Artistic Styles and Personalities: A Close View and a More Distant View

Abstract

In the empirical study of the arts, two approaches exist which illustrate different assumptions about what phenomena are most central to our concerns: the study of central tendencies, which seeks general principles, and the study of differences, whose aim is to accept differences as crucial and then explain them. Nowhere is the study of variability more important than in the creation of works of art; and no approach to accounting for the variability is more promising than a detailed study of the personalities of the creators. Research is discussed here in which the creation of images by undergraduate participants was followed closely, and their personalities were studied clinically by means of a psychodynamic interview. The individual dynamics seemed intimately connected with the processes of image making (the close view). A later cluster analysis of image types revealed that the individual dynamics were consistent within clusters and different between clusters (the distant view). Seven approaches to image making could be identified in this study and described in detail.