ART AND ARTIST by Otto Rank

I. Kunstschaffen und Persoenlichkeitsentwicklung
I. Creative Urge and Personality Development

The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse and even against his own work also shows itself in his attitude towards success and fame; these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which began subjectively with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with self-nomination as artist and ends in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies -- one might almost say, two personalities of the individual -- are in continual conflict throughout: one wants to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other in ordinary life -- in brief, immortal man vs. the immortal soul of man.

Image by Jeff Reese, photographer, accompanying text from Otto Rank, Art and Artist selected by Reese. Exhibit catalog contains 14 images and text, with introduction by Jay Belloli. © 1998 Cynthia Broan Gallery, 423 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10014. 212-633-6525.

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Excerpt from "Recommended Reading" in the Washington Post, 29 Oct. 1989:

Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, Rank's masterwork, was published by Knopf in 1932. Critic Ludwig Lewisohn called it "epoch making," and high praise followed from readers such as Anais Nin, Henry Miller, and Paul Goodman. But the 450-page tome went out of print and has been hard to find. Now it is available in paperback from Norton.

Art and Artist takes up aesthetics, play, architecture, myth, language, the graphic arts, success, fame and renunciation. Rank speaks not to the aesthete but to the artist in each of us: the individual struggling for balance between involvement with life, i.e., creation of self, and the need to withdraw and create something permanent, to achieve a form of immortality. This is a brilliant, readable work of social psychology addressing the broadest themes of cultural evolution. It should appeal to general readers and should be on reading lists in art history and philosophy, as well as the social sciences.

Rank wrote under the shadow of the gathering storm of European fascism. How good, then, to see him dismiss at the outset "the superiority of a particular culture or the preferableness of a particular style or the eminence of a particular race over all others."

--E. James Lieberman

Note: Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson (Knopf, 1932); Rank's original German text, collated from the manuscript at Columbia University by Bertram Mueller, will at last be published in 2000 by Psychosocial-Verlag, Giessen. Unfortunately the recent Norton edition replaces Ludwig Lewisohn's brilliant preface with an essay by Anais Nin.

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