The Artist's Mind

A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Creativity, Modern Art and Modern Artists

George Hagman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136896521
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte contemporanea

For the past century psychoanalysts have attempted to understand the psychology of art, artists and aesthetic experience. This book examines how contemporary psychoanalytic theory provides insight into understanding the psychological sources of creativity, Modern Art and modern artists.

The Artist's Mind revisits the lives of eight modern artists including Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, from a psychoanalytical viewpoint. It looks at how opportunities for a new approach to art at the turn of the twentieth century offered artists a chance to explore different forms of creativity and artistic ambition. Key areas of discussion include:

• developmental sources of the aesthetic sense
• psychological functions of creativity and art
• psychology of beauty, ugliness and the Sublime.
• co-evolution of the modern self, modernism and art.
• cultural context of creativity, artistic identify and aesthetic experience.

Through the examination of great artists' lives and psychological dynamics, the author articulates a new psychoanalytic aesthetic model that has both clinical and historical significance. As such this book is essential reading for all those with an interest in the origins and fate of Modern Art.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Ever since Sigmund Freud published his monograph on Leonardo da Vinci in 1910, psychoanalysts have attempted to understand the psychology of art, artists, creativity and aesthetic experience. Over several generations new psychoanalytic models have been promoted which reflect the evolving nature of theory and practice—each explaining art and artists in its own light. The perspective I will use is a contemporary psychoanalytic one, with an emphasis on mind as embedded in cultural, developmental and relational contexts, as well as the importance of self-experience and idealization. In an earlier book (Hagman, 2005) I elaborated the theory behind this new psychoanalytic model, pointing out the developmental origins of aesthetic experience; the role of idealization in early attachment and its bearing on the creation and appreciation of art; the dynamics of the creative process; the nature of beauty, ugliness and sublime experience; and the multiple dimensions of human subjectivity in culture, what George Gadamer calls “festival” (Gadamer, 1986, p. 39). In this volume I will apply these ideas to our understanding of modern art and modern artists. My hope is to illustrate a new psychoanalytic approach as well as increasing our appreciation of the role of individual psychological dynamics in larger cultural developments.

I acknowledge that there is no clear-cut boundary or single definition for modern art or, for that matter, modernism. That being said, I view modern art as beginning with Manet and the impressionists and ending with the abstract expressionist work of Jackson Pollock. It is a broad category that contains many philosophies, various groups and myriad individual practitioners. However, I will work with the following assumptions: modern art and modernism challenged “classical conventions” and continually pursued approaches that disrupted old assumptions and promoted innovation. Aesthetic quality in modern art was diverse and perspectival, it expanded notions and forms of beauty and encouraged subjectivity, expressionism and idiosyncrasy. It was also self-critical; as artists sought to innovate they also inquired into the nature of art itself. Freedom of expression required the aggressive abandonment of tradition and even the deconstruction of the notion of what art is. Modern artists were a new bunch. Unlike the middle-class craftsmen serving the aesthetic tastes of the church, the upper classes and the royals, modern artists were often rogue loners and aesthetic revolutionaries. They hungered to be freed of restrictions so as to execute the most original and personal artworks. They were only satisfied when their creations reflected their most personal, inner vision, and they viewed creativity and art as opportunities for a transcendent, state of self-fulfillment. For them art was a chance at self-healing and, perhaps, a fantasy of immortality.

In other words, this book is about the psychology of art and artists during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The importance of this period for art, artists and modern culture is well known, and I will not try to review the myriad perspectives from which the modern period has been viewed and analyzed. The perspective that I will take is that modern art placed the individual subjectivity of the artist at the center of aesthetic experience and the creative process. Many different factors contributed to this change, such as the availability of cheaper highquality mediums, the expansion of the middle-class art market, the waning influence of large art institutions and academies, and, importantly, the elaboration of aesthetic experience as an internal private process arising from the individual person’s relation to art. However, my argument will be that the new types of people entering the art world also fueled the cultural and institutional changes in aesthetics and the nature of art, as well as the psychology of art and artists. These new artists, coming from outside the traditional art communities, brought a different type of motivation to the artistic career, a motivation to succeed in the modern marketplace, within which the individual genius, the aesthetic revolutionary and the innovator became increasingly important to western culture’s idea of the arts and of artists.

I have chosen a number of artists whose work and lives most clearly represent the technical and psychological aspects of modern art and modernism. They are Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol (in Chapter 4 I explain my choice of artists and their relation to my project). It is the psychodynamics, professional ambitions, creative methods and aesthetic values of these artists that will be my focus. I will attempt to explain why each chose to become an artist; and I hope to explain the developmental source of the unique contribution which each made to the development of modern art. Most importantly, the entire book argues for how the drive for innovation and the creation of a unique individual art form was powered by each artist’s psychological, developmental and relational background. In other words, this book is not a work of art history or of art criticism, or a treatise on aesthetics (although it is partially all of these things), it is a psychoanalytic investigation into the psychological lives of some important modern artists, which I hope sheds light on how the personal, the relational and the cultural play a part in bringing about major artistic changes at a particular time in history.

As a group these moderns were new types of artists. Reacting against tradition, developing new artistic mediums, attacking old assumptions about subject manner, style and even basic ideas about the nature of art, each artist created out of his individual intrasubjective experience new creative approaches and aesthetic forms. The result was an explosion of artistic innovation. At no time in history was art subjected to such intense competition, analysis, attack and revolution. No longer constrained by the traditional art institutions or the financial limits of the art marketplace, these men and women were not just free to do what they wanted, they forever changed the nature of art, the art world, the social role of the artist, and the nature of the artistic self.

In order to understand the motivations of these modern artists we have to better understand the psychological dynamics of aesthetic experience, the creative process and the relation between art and the mind. It is in these areas that this book attempts to offer something new. Building on this, the following is a brief overview of a new psychoanalytic model of aesthetics, art and creativity.

Aesthetic experience is a fundamental dimension of human experience. It is as important as love, sex and aggression, and is part of all human experiences. Ellen Dissanayake (1992) refers to man as “homoaestheticus”, declaring art and aesthetics to be basic to human identity and daily life. Her belief (which this book will support) is that art arises out of the most important aspects of relationships. It is the form of our bodies interacting, the rhythms of breathing together, the soothing or exciting touch of skin against skin, the music of voices in conversation. Out of these human communications is elaborated the dances, music, dramas and visual images that make up art. And it is art that becomes the glue of society; it gives shape to our towns and villages, it entertains communities, it decorates our appearance and our cities. Art is the means by which we celebrate and mourn. It makes real and concrete the subjectivity of people in communities that live day to day and exist over ancestral time.

The source of the power and ubiquity of art is of central importance to human attachment, interaction and interpersonal regulation. The mother holding and caring for her child is the first medium of aesthetic experience and creative life. The beauty of her child’s smile, the shape and color of the child’s body, the clothing with which she keeps him or her warm, all are aesthetically based and are chosen out of the mother’s engrossment and love. And likewise the baby experiences the mother aesthetically: her expressions, the movement of her body, the ebb and flow of soothing comforts or mutually invigorating playing. The shared love and idealization between mother and baby invests the forms of feeling with beauty and special value. The aesthetic experience of this dyad is intense, exciting, and endlessly variable and expressive.

I believe that these basic aesthetics of relatedness are extended and elaborated into the endless forms of aesthetic experience and artistic creations that fill our cultures to overflowing. Art becomes the way mankind affirms its most basic nature, the forms of feeling and relating that characterize our self-experience and our relationships. But art also perfects the human, idealizes the forms and meanings that hold and contain our lives. It is the idealized nature of the formal aesthetic organization of our cultural world which creates an environment that is meaningful, special and at times beautiful—in this way we are protected from the often empty and grim experience of the physical world.

Hence human cultures have encouraged and valued the creation of art. It is why large groups of people adopt familiar ways to dress, to memorialize, to decorate and entertain. A culture is the sum of its many and varied aesthetic forms and artworks. It is art that makes cultures human and it is by means of the arts that culture makes available resources for people to grow and prosper.

In all societies certain people are designated and trained to be artists. This special group is charged with elaborating and perfecting the aesthetic rituals and costumes of the larger group. In most cases they get together around their shared role and work. They share ideas and practices, tools and mediums. They come up with new ideas and new ways to improve on old practices. When they organize they can support and advocate for the artist’s craft and status in society. It is these artists’ special talents, training, learned skills, and shared values that maintain the culture’s aesthetic infrastructure. This is the way that societies marshal and direct aesthetic resources, maintaining and developing new meanings and adapting to changes in the social makeup of society.

Unlike practical disciplines such as engineering, farming and hunting, which adapt to the changing demands of the physical world to increase the survivability of society, art adapts to the changing human environment, giving value and meaning to events that impact on and change society, such as death, marriage, birth, the harvest etc. All cultures tend to conserve aesthetic standards and art forms. Art becomes a means to preserve and maintain the life of the people and the way in which they live together. So cultures tend to resist major changes in art, gradually integrating change into existing paradigms. Change, and indeed revolutionary change, begins and is fueled by dialogue and individual effort. It is the day-to-day struggle of individual artists to survive in society and respond to the changes and demands of the environment (both natural and social) that leads to the rapid and diverse innovations that characterized the modern period of art. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the old cultural institutions changed, losing their control over the production of artists and the art marketplace. The rapidly changing culture made new demands on artists and offered new opportunities. As artists began to respond with innovations and increased production of artwork and ideas, the culture, grudgingly and sometimes violently, responded and changed around them.

As I said earlier, I intend to look at the individual developmental and psychological factors that contributed to the development of modern art. However, unlike prior analytic approaches, I do not intend to focus on artistic imagery or content, the symbols and unconscious meanings that may lie hidden in an artwork like the latent meaning of a dream. Rather, I will be interested in innovations in the creative process, and the artist’s changed relationship to aesthetic experience and aesthetic form. I believe that the sources of artists’ motivation to grapple with these areas lie in the earliest relational experiences and how they have been elaborated into the mature artist’s self-experience, sensibility and creative efforts. Hence I will take each artist in turn and look for the sources of each person’s particular aesthetic innovation and contribution to the development of modernism. As you will see, I believe the sources are in early developmental experiences (some of which were traumatic, but not necessarily) which posed particular challenges for each artist. These conflicts, deficits, preoccupations, etc. contributed to the selection of the artistic career and specific aesthetic projects. I will tie this directly to attempted solutions for early developmental dilemmas and, most importantly, to efforts towards self-healing through art.

A note to the reader: I have chose not to include images of artworks in this book. There are few instances where we will be discussing particular artworks in detail and images of these works are easily available in standard art history textbooks or on the internet. In fact, rather than analyzing specific works, the discussions that follow emphasize the broad sweep of the artist’s career and the evolution of his aesthetic style. Given this, for the reader to get the most from the discussion of the various artists, I recommend familiarizing oneself with a selection of the artists’ works so that engagement in the discussion of the development of style and aesthetic approach can be informed by knowledge of the paintings, buildings or sculpture which that artist produced.

Chapter 2
A new psychoanalytic model of aesthetic experience

When the artist passes from pure sensations to emotions aroused by means of sensations, he uses natural forms, which are calculated to move our emotions, and he presents these in such a manner that the forms themselves generate in us emotional states, based upon the fundamental necessities of our physical and physiological natures.

(Roger Fry, 1909, in Frascina & Harrison, 1987)

This chapter presents a new psychoanalytic approach to aesthetics and creativity from the perspective of contemporary psychoanalytic theory, and clinical practice and research. It includes recent advances in psychoanalytic thinking and self psychology, especially an appreciation of the relational context of aesthetic experience and the role of relatedness and intersubjectivity in aesthetic experience. Several of the most important points of this new perspective are highlighted, specifically: 1) that the source and enduring core of aesthetic experience is found in early childhood; 2) that the special, idealized quality of aesthetic experience has its source in early experiences of mother-infant interaction; 3) that the sense of beauty is an aesthetically organized selfobject experience, tied to specifically maternal aspects of this initial relationship; 4) that the intense aesthetic experience known as the Sublime is tied to the relationship with and experience of the father; 5) that the violation of aesthetic organizations of experience is experienced as a sense of ugliness; and 6) that all aesthetic experiences and artistic efforts possess three dimensions of subjectivity: the intrasubjective, the intersubjective and the metasubjective.

I will start with a brief review of the issues of intersubjectivity and self-experience in the psychoanalytic literature on aesthetic experience. I will then discuss the work of Gilbert Rose, Daniel Stern and Ellen Dissanayake, which links aesthetic experience to the intimacy of parent and child. This idea will be extended to recent psychoanalytic ideas about idealization, beauty, the Sublime and ugliness. I will close with a brief overview of the multi-subjective model of aesthetic experience.

The intersubjective source of aesthetic experience

Psychoanalysts have studied art, aesthetic experience and the dynamics of the creative process for generations. Initially creativity and art were viewed as sublimations, defending against forbidden sexual wishes (Freud, 1908, 1910, 1925a, 1925b). Hence Freud’s approach to the study of art was interpretive in that the symbolic forms of artistic expression were unmasked, revealing hidden fantasies and wishes. This view of the psychology of art and creativity as a type of dream work or defensive operation has been the center of classical psychoanalytic aesthetics. Later analysts viewed art more progressively, with the ego harnessing the resources of the unconscious for the purpose of self-expression (Kris, 1952). This ego-psychological perspective continued to emphasize symbolism, but now saw regression as being at the “service of the ego” rather than the other way around. Eventually analysts such as Gilbert Rose (1980) and Jerome Oremland (1997) would elevate creativity to the status of a complex developmental accomplishment resulting in a higher level of human experience. In keeping with the classical analytic perspective on the mind as a self-regulating system, most analysts have approached the psychology of art and the artist from a primarily intrapsychic viewpoint, only tangentially related to other people (for example the potential audience). This is consistent with contemporary culture’s myth of the artist as a solitary rebel who defies convention and critical judgment. However, some recent thinkers have argued that the artist is a far more social being than has generally been admitted to (Rotenberg, 1988; Dissanayake, 2000; Press, 2002; Hagman, 2005). I believe that the major limitation of the analytic approach has been its focus on the intrapsychic dynamic of the individual artist’s mind. This shortsightedness has become increasingly obvious given the recent revolution in psychoanalytic thinking which views human psychology as more relational and intersubjective than previously thought.

Given that Freud saw art as a compromise formation between conflicting parts of the mental apparatus, the issue of the relational and developmental sources of art was not relevant to him. Freud viewed art as one of the many manifestations of the defense mechanism of sublimation, which, despite cultural trappings, was at heart an intrapsychic phenomenon. The ego psychologist Ernst Kris viewed art as resulting from regression in the service of the ego whereby earlier forms of mentation and instinctual life are temporarily allowed access to consciousness, permitting aesthetic expression for the purpose of mastery (Kris, 1952). However, once again the source of art lay in the functions of the ego, which made use of infantile modes of thinking, but these early forms of mentation did not constitute aesthetic experience itself. Ultimately the notion of the elaboration of the products of regression during the later phase of the creative process placed the heart of successful creativity in the mature emotional and mental capacities of the artist.

Gilbert Rose, in his monograph The Power of Form (1980), argued that artists seek through their art to...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 A new psychoanalytic model of aesthetic experience
• Chapter 3 Art and the artist’s mind
• Chapter 4 Modern art and modern artists
• Chapter 5 Edgar Degas: The psychological edge of modernism
• Chapter 6 Pierre Bonnard: The seduction of beauty
• Chapter 7 The creative anxiety of Henri Matisse
• Chapter 8 The beauty of indifference: The art of Marcel Duchamp
• Chapter 9 Modern art in America
• Chapter 10 Joseph Cornell’s quest for beauty
• Chapter 11 Form follows function: The selfobject function of Frank Lloyd Wright’s art and architecture
• Chapter 12 Jackson Pollock: An American’s triumph and the death of modernism
• Chapter 13 The birth of postmodernism: Andy Warhol’s perverse aesthetics
• Chapter 14 Postscript: The world after Warhol
• References
• Index