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WHATEVER ELSE a critic may or should be, he is minimally required to be a connoisseur. In any field of human activity, some are designated as critic or connoisseur by society. In preliterate society, the leader or the master was the connoisseur. The step from connoisseur to critic implies the progression from knowledge to judgment. Connoisseurship is related to scholarship, and criticism superimposes the factor of judgmental values. Many fields of man's endeavor call upon the critical connoisseur to play the role of historian, evaluator, judge, arbitrator, attributor, and interpreter.
When confined to the fields of artistic creativity, the critic must have a sound knowledge of man's art treasure, past and present. He must have the ability to identify the artist and his works, the skill and the knowledge to attribute unidentified treasures of art to the proper era and the proper artist. Ideally speaking, he should have insight into the nature of the artist and the creative process, and how they are integrated. For these functions, it is apparent that psychoanalytic intuition or orientation would be desirable. A full discussion of this matter is reserved for the second part of this study.
It is not uncommon for a critic to be devoid of creative powers in the given field of art he is serving. Critics are rarely creative as painters, and creative painters are rarely important as critics. It has been said that the critic re-creates in a reverse