pg. 13

A dramatic economy of means, selectivity, precision and bold, pure colors are the dominant attributes of his style, made by a technique of such disciplined power that it appears effortlessly simple.

There are no smears, no blurs, no dissolving shapes, no messy brushstrokes. The subtlest gradations of color are broken into distinct areas with discernible boundaries: one does not see them, at first glance; one sees only the effect of unusual clarity; but look closer, if you wish to observe a virtuoso technique.

If conceptualization consists of organizing an indiscriminate perceptual chaos in terms of essential characteristics, [*] then Capuletti's style creates and imparts to his viewers a conceptual method of vision: the ability to see in terms of essentials -- an unobstructed, unwavering, incisive power of sight.

[*] "indiscriminate perceptual chaos"? That doesn't fly even in terms of her own theory of concepts, which she was publishing at the very time she wrote this piece. But never mind.

I think that makes clear what she's talking about. Does it occur to you that maybe the features which to your trained eye make him "mediocre" are ones she didn't even notice? That the issue might not be her confusing technical excellence with her liking the work but her not having the kind of technical background in regard to painting which you have?

The issue of Rand not having the technical background to make the statements she makes is the act of her confusing technical excellence with her personal tastes. Rand liked Capuletti's work, but instead of simply saying so, she tried to disguise (intentionally or not) her personal preferences in the language of an objective, technical appraisal.

I think that a younger Rand, who wasn't yet adored as an authority figure who possessed all the answers, but was still questioning everything, including the phrasing of the questions used to question everything, might have begun by asking herself and her readers which criteria one should use in evaluating a painting. She might have pondered which things a person who knows nothing about the visual arts would need to learn in order to judge whether or not an artist's work actually displays "disciplined power," "virtuoso technique," or "sheer perfection of workmanship." Instead, we see in the excerpt that you posted that Rand considered none of those questions but simply smuggled in her own subjective tastes and preferences as if they were universal objective criteria for judging art.

She liked what she imagined were "bold, pure colors," and she disliked what she characterized as "smears," "blurs," "dissolving shapes," and "messy brushstrokes," so, lacking any real technical knowledge of the visual arts, those personal preferences became the criteria that she used to fill the void.

(How dare she render an opinion then! She wasn't qualified. Well, no, she wasn't. Not on painting. Horrors.)

Horrors? No. It's just rather silly for someone to be writing -- especially for publication -- about "virtuoso technique" and such things when she has no idea of what she's talking about. It comes across as bluffing at being objective instead of having the courage to admit that she was simply giving a personal opinion and sharing her joy for artworks created in a medium about which she was uninformed.

J

Edited October 5, 2009 by Jonathan

[jeffrey smith]

For the benefit of others, here's the picture of the Holy Family Philip and I are talking about:

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/michelangelo/holy-family.jpg

This matches fairly closely my own memory of what the painting looked like up close and personal. For those not familiar with the conventions of Renaissance art--the bratty looking kid on the extreme right is a St. John the Baptist, already dressed for his life in the wilderness.

Also pictures of the Edinburgh El Greco I mentioned (although I remember it being much more luminous that this image suggests)

http://pics.livejournal.com/kishnevi/pic/0006dxew/

And for comparison purposes, this fresco of the Conversion of St. Paul which seems to be unrestored, and is also by Michelangelo, although it resides in another part of the Vatican with its companion, the Crucifixion of St. Peter.

http://pics.livejournal.com/kishnevi/pic/0006exbk/

Edit: The above are the URLs. The forum software has informed me that I am "not allowed to use that image extension on this board". The first image is from the Webmuseum; the other two are posted at my now nearly dormant LiveJournal account. If the URLs don't work, they can be seen here: http://kishnevi.livejournal.com/47147.html?mode=reply

[Ellen Stuttle]

As to her judgment of Capuletti's technique, I'm not finding the words "sheer perfection of workmanship" in the article about his work. Maybe they're there and I'm missing them even reading through, pretty quickly, twice.

The "sheer perfection of workmanship" comment was about a painting called El Muro, which is the image of a cracked plaster wall with keys hanging on a ring above a pistol. It's the image about which Rand rather arbitrarily excused subject matter for which she would have denounced other artists if they had included it in their work.

Ah, I find it now. I missed it on rapid skimming. I don't agree with your "rather arbitrarily excused [...]."

The issue of Rand not having the technical background to make the statements she makes is the act of her confusing technical excellence with her personal tastes. Rand liked Capuletti's work, but instead of simply saying so, she tried to disguise (intentionally or not) her personal preferences in the language of an objective, technical appraisal.

I'll imitate Dragonfly for once and say "Oh come on." I.e., you read into her lack of technical knowledge about painting her confusing the types of evaluation and then you proceed to assume suspect motivations. Likewise with your comment:

It comes across as bluffing at being objective instead of having the courage to admit that she was simply giving a personal opinion and sharing her joy for artworks created in a medium about which she was uninformed.

To whom?

Ellen

Edited October 6, 2009 by Ellen Stuttle

[Jonathan]

Likewise with your comment:

It comes across as bluffing at being objective instead of having the courage to admit that she was simply giving a personal opinion and sharing her joy for artworks created in a medium about which she was uninformed.

To whom?

To me.

Are you saying that you think that Rand would have freely admitted that her comments on Capuletti were not objective, and that they were just the subjective opinions of a layman?

J

Edited October 6, 2009 by Jonathan

[Brant Gaede]

Likewise with your comment:

It comes across as bluffing at being objective instead of having the courage to admit that she was simply giving a personal opinion and sharing her joy for artworks created in a medium about which she was uninformed.

To whom?

To me.

Are you saying that you think that Rand would have freely admitted that her comments on Capuletti were not objective, and that they were just the subjective opinions of a layman?

Since she wrote them she thought they were true statements. If you were to dispute this she'd probably take it as impugning her integrity.

--Brant

[Dragonfly]

The "sheer perfection of workmanship" comment was about a painting called El Muro, which is the image of a cracked plaster wall with keys hanging on a ring above a pistol. It's the image about which Rand rather arbitrarily excused subject matter for which she would have denounced other artists if they had included it in their work.

Yup. In an earlier post I wrote: "In her aesthetic theories she stresses the importance of the subject of a painting ("It is the selectivity in regard to subject - the most severely, rigorously, ruthlessly exercised selectivity - that I hold as the primary, the essential, the cardinal aspect of art" [Ayn, please put down that hammer, I get your point..."] "That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art"), but when her favourite Capuletti paints "a still life featuring a solid expanse of old, peeling, blotched, cracked plaster" it suddenly becomes a "tour de force", "beautiful and inspiring"."

In other words, all that talk about the selectivity in regard to the subject can go straight into the circular file, she completely refutes her own theory here.

[Jonathan]

Likewise with your comment:

It comes across as bluffing at being objective instead of having the courage to admit that she was simply giving a personal opinion and sharing her joy for artworks created in a medium about which she was uninformed.

To whom?

To me.

Are you saying that you think that Rand would have freely admitted that her comments on Capuletti were not objective, and that they were just the subjective opinions of a layman?

Since she wrote them she thought they were true statements. If you were to dispute this she'd probably take it as impugning her integrity.

--Brant

I don't doubt that Rand believed that some of her statements were true, such as her comments on the purity of colors and the lack of "messy" brushstrokes, but I think that, deep down, she had to know that she wasn't a connoisseur of the visual arts, and that her statements about virtuosity and perfection of workmanship would sound as if she was trying to convince people that she was. But I could be wrong. It's possible that she actually believed that she was giving an objective evaluation when pointing out what she liked about Capuletti's work, and that, despite her lack of knowledge, she was somehow nevertheless qualified judge who was or was not a great painter.

J

[Jonathan]

The "sheer perfection of workmanship" comment was about a painting called El Muro, which is the image of a cracked plaster wall with keys hanging on a ring above a pistol. It's the image about which Rand rather arbitrarily excused subject matter for which she would have denounced other artists if they had included it in their work.

Yup. In an earlier post I wrote: "In her aesthetic theories she stresses the importance of the subject of a painting ("It is the selectivity in regard to subject - the most severely, rigorously, ruthlessly exercised selectivity - that I hold as the primary, the essential, the cardinal aspect of art" [Ayn, please put down that hammer, I get your point..."] "That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art"), but when her favourite Capuletti paints "a still life featuring a solid expanse of old, peeling, blotched, cracked plaster" it suddenly becomes a "tour de force", "beautiful and inspiring"."

In other words, all that talk about the selectivity in regard to the subject can go straight into the circular file, she completely refutes her own theory here.

I found the full Rand quote on El Muro at Papertiger:

"(El Muro) is a tour de force: it is a still life featuring a solid expanse of old, peeling, blotched, cracked plaster wall. If ever there was a subject for the modern cults of decay and degradation, this was it. You would not believe that it could be made beautiful - beautiful and inspiring by the sheer perfection of workmanship; neither did I until I saw it."

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Rand did venture into technique in painting and she did position herself as a rule-setter and final authority. She most certainly did. I have always had difficulty with this, too, even in my Randroid days. Here is a passage from The Romanic Manifesto, "Art and Cognition," pp.48-49.

The closer an artist comes to a conceptual method of functioning visually, the greater his work. The greatest of all artists, Vermeer, devoted his paintings to a single theme: light itself. The guiding principle of his compositions is: the contextual nature of our perception of light (and of color). The physical objects in a Vermeer canvas are chosen and placed in such a way that their combined interrelationships feature, lead to and make possible the painting's brightest patches of light, sometimes blindingly bright, in a manner which no one has been able to render before or since.

(Compare the radiant austerity of Vermeer's work to the silliness of the dots-and-dashes Impressionists who allegedly intended to paint pure light. He raised perception to the conceptual level; they attempted to disintegrate perception into sense data.)

This is one of the few passages by Rand that I consider to be gobbledygook.

I learned from her herself that the method behind conceptual thinking was integration. She hammered this home time and time again. This translates into "pattern recognition" at the identification stage.

So what is Impressionism if not pattern recognition? In other words, you have to step back and integrate an Impressionist painting in order to get it.

I can see not liking a certain mistiness or blurriness in this technique up close, but from far away, some of the Impressionist paintings I have seen are stunningly beautiful and clear.

Rand did not trash a specific work here. She trashed the entire technique and set a philosophical standard for a "proper" painting technique. This always struck me as Rand seriously overreaching her expertise.

If she judged Impressionism to be "silliness" as a technique, I wonder how she judged comic books...

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

But I could be wrong.

Yeah, you could be.

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

Re the quote from "Art and Cognition," that article was written 5 years later than the piece on Capuletti, and Rand had had extensive conversations in between with Mary Ann Sures, who taught courses on art appreciation. Whether Mary Ann's theory of the "conceptual method" of painting is a good one is another question, but it was an attempt at a systematic theory.

Ellen

[Brant Gaede]

Likewise with your comment:

It comes across as bluffing at being objective instead of having the courage to admit that she was simply giving a personal opinion and sharing her joy for artworks created in a medium about which she was uninformed.

To whom?

To me.

Are you saying that you think that Rand would have freely admitted that her comments on Capuletti were not objective, and that they were just the subjective opinions of a layman?

Since she wrote them she thought they were true statements. If you were to dispute this she'd probably take it as impugning her integrity.

--Brant

I don't doubt that Rand believed that some of her statements were true, such as her comments on the purity of colors and the lack of "messy" brushstrokes, but I think that, deep down, she had to know that she wasn't a connoisseur of the visual arts, and that her statements about virtuosity and perfection of workmanship would sound as if she was trying to convince people that she was. But I could be wrong. It's possible that she actually believed that she was giving an objective evaluation when pointing out what she liked about Capuletti's work, and that, despite her lack of knowledge, she was somehow nevertheless qualified judge who was or was not a great painter.

I don't think AR was a "deep down" person in the sense you mean.

--Brant

[Jonathan]

But I could be wrong.

Yeah, you could be.

Ellen

Uh huh, and your opinions on Rand's asethetic/moral judgments are just as speculative as mine, despite the certainty with which you've expressed some of them. Rand was unpredictable when it came to her tastes in art. She could be quite informed and objective while discussing one work of art and then uninformed and subjective while discussing another. She sometimes adhered to her definitions and her proposed methods of judgment and classification, and she sometimes deviated from them, or downright contradicted them. She might denounce or dismiss art which perfectly fit her concept of romanticism, and she might arbitrarily overlook subject matter which she felt represented the glorification of one type of evil or another. She was too complex and mercurial for anyone to know what she might have believed, and why, about any artist or his work.

J