The art of psychotics

Abstract

Incomprehensible art is a modern phenomenon of our civilization. We attribute it to the rather unique combination of two factors. There has been a splitting-up of our cultural heritage, by which commonly shared ideas have given way to private conceptions nurtured by special groups or individuals. Correspondingly the symbolic images representing these ideas have come to reveal their meaning only to the happy few. At the same time, however, our century has generated the democratic expectation that works of art be understandable to everybody, so that the kind of esoteric message that was confined in earlier periods to those able to receive it now faces the population as a whole, an audience unprepared for it. This gulf between art and its public became particularly apparent when the artist in his presentations estranged himself by an unfamiliar style of visual form, that is, when he deviated from the lifelikeness that citizens had come to expect from paintings or sculpture. In the past, a viewer of Botticelti’s Birth of Venus might have been unaware of the picture’s mythological and humanistic connotations, but he had little trouble deciphering and being moved by the airy figures his eyes saw; whereas the visual idioms of the modern artist stop the unprepared visitor at the very first step of his approach. Add to this the protective unwillingness of people at most other times and places to pay attention to any form of art not in conformity with their own. Incomprehensibility was no issue as long as one felt no urge to understand. In our own setting until a century ago it was possible to dismiss as barbarian not only the art of “primitive” tribesmen but also much of what came over from Asia. Similarly, as the art historian Georg Schmidt has pointed out, three “outsider” varieties of art were excluded from recognition: the folk art of the peintres nai;fs and the art work of children and mental patients (3, p. 28). It was taken for granted that inability and derangement made such products unfit for aesthetic consideration. The first attempts to understand and appreciate the art of the insane coincide with the first impact of modem art upon Western Europe. In 1872, Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, a Paris physician published a “medical-legal study of insanity,” in which he reproduced a drawing by a schizophrenic and pointed to the psychiatric and artistic interest of such work [15]. By that time, Impressionist painting was in full swing. A few years later, the Italian art historian Corrado Ricci published the first book on the art of children [ 141. The profound impression exerted by Japanese woodcuts and African sculpture around the turn of the century is well known. The art of Asia and Africa, although strange to Western eyes, derived of course from clearly established traditions of its own. A curious, very different problem was posed by the art work of psychotics and children and, to some extent, by folk artists. These products were all but untouched by the artistic climate of their setting. They seemed to burst into bloom from nowhere, created by untrained and uninfluenced laymen. Also professional artists, struck by mental illness, suddenly produced