Art and psychiatry
Or: how fragments of history can be useful in diagnosing an exhibition.

Ever heard of the Sainte-Anne Hôpital? It is a psychiatric clinic in Paris where exhibitions were held in the aftermath of World War II of work that had primarily been known up to then as l'art des fous. Thanks to these exhibitions, however, 'the art of the insane' began to play a serious role in the discussion of modern art. The first exhibition, which opened in April 1946, presented more than two hundred works by psychiatric patients from various clinics in France, and the second showed no less than ten times as many. But then, it was the International Exhibition of Psychopathological Art, organized at the same time as the first International Psychiatric Congress, in the fall of 1950. Both exhibitions attracted a large public, both were accompanied by a catalogue with an introduction by the well-known art critic Waldemar George, and both were visited by numerous avant-garde artists. Karel Appel, who had just discovered Paris in 1950, visited the international exhibition twice. He was so affected by what he saw that he started to sketch in the catalogue and gradually populated it with cats, birds, children and all kinds of monsters of his own imagination. In this way Appel produced an eloquent document on the relation between art and psychiatry.

It is understandable that in his introduction of 1946, Waldemar George adopted a primarily defensive tone. After all, the view of modern art that prevailed in postwar France had its origins in right-wing extremism and Nazism. Abstract art was 'degenerate' (entartet); Picasso was 'a mad genius'; and Braque painted like a 'fool from an asylum'. In short: modern = mad. The critic had to counter this view: 'Genius and madness! Who can see any resemblance between these works by the mentally ill and the sublime aberrations of famous artists?' Four years later, in the 1950 catalogue, George felt that the discussion had ripened enough for him to be able to write: 'Without a doubt there are demonstrable parallels between the work of patients and the art of twentieth-century painters - Expressionists, Surrealists, and some pure Abstract painters'.

From this moment on, artists like Jean Dubuffet, Wols, Fautrier, and thus also Karel Appel and the other Cobra painters could openly bear witness to their well-founded interest in the visual expressions of children and the mentally ill. And thus in the half century or more that has passed since the exhibitions in the Sainte-Anne, art criticism and art theory have gradually come to show an interest in images that have originated outside the tradition of Western art. In 1967 Jean Dubuffet presented his Art Brut collection in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Around the same time the influence of Michel Foucault's Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (first published in 1961, and translated into English as Madness and Civilization in 1965) began to be felt internationally. In 1972 Roger Cardinal published his book Outsider Art, and in 1979 the Hayward Gallery in London organized a large exhibition with the same title, subtitled as 'Art without Precedent or Tradition'. Ten years later, in 1989, Jan Hoet's Open Minds - Closed Circuits in Ghent represented a first, rather cautious attempt to combine pictures with and pictures without an artistic tradition in the museum. This initiative was tackled on a large-scale and in a thorough way in the exhibition Parallel Visions. Modern Artists and Outsider Art in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1992.

And now, in the autumn of 2003, there is de inrichting, an exhibition of international contemporary art in a building in Heiloo known as the St Wilbrord Psychiatric Centre, but whose official name is now Mental Health Care Foundation for the North of the province of North Holland. There is some outsider art to be found in the small, half-subterranean museum that cherishes the history of the centerre and near which a number of artists have placed a work, but it is by no means the aim of this exhibition to go into the parallels between art and therapeutic products. Artists in 2003 do not seem interested in authenticity, at least not in the sense of primary, raw and uncultivated. On the contrary, in fact, their terms are more likely to be culture, concept and strategy. Does de inrichting have any connection with the brief history of the relation between art and psychiatry outlined above? And if not, what is it about?

Of course, the exhibitions in the Sainte-Anne did not come out of the blue. The clinic had already been a center of experiment and innovation in the decennium before the war. In particular, Dr Gaston Ferdière (1907-1990), who came into contact with the Sainte-Anne in 1934, became a key figure between the world of art and psychiatry. He maintained close contacts with specialists in the field of creative therapy, such as Jean Vinchon, whose l'Art et la folie had appeared in 1924, and Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst who denied the existence of the subject as such and assumed that the individual is shaped at the level of symbolism through language and image.
Ferdière was also very interested in the famous book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken that the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn had published in 1922. He also knew many artists, such as Alberto Giacometti, Marcel Duchamp and André Breton. While the Surrealists regularly met in the open part of the institute (where relatively inexpensive meals were also served) and attended his lectures on clinical psychiatry, Ferdière met the Surrealists in Parisian bars like Cyrano or Les Deux Magots. At the international exhibition of Surrealism that was held in the Galerie des Beaux Arts in 1938, it was Ferdière's collection of fetishes made by patients that lay scattered over the floor - at the feet of sixteen mannequins decorated by famous Surrealists.

The outbreak of World War II shattered Ferdière's plans to link psychiatry to other research fields (for instance, he wanted to found a museum and laboratory for psychotic art and he had thought up the idea of studying life in a clinic according to ethnographic methods). In July 1941 he was put in charge of the psychiatric hospital in Rodez, in the south of France. There was no avant-garde there, just a psychotic artist called Guillaume Pujolle who was fairly interesting to Ferdière and his colleagues. The stint in Rodez would always have been no more than an interruption, more troublesome at some times than at others, had it not been for the admission of a patient with symptoms of malnutrition in 1943. He had been in a clinic several times since his eighteenth birthday, had lived with his mother in Paris between 1924 and 1937, and had spent five years moving from one clinic to another before ending up in Rodez. His condition had been steadily deteriorating all this time. The patient was a writer, playwright and actor; his name was Antonin Artaud (1895-1948), now a household name, above all for his attempts in the first half of the 1930s to develop an entirely new form of theatre. Artaud wanted theater to be a ritual meeting, a mass performance in which actors and audience combined to give expression to the magical, if not sacred, foundations of our culture. While Artaud spent his time in Rodez recording the experiences that he had undergone during a prewar trip through Mexico (without failing to mention ritual spectacles in which people were made to suffer pain, and sometimes even sacrificed), Ferdière started to give him electrical shock treatment.

As the Sainte-Anne had done in Paris in the 1930s, so does St Wilbrord offer cheap meals to both patients (or clients, as they are now called) and visitors in Heiloo today. And if Artaud had been in Heiloo in 1943, he would probably also have been given electro-convulsion therapy, the official name for the administering of electrical shocks for medical purposes. But those are the only parallels between then and now, there and here. Nor does the fragment of history that has just been excavated appear to answer the question of what de inrichting is about any more than the story about the exhibitions in the Sainte-Anne does. As far as we know, at least, the Wilbrord Foundation has never accommodated an artist of the calibre of Artaud, let alone his great model Vincent van Gogh. So can the exhibition de inrichting be related in some way to the image of the artist whose genius is so great that his mind borders on madness?

The idea that there is a relation between genius and madness goes back to classical antiquity. In his dialogues, Plato (430-347 BC) distinguished between madness as a type of illness and mania, the inspired madness which he believed to affect painters and poets in particular. His pupil Aristotle (384-322 BC) went on to establish a connection between artistic and scientific talent, on the one hand, and the melancholic, on the other. The melancholic is the type of person who is born under the planet Saturn and in whom the balance between the four bodily humors (blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy) is disturbed by an excess of melancholy. There do not seem to have been any 'mad artists' during the Middle Ages - only more or less talented craftsmen - and melancholy was a purely physical defect, almost a sin. Later on, however, the idea gained ground that artistic talent goes together with a labile and brooding type of personality. The key figure in this change was the Florentine philosopher and Platonist Marsilio Ficino, who wrote a letter on inspiration in 1457: 'Whoever is inspired passes into a state of divine madness'. Moreover, in his book De Vita Triplici (1482-1489) Ficino characterized melancholy as a similar divine state of mind. He thus welded Plato's mania and Aristotle's melancholia together into a single concept, and one that proved strong enough to influence the behaviour of generations of artists. By directly linking genius to Saturn, at the height of the Renaissance Ficino already unleashed a fashion that expected every mediocre talent to behave like a melancholic. Centuries later a wave of cultivated melancholy can be recognized in the Weltschmerz of the Romantics and in the nihilism of the Angry Young Men of the 1960s.

Was it just Ficino's concept that has influenced the image of what makes an artist down to the present? No, the remarkable thing is that after the theory of the four humors had been replaced by what is now characterized as medical science, professional psychologists still continued to seek a connection between psychosis and artistic creativity, though this time on the basis of clinical observation. 'Megalomania is a common aberration among artists', wrote a certain Courbon at the beginning of the twentieth century. And the standard work of 1942 by Lange-Eichbaum entitled Genius. Insanity and Fame states that 'the most brilliant people were psychopathic [...] and many were neurotic too'. Although the terminology was slightly different, the psychoanalytic tradition also made its contribution to the image of the artist as madman: artists were supposed to be plagued by the Oedipus and other guilt complexes, to display narcissistic tendencies, and to have a bisexual predisposition more frequently than non-artists.

It is doubtful whether the artists in de inrichting have concerned themselves with the historical development of this stereotype. And if they have done so, it was to stifle even the minutest trace of Ficino's melancholy maniac. However we all experience life individually, it must be made clear to the outside world that art is not a mental illness, a mild itch or a heavy obsession, but a profession that deserves a place in the midst of society. The fact that it is different from the professions that most people practise - and is in any case harder to reconcile with the principle of utility and the capitalist system of supply and demand - may be the pretext to move out to a place that is 'different', but there can be no question of confinement, isolation or stigmatization. In the last resort the idea behind de inrichting is that you and I go to that place, try to discover things there - perhaps a structure, or a new world - and that we may perhaps leave something behind that makes that place a fraction less strange.

Els Hoek, September 2003.

P.S. There were medical experts who denied any relation between artistic genius and madness, such as the well-known nineteenth-century psychologist Charles Lamb, who was prepared to accept that something like skill and madness could go together, but considered that true genius could only be found in mentally sound artists: 'It is impossible for the mind to conceive a mad Shakespeare'. Pasto and Kivisto, two psychologists from the 1950s, even applied the democratic principle to their theory. 'The painter or writer is not unique', they argued, 'and he has no more need to be understood than the greengrocer, the banker or the ordinary man-in-the-street. They all have their own special and symbolic way of dealing with psychological forces - whether they are connected with money, food, power, painting or politics.'

Bibliography:
Rudolf & Margot Wittkower, Born under Saturn. The character and conduct of artists: de documented history from antiquity to the French revolution, New York/London, 1969.
Cat. tent. Parallel Visions. Modern Artists and Outsider Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 18 oktober 1992 - 3 januari 1993.
Cat. tent. Open Minds - Closed Circuits, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Gent, april-juni 1989.
Catharina Th. Bakker & Leonie de Goei, Een bron van zorg en goede werken. Geschiedenis van de geestelijke gezondheidszorg in Noord-Holland-Noord, Amsterdam, 2002.
Antonin Artaud 1895-1948, oorspronkelijk gepubliceerd in: Wallace Fowlie, Dionysus in Paris, New York, 1960.