Art Making, Maps of Interpersonal Space, and the World of Art

Abstract

History tells us that art is the product of many needs and constraints, of which the personal ones are only a part. It is difficult to say what the relative importance of social requirements and individual ones might be— such as the need for a particular style to suit a particular epoch, as against the need for individual expression. Surely their relative importance varies with time and place, and equally surely both sets of determinants need to be taken into account. But in any given study, and in any given discipline, one has to select out the part one can illuminate, and in the present one I have made all the room I could for the contributions of personality. What I hope to have demonstrated here is that that contribution is both significant and understandable, even in individuals for whom art has become a discipline—and perhaps to have shown that the better it is understood, the more seriously it needs to be taken.