The Artist as Creator by Milton C. Nahm (review)

526 BOOK REVIEWS The Artist as Creator. By MILTON C. NAHM. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1956. Pp. 352 with index. $5.50. The central problem of this book is, in the words of the author, an attempt to establish a " theory of fine art adequate to account for the emergence of the novel and unique yet intelligible work of fine art." (p. 82) Prof. Nahm seeks to resolve this problem by reconciling two apparently opposed and long-established positions about the fine artist: a) the artist is a maker who exercises a limited freedom of choice, and b) the artist is a creator endowed with unconditioned freedom of originality. It is not surprising, therefore, that the sub-title of the book is " an essay of human freedom." The author appears to regard fine art primarily as a manifestation of human freedom. The work is divided into two main parts. The first part, Book I, is largely a historical summary of the " great analogy " of the fine artist to God as creator and maker. It is the view of Prof. Nahm that the "great analogy " has dominated speculation in the Western tradition, out of which has come the notion of the fine artist as one endowed with a type of freedom that is analogous to God's as n creator. The author remarks that " the analogy turns in general terms upon the relation of the artist and of God to ends and to matter, in explanation of the individual product of the creative process." (p. 64) Mr. Nahm presents this analogy as "a problem " at three levels of conflict. The aesthetic conflict contrasts Croce with Bosanquet. Croce's position is that " expression is free inspiration " and hence the artist is a free creator. Bosanquet's position is that the imagination is "the mind working under great reservations which set it free," and hence the artist is a free maker. Croce, consequently, proposes a theory of artistic creativity which gives a logical priority to intuition and at the same time attributes an unconditioned freedom to the artist while denying any freedom manifested in the technique of art. Freedom of choice is thus eliminated for the artist because the artist is not related to ends. Bosanquet sees this procedure as destroying the relation of the mind of the artist to the external world. The conflict between the two is not so interesting as the underlying agreement . Both appear to belong to the tradition that, in general, denies attributing the miraculous powers of God to man; yet the analogous character of speaking of man's creative powers in art is quickly forgotten. The presumption remains that the human artist has an omnipotence and omniscience attributed properly to God and that the human artist is, after all, capable of transcending the natural order of things in the miraculous way in which God can. The cosmological conflict contrasts the issue of making and creating in the " historical conflict of cosmologies " one finds in Plato's Timaeus as opposed to the account of the creation of the world in Genesis. Mr. Nahm BOOK REVIEWS 5~7 subscribes to the view that the theory in the Timaeus is a theory of making and not of creation, and hence Plato's God is an architect who shaped the world out of a given, eternal matter. The account in Genesis, of course, speaks of the world as created by God out of nothing. The relevance of briefly introducing these two accounts of the formation of the universe (expanded and developed by later writers) is to suggest that just as creation in the strict sense by God came to be the dominant explanation of the coming to be of the universe so, in a theory of fine art, the notion of artistic creation tended to supplant the notion of artistic making. The original analogy of the artist to God was supplanted by the view that the artist is really a creator. The microcosmic conflict concerns divergent interpretations of freedom deriving from the cosmological conflict. The theory of cosmic making includes an interpretation of man as having a microcosmic soul that is analogous to the macrocosmic world soul. The theory of...