Art: Insanity in Art

The “subconscious,” grand catch-all of irrational human nature, came into literature through James Joyce, into painting through Surrealism. The soberest writers and painters are glad of it, reckoning dreams and fantasies and unconscious motives part of the subject matter of art. They agree with most people in disliking Surrealism’s fakes, faddists, exhibitionists. They value the systematic study of the subconscious by qualified scientists. Last week in Manhattan this respectful alliance between artists and psychiatrists was demonstrated in the first public exhibition of its kind yet held in the U. S.—106 pictures made by pathological patients at Manhattan’s large, grey Bellevue Hospital.

Drawing and painting were added to the time-honored forms of occupational therapy (basket-weaving, metal work, etc.) at Bellevue in the spring of 1935. The Federal Art Project furnished artist-instructors to hold four or five classes a week for all children and adults, except surgical patients, in the psychiatric division. For Bellevue psychiatrists this meant precisely what a new and rangier telescope would mean to an observatory. Day by day they could study in sequence the attempts at expression by mentally sick people. Though the art of individual schizophrenics, among them Dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, has been analyzed in the past as a matter of psychiatric routine, Director Karl Bowman of the Psychiatric Division thinks Bellevue was the first to practice such extensive therapeutic use of painting, such systematic study of the results.

Selected and captioned by Dr. Lauretta Bender, senior psychiatrist in the children’s division, and hung in the Federal Art Project’s Harlem Art Center, the exhibition last week embraced two clinical extremes: drawings by moronic children, unable to complete even primitive images, and monstrous figures drawn by patients with ”general paralysis of the insane.” In between were works by children and adults of varying aptitude, suffering from various disorders.

One remarkable series of drawings showed the progression of schizophrenia in an eleven-year-old girl, “Francine.” Before she went to the hospital this little girl never drew. The first stages of her illness seemed to free an artistic gift: she made rapid and effectively caricatured sketches of nurses (see cut), instructors, patients. As her condition became worse, she lost even this contact with reality, and her last drawings were spidery, merely suggestive of form.

A release of subconscious insight such as Francine’s was found in other patients at a certain stage. ”Schizophrenics sometimes cling to reality just in the moment when, because of their disease, they are afraid of losing it completely,” Dr. Bender said. “Then they see more than the normal person, who does not always appreciate what he has in this world.” Most sane and able artists professionally see “more than the normal person,” and in this, as in what Dr. Bender called “the uncanny mysticism” of other pathological daubers, the case work on exhibit invited rude yells from that part of the public which likes to identify the artist with the screwball. What psychiatrists think about that was put simply by Bellevue’s animated, mop-haired Dr. Paul Schilder: “A pathological person is forced down under the surface of everyday reality and can’t get back. A normal artist can dive down and come back up with the treasure.”