The earliest known use of the term “psychology” worldwide is attributed to the Croatian Christian humanist Marko Marulić (1450–1524), while the first topics in the psychology of art were addressed by Gjuro Arnold, a professor of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb (the chapter “Aesthetic Consciousness” in the book Psychology for Secondary Schools, 1893)—only 14 years after the emergence of scientific psychology in the world (W. Wundt, 1879, Leipzig). This evokes a certain sense of pride among psychological scientists in Croatia, but then comes a sobering realization: to date, no empirical scientific studies on the creativity of Croatian visual artists have been published.
Research has been conducted on students’ self-assessment of creativity (Ljubotina, 2015), children’s creative thinking (Huzjak and Županić Benić, 2017; Butković, 2018), the creativity of future teachers (Croatian and international authors, 2015–2017), and the development of creativity in teaching (Pahljina-Reinić et al., 2023)… yet, to date, nothing has been published in Croatia regarding the creativity of visual artists. The situation is better—though not significantly so—at the global level.
The reasons why the creativity of artists remains scientifically understudied are methodological. They include the difficulty of obtaining a representative sample of academically trained visual artists; limitations of creativity assessment procedures, which create uncertainty regarding the choice among psychometric approaches, qualitative methods, expert evaluations of creative products, domain-specific measures, and domain-general measures of creativity; and the influence of contextual factors, such as participants’ motivation during the creativity assessment.
Conclusion: a scientific study of the creativity of visual artists in Croatia—individuals who are, by definition, creative—has long been awaited.
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