THE NATURE OF CREATIVE ACTIVITY By Viktor LOwenfeld
Viktor Lowenfeld has spent fifteen years in the Hohe Warte Institute for the Blind in Vienna, teaching blind and weak- sighted children to draw, paint and sculpt. On the strength of this specialised, practical experience he attempts in The Nature of Creative Activity (Kegan Paul, ms.) the clarification of various fundamental problems of aesthetics. Not being a philosopher, he does not investigate the theoretical difficulties of aesthetic activity in the blind. For the purposes of this book he treats his research into the artistic development of weak-sighted children as a means to understanding the psycho- logical aspect of creative activity in normal people. His argu- ment,, briefly, is this : There are two kinds of " creative activity," visual and haptic. The one springs mainly from visual experiences, the other from kinaesthetic, tactual and somatic experiences—which involve, to a certain extent, value judgements. A haptic artist, for instance, when drawing himself with a headache, will emphasise the importance of his head by increasing (not exaggerating) its size. He does not conceive space projected in perspective, but in terms, if possible, of the relation of objects in space to his own body. If his own body does not occur, he supplies, as a formal substi- tute, a baseline, to which all objects in the picture are literally attached. From comparison of the work of (i) ordinary children, (2) weak-sighted and blind children who cannot have had co- ordinated visual experiences, and (3) weak-sighted adults, it can be established that the " tumaturalistic " features of the work of ordinary children are due not to mismanagement of visual experience, but to proper use of haptic experience. Similarly, " tumaturalistic " primitive paintings are often the product, not of visual inaccuracy, but of highly developed haptic art. Up to this point, with the help of impeccable illustrations, Dr. Lowenfeld literally demonstrates his case. But when he extends his haptic-visual classification to cover such cases as Expressionism and Impressionism, which involve more complicated aesthetic problems, his purely psychological argument becomes inadequate.
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