The Second Approach
This approach to the relationship between art and personality
emphasizes the role that the 'group' plays in the creative process
that takes place within the individual. The focus, in other words, is
subtly shifted to the social and cultural dimensions of creativity.
If we are to accurately type the artist, as we pointed out in Part One,
we will need to understand precisely what it is he or she is TRYING to
do. And for this purpose it will be necessary to place the artist in a socio-cultural context that lends breadth and depth to our understanding.
This is typically accomplished by locating the individual within a particular school of thought, or art - or at the intersection between one or more schools. Schools constellate around issues, and spawn school-related
literatures that define its concerns in ways that will articulate relationships between such things as school-specific methodologies
and certain mental functions.
Furthermore, there is, according to some contemporary sociologists
a direct link between art and social structure, of a kind that is important for us to consider in the present context. In his book on the subject of art and social structure, 16 Robert Witkin (1995) maintains
that -
But if, as WE believe to be the case, experience is structured by the
manner in which individuals or groups of individuals nest function-related
frames of reference, there ought to be more than ONE such
'code' in any given cultural epoch. Each code, we would further expect, might find expression in a particular 'style' or 'school' with which one could associate a particular way of ordering experience that will parallel what we call 'personality type' in the individual.
A 'school of art', in this sense of the term, will resemble
what came to be known in science as a 'paradigm'. Each paradigm, as
we've explained in a section on that topic in our paper on
Lucid Dreams, has a unique blend of features that
are peculiar to it - a methodology, a language, an epistemology, issues
of its own, and so forth. Each paradigm thus constitutes a veritable
world of its own, which invariably comes into conflict with rival worlds, experienced as 'incommensurable' with it.
From the perspective of personality theory, we can interpret the conflict that takes place between schools as the manifestation of a struggle 17 between
functions. Culture in general, and art in particular, might indeed be conceived - almost by definition - as the battle ground on which encounters of this kind take place. It is the arena in which new syntheses of functions are forged, the social laboratory in which our mental functions EVOLVE.
And although there is no disputing the fact that individuals play
a significant and indispensible role in the creative efforts that
result in new cultural products - ones that will manifest hitherto
untried functional syntheses - the role of the group in this process cannot be underestimated. For what at one level of description is a functional struggle within the individual is at another level of description a
paradigm clash.
One of the things that interests us, as NFs, is how the
group or school - insofar as it has succeeded in remaining fresh
and vibrantly alive - acts as the repository for new function-related
techniques, methodologies, and so forth. It is a resource center
to which persons make their individual contributions, and
a pool from which the individual, in forging her own
unique product, can draw. In the absence of such a center,
the individual's goal becomes immeasurably more difficult.
In this way, it seems to us, individuals can (at best)
be stimulated by the presence of the group or 'school', and inspired to
move together toward the new aesthetic horizon around which the school is
virtually (i.e., unconsciously, or without the intention of any particular
INDIVIDUAL) centered.
When Herbert Read in 1942 asked if, with the use of Jungian typology, 'order can be found in the vast confusion of styles and movements that is contemporary art', he shifted focus from an interest in understanding the psychological type of the individual artist to an interest in understanding how the theory of type can be used to classify approaches to art, so as eventually to understand its ultimate nature and purpose. 18
Reviewing some previous attempts to categorize art, Read says -
The study of primitive art has given rise to similar antitheses: Max Verworn [1914], for example, contrasts 'ideoplastic' and 'physioplastic' types of art, and Herbert Kuhn [1923] makes a more or less identical distinction between 'imaginative' and 'sensorial types'. (Read, page 95) Read gives special attention to the 'four types' into which Edward Bullough (1906) classifyied persons with respect to differences in the way they perceived color and how these conditioned further differences in aesthetic response. And although Read believed Bullough's four types to demonstrate an 'obvious parallelism' to Jung's four functions, in Read's estimation it was nevertheless Jung's work that provided 'the best working basis' for a classification of art. 19
With this choice of explanatory frame in mind, Read proceeds to divide art into four groups - each of which he associates with one Jungian function, resulting in the following table.
With Read's definitions 20 of the schools of art we have no quarrel. But the previously mentioned mistakes 21 that he personally made in understanding the nature of the functions results in some questionable correlations. Surrealism, for instance, like cubism (which is subsumed under 'constructivism' for Read, and correctly associated with iNtuition), tends to be an intuitive project. And Realism strikes us as being more aptly described as 'ST', rather than exclusively 'T' - although in 1942 Read would not have had the benefit of an explanatory frame utilizing the socalled 'core types' [ST, SF, NT, NF], an innovation that only came into being with the advent of the MBTI. Furthermore, certain schools of expressionism - the Abstract Expressionists, in particular - seem to exhibit more of an inclination toward Feeling than toward Sensing per se. What one of this school's practioners - Phyllis Sullivan - had to say about it is instructive. Since her thoughts on this matter provide an interesting example of the way in which Read may have 'mistyped' expressionism, we shall take the time to go into this matter in a bit more detail. Phyll was a contemporary of Herbert Read's. While attending the Royal College of Art she met Merlyn Evans, another student at the College. They became a couple and remained in London, where their work as painters brought them into personal contact with Kandinsky, Miro, and Hans Arp, among others. One of Merlyn's paintings appears as a plate in Read's book, A Concise History of Modern Painting. 22 Another was shown in the famous surrealist exhibition in London at which Paul Elouard read his poetry and Salvador Dali, as his contribution, pushed in a wheelbarrow across which lay a woman covered in roses. It was Herbert Read who wrote the catalog for the exhibition, which was held at the New Burlington Galleries in London in June and early July 1936. He was also a member of the organizing committee. 23
Recently, in a candid conversation about her life and art, Phyll compared her own work to Merlyn's, in a way that seems to suggest that the major difference in their approach to art reflected their respective functional preferences - her inclination toward Feeling, his toward Thinking:
For Phyll, it seemed to be FEELING that was being expressed in abstract expressionism. And with her, Kandinsky - who was 'the first and most important of the abstract Expressionists', according to another Read's contemporaries, the art critic Rosamund Frost (1942) 25 - would
apparently agree:
In real art, theory does not precede practice, but follows her. Everything is, at first, a matter of feeling. Any theoretical scheme will be lacking in the essential of creation - the inner desire for expression - which cannot be determined. Neither the quality of the inner need, nor its subjective form, can be measured or weighed. Such a grammar of painting can only be temporarily guessed at, and should it ever be achieved,
it will be not so much according to physical rules ... as according to the rules of the inner need, which are of the soul. 26
Spoken like a true NF, in our opinion, not someone who is primarily occupied with the Sensory function. Kandinsky - who literally wrote the book on the subject of abstract expressionism - maintained, in fact, that in this school of painting the object itself, as it appears to the senses, has a strikingly diminished value:
The approach to art and personality type which we are briefly considering
here - the socalled 'second' approach - might not seem to differ very much from the 'first' approach. But what we must keep in mind is that a school can manifest a bias that is characteristically associated with one of Jung's four 'mental functions' without it being the case that that particular function will be the dominant one in ALL of the artists who are members of the school.
And an individual can paint in a 'style' associated with the school without being a member of the school - i.e., without sharing its primary concerns. 27
Thinking, for example, is the function to which much of what is sometimes popularly called 'conceptual art' seems to appeal. In such pieces some clever point or visual pun is being made. When all is said and done, it is the thought 'behind' the piece that seems to count. This is not, however, to say that it will always be the thinking type who will produce conceptual art. Neither is it to say that conceptual art is the cream of the Thinking type's crop. Or even that it is the type of art that is most representative of the Thinking-type artist.
All that we might really be justified in concluding is that such a work would probably be difficult to appreciate without Thinking playing the dominant role in the appreciation process. Although this may account for why those who are not Thinking types can often be found wincing when confronted by
this type of art, and wondering if it is in fact art at all, it cannot be concluded that individuals who do not have Thinking as their dominant type will never produce such a piece.
The same, of course, would hold true for the other functions. A particular school of art might attract individuals who are concerned, for instance,
with issues which are the ones with which Sensation types characteristically grapple without it being the case that all of the artists working in that school will necessarily have Sensing as their dominant function. An artist may have a special attraction to color not because Sensing is his dominant function, but because it is his INFERIOR function and holds for him a special sense of intrigue. Color, for such an individual, might take on what Jung calls a 'numinous' feel, a magical quality that it acquires by being steeped in the individual's 'unconscious' as it were.
If Kandinksy, for example, actually was the NF that we suspect him to have been, the FASCINATION with color that his art and writing displays will most likely have been the product of an inferior Sensing function.
For the purpose of typing a human organization or school, as opposed to typing human beings, it is less useful (as we have previously pointed out) to think in terms of the 'functional preference orders' of the individual members of the organization (or the person responsible for having created it) than it is to think in terms of the various orders in which function-related frames must be nested in order to
organize the entity in its characteristic fashion.
From this perspective, a particular organization (or even a school or style of art) may itself thus be said to have a STRUCTURE that can be associated with a particular 'personality type' (ESTJ, say). But does that mean that individuals who participate in that organization, or style, must themselves share that personalilty type? Not necessarily.
In addition, for human ventures that are truly collaborative (one might think here of the making of a good movie, by a team of individuals - including writers, directors, actors and so forth), the final product may actually represent a personality type that is some sort of COMPOSITE of the type-related 'concerns' of all of the individuals in the group. (For further discussion of these matters please see On 'Typing' Organizations, Theories, and Other Non-human Entities -'Nested Frames' Versus 'Functional Preference Orders').
Nevertheless, for those individual artists who at some level identify, in some FUNDAMENTAL fashion, with a style or school of art, our knowledge
about the school will tell us something about the individual. It will provide us with critical information, over and above what the particular piece that the artist produces may alone be capable of revealing. To the extent that we are familiar with the concerns of the school in question we will know about the intra-personal processes characteristically utilized in the school, and the relative value the school places on particular function-related frames of reference. And from this we can gleen information about the personality of the member artist.
To see this, all we need do is ask questions of the following sort. Will present-day readers of Yeats who happen to know nothing about art history realize that surrealists were also quite fond of exploring socalled 'automatic' writing and drawing? Will they know why surrealists were intrigued by this activity, or what such activity has to do with the evolution of the 'iNtuitive' function? Or, to use another example, will a member of today's TV generation, brought up on images technologically constructed from a matrix of colored pixels, be able to recognize in the work of impressionist painters the primary and passionate interest they had in exploring the effects that light has when falling on an object? If not, will they miss the bias the Impressionists displayed toward the Sensing
function? Or, to use a final example -in looking at works from Picasso's cubist period will the viewer realize that the word 'cubism', coined by Matisse as a pejorative term, is EFFECTIVE as a slur precisely because it describes an essentially iNtuitive project in Sensory terms that are incapable of capturing the non-Sensory intent of the project - as if to say that this form of art is MERELY a matter geometry? Does knowing this
ironic fact help the viewer to see that it is really not geometry that Picasso was exploring?
Without knowing these or other similarly subtle things about the artist's
school, style, or period - which in turn sheds light on the artist's intentions - what chance do we, as individuals interested in determining the personality type of the individual artist, and understanding how
that artist structured awareness, have of succeeding?
Footnotes and References
16. Robert Witkin, Art and Social Structure, 1995, (Great Britain: Polity Press), page xi.
17. For instance, at the end of the 19th century, [the poet] Saint-Pol-Roux devised an approach that showed him, according to Balakian (page 40) ... able to conciliate realism with the symbolic interpretation of art and to succeed in producing a fusion which he called 'ideorealism' or 'supernaturalism' which is in fact the nucleus of the term 'surrealism'. If symbolism was the tranfiguration of nature, then Saint-Pol-Roux foresaw a more evolved process, which might be called METAFIGURATION: not beyond the figure but a virtual change of it within its own entity. This was in fact the simultaneous acceptance and refusal of reality. This resulted in the idea that sensing need not be conceived as necessarily a merely passive or receptive act - [In surrealism] seeing was no longer considered a receiving process but an interchange between subject and object. With conscious training, the senses were to reach a point of acuity whereby their function would not be limited to accepting and storing sensations. It would be aimed at enriching the objects of their perception. (14)
18. Read, Education Through Art, Page 97. We used a similar
STRATEGY to Read's when we proposed that by using the schema offered in our theory of the five levels of development of the feeling function order could be discovered in the vast confusion of seemingly contradictory theories of emotion that had come into existence during the past few hundred years. [See The Feeling Function: Level One, to be posted
in May of 2000.]
19. Most of the theorists who Read mentions produced work on art and
personality that preceded Jung's. Nevertheless, in the section on 'The Type Problem in Aesthetics' in Jung's Psychological Types (original Swiss edition, published in 1921) only Worringer is mentioned.
20. Read defines these terms in the following way: 1. Realism, naturalism, impressionism - terms which indicate an imitative attitude towards the external world of nature. 21. See footnote 11, part 1.
22. Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting, 1959,
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger).
23. See Donald Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts - Western Europe: a Cultural History from the French Revolution to 1968), 1970, (New York, Alfred Knopf), page 514.
24. "Shared Reminiscences of Mother and Son", Phyll Sullivan and C.O. Evans, 1999.
25. Rosamund Frost, Contemporary Art, 1942, (New York, Crown Publishers, p.221.
26. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1914, (New York: Dover Publications), page 35.
27. This probably occurs more often, however, with schools that are in a later stage of development - when they have become popular or established, widely imitated and adapted for use in contexts for which they were not originally intended - i.e. co-opted by
rival schools.
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