{"id":121172,"date":"2018-02-06T09:00:58","date_gmt":"2018-02-06T14:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=121172"},"modified":"2018-02-06T10:52:50","modified_gmt":"2018-02-06T15:52:50","slug":"the-art-of-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/06\/the-art-of-madness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Madness"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Alo\u00efse Corbaz, Le ricochet solaire<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

On July 5, 1945, the French painter Jean Dubuffet set off for Switzerland accompanied by two fellow Frenchmen, the publisher Jean Paulhan and the architect Charles-\u00c9douard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. The Swiss tourism board had organized the trip with the hopes that the men would return to Paris with a new view of Switzerland. Paul Baudry, the cultural ambassador of French-Swiss tourism, had organized for them to eat at the top restaurants, take in the rolling hills and meadows, and go to the Matterhorn.<\/p>\n

But Dubuffet had little interest in all that. \u201cHe ran around the asylums,\u201d Paulhan later wrote, collecting \u201cdifferent drawings and gouaches.\u201d In Paris, Dubuffet had already begun purchasing art made by people who had been deemed mentally ill, but it was in Switzerland, across roughly half a dozen institutions, where he gathered the bulk of what would become his collection.\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Heinrich Anton M\u00fcller, Hermine<\/em>, c. 1917.<\/p><\/div>\n

He broke away from the group and went first to the Waldau Asylum, outside Bern, where he spoke with Walter Morgenthaler, a Swiss psychiatrist who had worked at Waldau as a medical assistant, collecting thousands of works made by the asylum\u2019s patients. Dubuffet saw first the art of Adolf W\u00f6lfli, a sexually abused orphan who had been interned at Waldau after becoming an abuser himself. W\u00f6lfli\u2019s twenty-five-thousand-page masterpiece combines texts, drawings, collages, and musical compositions that together outlined a reimagined history of his childhood and a fantastical, mythological future he dreamed up for himself. Dubuffet recognized the work\u2019s brilliance immediately. Upon seeing it back in Paris, his friend, the surrealist painter Andr\u00e9 Breton, called the work \u201cone of the three or four most important oeuvres of the twentieth century.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an asylum in M\u00fcnsingen, a municipality inside the canton of Bern, Dubuffet also collected the work of Heinrich Anton M\u00fcller, an illustrator with severe depression. M\u00fcller\u2019s work evokes the childish drawings of Paul Klee and Marc Chagall but also taps into Swiss folk, medieval, and modern art. With no knowledge of art history, M\u00fcller was unshackled from a rigid style. In Hermine<\/em>, he drew what appears to be a biblical Eve\u2014but in green and orange pencil. He has her holding grapes, beneath a tree, with a serpent gliding up toward her pregnant belly. Like most of his figures, she has great big eyes and a melancholy look. Thanks also to his frequent use of white chalk, M\u00fcller\u2019s figures look like ghosts, creatures that understand\u2014and accept\u2014the brutalities of life.<\/p>\n

Dubuffet continued throughout Switzerland, meeting with and collecting the art of the schizophrenic painter Alo\u00efse Corbaz at La Rosi\u00e8re, an institution near Lausanne, as well as the sculptures of Joseph Giavarini, who had been imprisoned in Basel for the impassioned murder of a woman who had spurned him.<\/p>\n

Dubuffet took all of these works back to Paris but found the art to be unpopular in French salons. Only a select few took interest\u2014fellow outsider artists or surrealists like Breton\u2014so two years later, in 1947, Dubuffet wrote The Art Brut Manifesto, <\/em>laying out the cultural necessity and aesthetic beauty he believed was ignored by the mainstream art world. A year after that, he, Breton, and the critic Michel Tapi\u00e9 founded the Compagnie de l\u2019Art Brut, which collected works from outsiders and the mentally ill.<\/p>\n

In the end, Dubuffet\u2019s movement never caught on with mainstream artists, galleries, and auction houses. The works that he had collected between France and Switzerland went on show only twice, in 1949 at the Galerie Ren\u00e9 Drouin and later, in 1967, at the Mus\u00e9e des Arts D\u00e9coratifs, both in Paris. And yet its influences have been far-reaching, inspiring the filmmaker Jean Cocteau<\/a>, the painter Joan Mir\u00f3, and the anthropologist Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss, among many others.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a>

Adolf W\u00f6lfli (1864\u20131930).<\/p><\/div>\n

Art brut, or raw art, is \u201craw because it is \u2018uncooked\u2019 by culture,\u201d John Maizels\u00a0writes<\/a>\u00a0in Raw Creation<\/em>,\u00a0\u201craw because it came directly from the psyche, and, in its purest form, touched a raw nerve.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his own words, Dubuffet called art brut \u201cworks created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses\u2014where the worries of competition, acclaim, and social promotion do not interfere\u2014are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professionals.\u201d<\/p>\n

The culture of mainstream art, Dubuffet reasoned, was driven by an urge to assimilate every inventive artistic development, and thereby robbed it of its power. Mainstream art would be sure to, Maizels writes, \u201casphyxiate genuine expression.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2013, the French government took what was once Victor Hugo\u2019s house on the Place des Vosges and nationalized it, turning it into the Maison de Victor Hugo. Best known as a place where fans and tourists come to see the bed in which he died, it is a museum in which large exhibitions are seldom put on. But this winter, the museum is showing four European collections of art created by mentally ill patients, including those from which Dubuffet collected. The exhibit, called \u201cLa Folie en<\/em> T\u00eate<\/em>,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>or, roughly translated,\u00a0\u201cMadness on the Mind,\u201d includes no well-known artists. (Most of them, in fact, are without last names or are entirely anonymous.) It is one of the most striking shows to be put on in the French capital in years. Across the entirety of the house\u2019s second floor, the show underscores the way in which art brut directly informs mainstream art culture.<\/p>\n

What is now considered edgy contemporary art\u2014surrealism but also minimalism, found objects, even much of abstract expressionism\u2014has its origins in the works of outsiders. In Morgenthaler\u2019s collection, the works at once refuse to operate within the confines of art history\u201athe art he collected is especially childish, earnest, and done in \u201cinnocence\u201d of outside knowledge\u2014while also predating the art of future famous mainstream artists. For instance, throughout the\u00a0twenties, Marie F\u00fcri, an essentially unknown artist and mentally ill woman who suffered from epileptic seizures, made dozens of drawings at Waldau, including an untitled lead-pencil work on paper comprised of tight, thin, continuous cursive ovals spanning the entire page. It is a work that might be easily confused for a study of Cy Twombly\u2019s 1968 untitled drawing of white scribbles on a blackboard. While Twombly\u2019s version sold at Sotheby\u2019s just over two years ago for $70.5 million,\u00a0F\u00fcri\u2019s work is virtually unknown.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Anonymous, 200 (Money) <\/em> \u00ab 200 \u00bb [Billet de banque], ink on paper. \u00a9 Sammlung Prinzhorn, Heidelberg<\/p><\/div>\n

In the collection of Auguste Marie, the chief physician of the Sainte Anne Psychiatric Hospital in Paris from 1920 to 1929 and a consultant at the asylum in Villejuif for the two decades before that, the untitled drawing-cum-collage of a mentally ill man named Victor-Fran\u00e7ois (his last name is unknown) uses Chinese ink and yellow-tinted pencil on transparent paper to create a complex figuration of a Christ who appears to have gone insane. Christ\u2019s eyes are formed with squiggling circles, making it appear as though he has either gone mad or, more intriguingly, that a form of madness has become divine. Such religious parody would elude more mainstream sensibilities until, arguably, up until the late twentieth century, when artists like David LaChapelle and Maurizio Cattelan came to the fore. In the self-aware\u00a0Objects of the Insane<\/em>, an anonymously constructed wooden box full of tightly arranged black buttons, strings, rusty nails, and bits of metal precedes Marcel Duchamp\u2019s found objects by well over a decade. In the work\u00a0Contemporary History<\/em>, a patient named Albert G. gorgeously deploys inky geometrical shapes and lines\u2014pure automatism\u2014in a style so original that it would only be taken up more than two decades later by Andr\u00e9 Masson. And in another work, an anonymous artist cut a German newspaper into a triangle and then colored in, seemingly at random, between many of the letters in orange, red, and green colored pencil. Of course, the work\u00a0means<\/em>\u00a0absolutely nothing, and yet its just-off-kilter composition, its tiny vertical folds and brief bits of vertical print, are so stunningly new that when you see the date\u00a0is 1897, you think there\u2019s been a massive typo.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Auguts Klett (1866\u20131928), The Republic of the Roosters in the Sun Has Dined and Dances Without<\/em> Costumes.<\/p><\/div>\n

The question that these deeply original artworks pose is both simple and deceptive: What is art supposed<\/em> to do? Is it meant to be in dialogue with history\u2014to play within the confines of a certain style or set of visual rules\u2014or is it meant to be an unfiltered portal to the subconscious, even if\u2014especially if\u2014that subconscious is perverse?<\/p>\n

In the contemporary art market, outsider art remains undervalued. But if you look at what is most evocative and what, importantly, has the rare distinction of originality, art brut, raw and unfiltered, fulfills the distinction\u2014the madness of the mind made manifest.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a common idea that at least a trace of madness undergirds the creative impulse. But the notion that insanity and art go together is also a potentially harmful myth, perpetuated in part by a desire to justify bad behavior and in part by the need to ascribe genius to a fundamentally different state of being.<\/p>\n

Scientifically, the link between creativity and madness is well studied but not concrete. It is true that \u201cdistinguished artists,\u201d according to a study<\/a> from Johns Hopkins\u2019s Kay Redfield Jamison, tend to have depressive illnesses at a rate of about ten to thirty times higher than the population at large. Poets, especially, tend to be the most \u201ctortured\u201d and psychologically \u201cdamaged,\u201d according to a decade-long study<\/a> from the University of Kentucky\u2019s Arthur M. Ludwig. There\u2019s no getting around the fact that artists have especially high rates of mood disorders, including bipolar disorders and depression. While these illnesses are not a prerequisite to creativity, they do tend to accompany the artistic mind.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Anonymous, embroidery.<\/p><\/div>\n

One popular idea is that people who have mood\u00a0episodes have brains that are more accustomed to extreme emotional swings, and thus their brains are more adaptive to synthesizing disparate thoughts, a process that is often considered the crux of creativity. Likewise, the manic period experienced by those with bipolar disorders is similar to the high felt during the creative process.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea that mania has an intrinsic relationship to creativity is based in part on retrospection of what it feels like to be in a state of manic excitement, a state that feels like manic power, euphoria, endless energy and optimism,\u201d says<\/a> Sybil Barten, an emeritus professor of psychology. \u201cOn the face of it, these feelings might well be those that characterize the process of creation.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the myth of the tortured artist can also be harmful. Depression, alcoholism, shifting moods\u2014these are not especially productive states. Creativity still requires discipline as well as long periods of energy and focus. Even the classic examples of the \u201csuccessful mad artist\u201d would probably have been better off without their mental disorders. Vincent van Gogh, for instance, might have been able to create a good deal more artworks had his mental illness not interfered. \u201cThere is evidence in his letters that he didn\u2019t view these problems that were visited upon him as enhancing his creativity,\u201d says<\/a> Jane Kromm, a professor of art history, \u201cbut rather was very worried that his peaceful periods of accomplishment would be stolen from him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Else Blankenhorn (1873\u20131920), Untitled<\/em>. \u00a9 Sammlung Prinzhorn, Heidelberg.<\/p><\/div>\n

Indeed, many successful creative people make a point to impose stability and normalcy on their lives. In a longitudinal study<\/a>, Nancy Andreasen, who is known as one of the founders of the psychological study of creativity, found that successful artists typically follow relatively rigid schedules in which they purposefully set out time to write each day. Gustave Flaubert\u2019s quote\u2014\u201cBe regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work\u201d\u2014comes to mind.<\/p>\n

Successful artists, according to Andreasen, also stay close to friends and family, knowing this is vital to their happiness. They subscribe to the Freudian definition of health: to love well and to work well. And yet they also don\u2019t fully distance themselves from the emotional swings they feel. Many of the people she studied had serious mood disorders, which hurt their ability to create when they were in the throes of them. But these experiences also provided helpful material that they could later use\u2014what William Wordsworth called \u201cemotion recollected in tranquility.\u201d<\/p>\n

So perhaps the most pressing question is not, Are madness and creativity linked?\u2014the answer seems to be yes, although not in the romantic ways we tend to assume\u2014but rather, What should one do if mental illness has struck? While mental illness may not lead directly to creativity, artistic projects tend to be\u00a0some of the best outlets for dealing with mental disorders.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Karl Schneeberge, Sozialist, <\/em> 1922. \u00a9 Psychiatry Museum, Bern.<\/p><\/div>\n

William A. F. Browne, who directed the Crichton Royal Hospital in Dumfries, Scotland, and whose collection is on show at the Maison de Victor Hugo, believed that providing his patients with artistic activities was the most \u201cmoral treatment.\u201d Compared to the Victorian nightmare of straitjackets and electroshock therapy, a pencil and a piece of paper certainly seem like desirable instruments for rehabilitation.<\/p>\n

In the works on display at the Maison de Victor Hugo, the humanity of the patients shines through, a humanity that had largely been denied them both in and out of the hospital. Museumgoers often expect art to convey a distinct, singular message. It is not an overstatement to say that to then not \u201cget\u201d that message is to feel as though you don\u2019t have a soul. It\u2019s an idea evocative of Kazuo Ishiguro<\/a>\u2019s Never Let Me Go<\/em>, in which boarding-school students\u2014who we later discover are clones\u2014are asked to submit their drawings to the school\u2019s administration. The goal is to determine whether or not they have a deeper personhood. \u201cThat\u2019s the whole thing about art,\u201d says Tommy D, one of the three clones followed throughout the novel. \u201cIt says what\u2019s inside of you; it reveals your soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

But with this exhibit, that expectation is cast aside. One is free to experience the work as pure emotion, devoid of meaning or intention.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Heinrich Anton M\u00fcller, c. 1920.<\/p><\/div>\n

Much of the art shown in \u201cMadness on the Mind\u201d was created before and during the two world wars. In the midst of World War II, Carl Schneider, who had directed Hans Prinzhorn\u2019s collection of art by mentally ill asylum patients for years, was assigned by the Nazis to become the head of the so-called T4 Program, which stipulated \u201cthe extermination of physically and mentally handicapped adults.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Schneider had once worked closely with the mentally ill artists and their works, he now refused to look at it. It made those he was asked to kill too human. In looking, their work became them\u2014and they became their work. In their art, their souls shone too brightly.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cody Delistraty is a writer and critic in Paris.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  On July 5, 1945, the French painter Jean Dubuffet set off for Switzerland accompanied by two fellow Frenchmen, the publisher Jean Paulhan and the architect Charles-\u00c9douard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. 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