Earlier this year I published Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, a collection of essays on how to look closely at sculpture. One of my upcoming projects is a companion volume, Getting More Enjoyment from Paintings You Love. It will include essays from the past twenty-five years or so, most previously unpublished. As I work on it, I’ll be writing occasional posts about issues that arise.

The first issue was: Do I have enough material for a book, or will I need to write additional essays? I found out when writing last week’s post that I do indeed have enough essays. In fact, I have more than two dozen, so I may end up cutting a few, depending on how the book reads when I’ve put them all together.

The next issue is: who is this book aimed at? That will determine the style of the essays – whether they’re casual (speaking to a friend) or academic (arguing a point). The choice of audience affects not just the main text; it also determines the “hook” at the beginning of the book and (eventually) the angle for marketing. So I need to look at who the essays were originally written for, and then consider the audience for Getting More Enjoyment from Paintings You Love. Who do I most want to read this book?

National Gallery, London essays

I became interested in looking closely at art at an Objectivist conference in the mid-1990s, when I heard Mary Ann Sures give a lecture on painting and sculpture. It amazed me to hear Mrs. Sures state that one can objectively determine the theme of a work of art, and can objectively discuss why it rouses specific emotions in a given person. She gave a bravura performance that day, backed by decades of learning about and teaching art history, including years as a docent in the National Gallery, Washington.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Sures published very little on art: “Metaphysics in Marble” is the notable exception. She occasionally offered lectures at Objectivist Conferences, but in the 1990s, those only occurred every other year. (Can you imagine?!) I’m not a patient person. I decided I’d try to figure out myself how to identify a theme and evaluate works of art.

As I said last week, my original attempt was a series of essays on paintings at London’s National Gallery. Given that Ayn Rand and Mary Ann Sures had inspired my interest, and that I was hoping to present this material to Objectivists, it made sense to assume knowledge of Objectivist terminology.

The main points in my introduction to the National Gallery essays were:

1. What does it mean to identify the theme of a work of art?
2. What is an objective method for analyzing a work of art?
3. Analysis of an art to identify its theme is not deductive. It’s an inductive process, and therefore may seem messy.

An excerpt from the introduction:

Suppose I show you a painting and say, “You have five minutes to identify the theme and justify your identification.” Is your reaction anxiety? Discomfort? Annoyance? Good for you: it should be at least one of the above. Leaping from the concretes of a painting to an abstraction such as its theme, without knowing the proper methodology for doing so, is bad epistemology. In fact, there’s a name for higher-level concepts that one can’t reduce  back to concrete, perceptual knowledge: floating abstractions. Most Objectivists have scrupulously trained themselves to avoid floating abstractions. No wonder, then, that discussions of the visual arts make them uncomfortable. Little work has been done to standardize terminology or determine essential elements, never mind to set out a method for analysis and evaluation.

What we need is a way to proceed step by step from the concretes of a painting through a series of general statements to its abstract meaning. Then stating a theme will be a natural progression, not a leap of faith, and moving from there to an esthetic evaluation will be a logical step, not an emotional reaction. This paper aims to demonstrate the method for proceeding from a painting’s concretes to its theme.

What should we call this process? “Esthetic evaluation” is incorrect, since that requires judging the work of art as well as identifying its theme.  Because this paper does not deal with evaluation,  let us use the term “analysis,” in the sense given in Webster’s: “separation of the whole into its component parts,” or an “examination of a complex, its elements and their relations.”

I have assumed a basic knowledge of Ayn Rand’s writings on art, particularly her definition of art as “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.”   Her works are cited throughout this paper, and the annotated bibliography at the end suggests further readings.

If you’re familiar with Ayn Rand’s writings, you’re probably nodding agreeably. Terms such as “epistemology” and “floating abstraction” were familiar to the audiences I spoke to at the New York Objectivist Club, at Lyceum International, at The Jefferson School, and at Second Renaissance Conferences.

But if you aren’t an Objectivist, you probably tripped over “epistemology” and “floating abstraction”, and stopped dead when you ran into “selective re-creation of an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.” I made some very good points in that introduction, and I’d like to keep them in the next iteration … but they’ll need to be restated for a general audience.

Next week: more on the audience for Getting More Enjoyment from Paintings You Love.

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• In Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, I demonstrate a method for looking at sculptures in detail, in depth, and on your own. Learn to enjoy your favorite sculptures more, and find new favorites. Available on Amazon print and Kindle formats.
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