The Artist and Psycho-Analysis (1924)

Abstract

In this text of 1924, Roger Fry, English artist and art critic, shows his theories about art and the aesthetic process. As an artist, he blames the psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts having a reductive conception of the real value of both art and artists. In his opinion, there are two distinct groups of artists producing two distinct kinds of work and they have two different aims; in the first group we find the “impure artist”: he creates a dream world in his works, wherein – as Freud says  – he and his admirers find an ideal satisfaction of their unsatisfied instincts. In the latter group, we find instead the “pure artist”: he can create works, driven by the passion for pure beauty and detached from the instinctive life, where the formal qualities overtake the content, and where he and his public find a pleasure derived from the contemplation of formal relations and correspondences.