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In an article titled “The Empty Space,” Danish journalist Karin Michaelis recounts how her friend, “Ruth Kjär,” suddenly discovered a great artistic talent. Despite being “beautiful, rich, and talented,” Michaelis reports that Kjär felt haunted, hunted, by what she described as “a dark spot in her life”:
In the midst of the happiness which was natural to her, and seemed so untroubled, she would suddenly be plunged into the deepest melancholy. A melancholy that was suicidal. If she tried to account for this, she would say something to this effect: “There is an empty space inside me, which I can never fill!” (quoted. in Klein, 1929, p. 215)
Michaelis goes on to detail how Kjär's melancholic anxiety about empty spaces was abruptly externalized one day, when a painting from her carefully curated home was removed, leaving yet another empty space. For Kjär, this absence seemed “in some inexplicable way[, …] to coincide with the empty space within her” (Klein, 1929, p. 216). But Kjär's response to this blank space on the wall was surprising. To the great astonishment of everyone in her life, the lamination of internal and external emptiness prompted within Kjär not an intensification of her own misery but an inexplicable urge to create, to fill the empty space. In lieu of the lost picture, Kjär painted a portrait with such skill that both husband and brother-in-law—the apparent arbiters of aesthetic merit in this story—refused to believe she was the artist. From this, Kjär developed a decades long career in portraiture, as from an empty space.1
Many psychoanalytic readers surely recognize this narrative arc since Kjär's story is the subject of an important paper on art and aesthetics by Melanie Klein. In “Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected in A Work of Art and In the Creative Impulse” (1929), Klein speculates on the psychic life of art, creativity, and the aesthetic sentiment, taking both a Ravel opera and Michaelis's narrative report as her objects. While creativity will