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The Artist's Mind is an attempt to apply a self psychological approach to the understanding of modern art and a selected number of prominent
modern artists. The theoretical framework highlights an emphasis on self psychology, the subjectivity of the artist, and the selfobject experience. The author has chosen eight subjects for his study: Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. Hagman offers a brief biographical vignette of each.
In writing about modernism, Hagman has in mind the movement that began in the second half of the nineteenth century and that challenged classical conventions by promoting innovation and the abandonment of tradition. The author views this movement as consisting of a new breed of artists who moved away from the depiction of cultural institutions and their values and instead sought personal fulfillment through the externalization of an internal vision. Such artists are generally understood as having had challenging psychological experiences and turning to the creation of art as the healer of an inchoate and fragmented self through creativity. The act of creation revives and expresses aspects of early experience and, through formal means, transforms it in the artistic object. Insofar as early relational elements are problematic, adding beauty, idealization, and aesthetic organization to a work provides the artist with a renewed sense of coherence and strength by offering an enhanced selfobject experience.
The author finds among the subjects he has chosen that the early relationship with the mother or maternal figure was often critical. Occasionally, these parental relations extended into adult life as well and directly affect the nature of the work. Matisse is offered as an example of an artist who found sustenance in his mother's judgment, and even as an adult he tended to transform an image according to his conception of what his mother would have prefer