Circle and Square

Joaquín Torres García was the Uruguayan-born artist and art theorist who cofounded, along with
Michel Seuphor, the abstract artist group, Cercle et Carré in Paris in 1929. Pablo Picasso had
invented cubism in Paris at the beginning of the century, and a decade later, strongly influenced
by his abstract works, Russian artists began the constructivist movement as part of the Bolshevik
revolution, redefining the foundational structures of art along with those of society. The diverse
abstractionist artists who gathered in Paris were all committed to liberating minds by exploring
the infinite ways that we can conceive of the world around us. They challenged assumptions and
reveled in contradiction. The main theme flowing among them was that abstract art could get at
deeper realms of reality than what mere representation of what we perceive could achieve. The
constructivists believed, furthermore, that while these new forms of abstract art were
dramatically rejecting artistic conventions and reflecting modern industrialist society, they could
at the same time connect individuals with their larger communities, their cultures and traditions,
their histories, the land, even the universe.

Joaquín Torres García called his own art theory “constructive universalism,” while he continued
to use the term “Circle and Square” in reference to abstract art as the construction of reality
diluted down to its most basic forms. These forms carry intrinsic meanings in the symbolic
language of shapes. The circle is all-encompassing, expansive, round like the earth, disposed
toward motion, open to all perspectives, indicative of continuity and infinity. The square is
delineating, steadfast, reassuring in its symmetry, disposed toward containment, definitive of
four directions, indicative of conformity and measure. This symbolism works as a comparison
between philosophies that are connective, inclusive, and progressive versus those that are
divisive, exclusive, and conservative. The former encompasses art and exploration of emotions
and other non-linear views of the world, and as a symbol for social philosophies, it represents
socialism. The square delineates thinking that is hard-edged and right-angled, that wants to
compartmentalize the world, contain it, own it, rationalize it, representing the social philosophy
of free-market capitalism.

Joaquín Torres García went to New York City in 1920. His artwork from that period expresses
his great admiration for the dynamic vitality of the city, but he soon found that he could not fit
into the fast-paced scene there, so he returned to Europe. It was only several years later when
another immigrant first caught site of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, who would
become a major factor in the obscuring of the circle by the square. Alisa Zinov'yevna
Rosenbaum left Russia in 1925, arriving in the New World with the new name of Ayn Rand.
She, too, was greatly impressed with the newness, the promise, the industriousness of the United
States of America, and she immediately jumped into the cultural flow. She went beyond pursuing
the “American Dream,” dreaming up a new ideological framework which was very attractive to a
society that had already become mesmerized by the image of the stalwart square, that was busy
squaring off an entire landmass, dividing it up, owning it and its resources, and that had little
time to unravel the increasingly convoluted paths of connection that held their society together
and allowed for the illusions of separation and integrity.

Ideas such as “the supremacy of logic and reason,” “rational selfishness,” and “individual self-
sufficiency” were a perfect fit for a national narrative that stressed success and Happiness and
ignored poverty and Sadness. Having come from a bourgeois Russian family whose lives had
been turned upside down when the Bolsheviks incited revolution in 1917, Ayn Rand had an
inbred animosity toward the idea of socialism, and she became very passionate about
rationalizing a thought system that severed the connection between the individual and the society
within which they functioned. Thus, the ideology of Ayn Rand, one of the main pillars holding
up free-market capitalism, was nothing other than a reactionary impulse, perfectly timed to play
upon the irrational reactionary impulse that was McCarthyism pandemic. Both were the squaring
off of the circle of socialism's connective power, incited by fear and lack of comprehension that
socialism and democracy were not mutually exclusive, nor were socialism and tyranny bound
together as one. Her allegorical fiction and subsequent development of objectivism offered a
system of thought that, in its romanticization of individual integrity, its over-simplification of the
nature of human beings, and its blind faith in reason and objective reality, seemed very tidy and
unassailable in its logic.

Her straight and narrow line of reasoning, unable to direct itself inward, missed the possibility
that she was simply reverse-engineering ideas that the Bolsheviks and the constructivist artists
had been promoting in Russia when she was a youth. Whereas that movement was about
building social structures from the bottom up, where values were a function of connections to
culture, community, the land, and power came from within the hearts of the people, Ayn Rand's
was a top-down system, where values were objective ideals that individuals would arrive at
through pure reason and logic, and power came from the leaders of society.

That the idea of socialism has been obscured by the forces of free-market capitalism in this
country is a testament not to the enduring power of the square, but rather, to its obstructive
powers to disseminate, to delineate, to divide and conquer. The power of wealth couched in
language about “freedom” and “self-sufficiency” has proven to be monolithic. However, the
power of patient persistence, the power unleashed by the willingness to confront complexity, the
solar power that exposes dark secrets to the light, the golden ring that encompasses the round
world as an interconnected whole and links individuals together as members of a larger
community, is power that draws strength from unity. This connective power that Joaquín Torres
García championed, animated in times that call out for structural change, can run circles around
the solitary, boxed-in, inert square.