This Histories post comes from a bit of whimsy – I’ve done squares, so why not circles? But just as with the squares post, researching the use of stories in history ended up throwing up some themes of their own.
Circles are more natural than squares – which sounds pseudo-profound, but is actually just a fact. Visible nature doesn’t really do sharp angles, but it does do curves. Things which I can quickly think of which are circular to the human eye: the centre of flowers, eyes, the sun, worms (cylinders but you get my point). Squares? Apparently perfect squares naturally occur at molecular level, but that’s not what I’m talking about this time. That’s not the level which has directly influenced thousands of years of visual perception.
Circles may be classed as a geometric shape alongside squares, but in popular perception they’re barely of the same class. If I wrote previously about squares being boringly masculine, circles are tediously feminine. This goes beyond my perception – it’s borne out in use and psychology. Pedigree charts use a circle for female descendants, a square for male. Modern psychology bears out how widely we consider some shapes more ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ than others. And each of those words still contain a heap of biases and stereotypes about ‘natures’ that we’re so conditioned with that we can’t – or perhaps don’t want to – shake. Circles aren’t just differentiated from squares by the number of vertices & corners, but by a whole range of cultural associations.
But art hasn’t necessarily leaned into this. Call it the effects of patriarchy (I won’t argue), but the need to rationalise this more naturally-occurring phenomena is strong. There is, for example, a story behind the Rembrandt below – perhaps more of a theory – that the circles consciously reference his lineage to some of great artists who had gone before him. The ‘first art historian’ Vasari told a story that Giotto proved his genius to the Pope by sending him a perfect circle drawn by hand. This anecdote itself is taken straight from an Ancient Greek story about Apelles, who accomplished a similar feat. Whether backdropping a self-portrait or marking out the heavens in 18th-century India, the perfect circle is the mark of genius. So what about the imperfect circle? I’ve chosen a couple of examples which show its status in early 20th century art as that marker of something not quite opposite to perfect, but certainly different. What Kandinsky and af Klint have in mind is knowledge, but not of the worldly kind Rembrandt seems to be striving to demonstrate. They show a humanity, a connection to nature. They admit our humanity, that we screw up. The same force which are partly – though the cultural circumstances also go deeper – at work in Tjangala’s “dot painting”, as it captures a culture’s communing with another world. We might have evolved to live in world of geometric rationale, but the imperfect circle is a symbol that we keeping in touch with the messiness of humanity it seeks to defy.
And then there’s the Hammons photo. It’s not by chance that his commodity on this day in 1983 was a range of perfect spheres (and I’m counting them because in 2D they *technically* read as circles). It’s the perfect ideal – a form given attention and care, formed out of an (increasingly) rare material. It’s also entirely transitory, with its perfection unable to sustain long-term human interaction. A commodity which literally evaporates once possessed. If you wanted a message about the transience of perfection in a shape, it may be in this image.
Click on the images below to view and read full captions
David Hammons, ‘Bliz-aard Ball Sale’, 1983. Not technically ‘circles’ but ‘spheres’, but I give myself a pass on this one. This was a piece of what I guess you’d call ‘performance art’ in which Hammons spent a day selling snowballs on a street in New York. It’s been interpreted as a comment upon the hollowness of capitalism, life in the face of an increasingly materialist mainstream culture from which many Black people were economically excluded.
Uta Uta (Wuta Wuta) Tjangala, “Yumari”, 1981. Researching this topic I was interested to learn about the history of dot painting, a style which is seen as quntissentially Aboriginal Australian. It actually originated in a settlement called Papunya in the 1970’s, where Aboriginal people had been forcibly settled. Encouraged by an art teacher named Geoffrey Bardon, the paintings emerged from a transition from marking on transitory surfaces such as sand to the permanence of canvas. The style means artists can retell Dreaming stories without depicting the sacred traditions or artefacts of the tribe directly. Tjangala was one of the founding artists of the movement.
Hilma af Klint, “Group IV, The Ten Largest, no.3, Youth”, 1907. Af Klint was a Swedish painter who produced hundreds – thousands – of works, none of which were publicly exhibited until after her death (she stipulated in her will it had to be a minimum of 20 years). As her work has become more known, her renown has grown with it, and some now regard her as one of the earliest abstract painters. Moderna Museet in Stockholm are currently showing a retrospective and I’m sad I can’t go. Af Klint’s paintings aren’t mere flights of fantasy – she was heavily involved in spiritualism, theosophy and seances, and believed her works conveyed direct messages from the spirit world. Colours had meaning, and so did shapes – spirals led to knowledge, and circles, loosely drifting in their space, suggest a spiritual space. Notice as well that they recreate natural floral shapes.
“Self-Portrait with Two Circles”, Rembrandt van Rijn, c.1665-69. It’s not exactly clear why Rembrandt chose to make the background of this self-portrait a blank space with these two circles. One theory is that it’s an assertion of his genius at a time when he had little else. At this point Rembrandt was practically penniless – for all his success he was crap with money management (lesson for us all). As discussed above drawing a perfect circle has a history of being considered a sign of talent, and to draw these two might be the artist putting down his marker. His pose and expression hve also been read as “defiant”, which compliments this theory. Personally, I rather like the contrast between the finesse of the circles and the expressionist, textured style in which he’s committed his self-depiction to canvas.
Barbara Hepworth “Square With Two Circles”, 1963. If you’ve read my comments on the Kandinsky on unity and flow, this is how it’s done! I love how Hepworth uses the square to create a blank space, and then makes the circles a focus with negative space. The driving forces of the sculpture aren’t actually there, but in their absence they give purpose to the surrounding space – both of the sculpture and landscape beyond.
Jain map of the mortal universe, 18th century. There are many cultural stories from around the world in which origin stories, histories and calendars are depicted in circles. Nature is cyclical, after all. Jains have been making these maps since around the 14th century. The construction of the universe and relationships between the ‘world spaces’ in Jain cosmology is complex – you can read more about it here. This image shows the ‘middle world’ or ‘two and a half continents’, which is the only place humans can be born. The outer yellow circle shows the limits of this world, the space beyond which human beings cannot live.
Wassily Kandinsky, “Colour Study. Squares with Concentric Circles”, 1913. Christ, I HATE this piece. It wasn’t actually created as an ‘artwork’ but rather a study for ideas, and I wish it had stayed that way. I think this is an example of the work being taken too seriously because of who it’s by – and I say that as somebody who consider’s Kandinsky’s “Compositions” amongst my favourite artworks. I just don’t get any sense of or purpose to the circles – they’re loose, but not contemplative. There’s too many of them for that, so you end up visually jumping from one to another without any of the unity and flow I usually find so pleasing in his work. The colour palette also upsets me; I don’t find any of his combinations successful.
