Art and the Imagination

Blog readers may be interested in one or other of the following two events.

First, a premiere screening of Thou Art, a film on community outsider art practice produced in partnership with the Bethlem Gallery, will take place at Tate Modern on Friday 10 June at 2.30pm. It will be followed by a panel discussion on the status of outsider art, with opportunity for audience participation.

Second, the Royal College of Art’s conference entitled Imagining Imagination will take place in London on 10-11 June. Readers may remember Phantasmagoria, a temporary exhibition curated last year for the Bethlem Gallery which featured artworks created as part of a series of deliberate experiments at the Maudsley Hospital in the 1930s into the hallucinogenic effects of the drug mescaline. If so, they will be interested to know that the conference will feature a paper comparing and contrasting these works with the output of contemporary artists whose unforced visionary experiences have formed part of their creative subject matter. This paper will be co-presented by the Gallery Co-ordinator, who will be doing her best to be in two places at one time, as she is also involved in the event at Tate Modern!

In the Spotlight: George Gilbert Scott Junior

Since the subject of this month’s In the Spotlight is George Gilbert Scott Junior (1839-1897), arguably one of the least known of a family of prominent architects, one might be tempted to (unkindly) dub it ‘In the Shadows’. Scott’s father of the same name was a key figure in Victorian architecture’s Gothic Revival, and was responsible for the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, the Foreign Office, and the University of Glasgow’s Bute and Randolph Halls, along with many other domestic, public and ecclesiastical buildings. His son, Giles Gilbert Scott, was behind such ‘Gothic-modernist’ projects as Liverpool Cathedral, Battersea Power Station, Cambridge University Library and William Booth College in Denmark Hill, but is best remembered for having designed the iconic red London telephone box. His brother, John Scott, and remote cousin Elisabeth Scott, were also well-known architects of their respective generations.

Certainly George Gilbert Scott Junior had his own share of success, but he is less well remembered today, perhaps because two of his masterpieces (the Anglo-Catholic churches of All Hallows, Southwark and St Agnes, Kennington) were destroyed in the Blitz. The survival of a third signature ecclesiastical work (St John’s, Norwich, now a Roman Catholic diocesan cathedral) might be thought to be wryly appropriate in the light of his own conversion to Rome in 1880. Scott’s career was also disrupted by ill-health, both mental and physical, and alcoholism. Following a period of erratic, delusional and occasionally paranoid behaviour, he was admitted to Bethlem Hospital in July 1883. While in hospital, Scott commenced work on another of his ecclesiastical commissions, St Augustine’s Church in Hull. According to his modern biographer, the “notes [and] drawings made while he was confined were meticulously dated, as if to engage in academic or artistic activity…gave him a feeling of security and a hold on his sanity”.¹

Three months after his admission, Scott escaped the Hospital and fled the country, but shortly afterwards returned to England and to hospital, though not this time to Bethlem. He spent the next ten years in and out of hospital, but continued to “devote his best energies” to his architectural work, his attacks having “not affected his business capacity at all”, as his brother John wrote to one worried client.²

Scott died of cirrhosis of the liver and heart disease at the age of 67, while resident at the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station (ironically another of his father’s best known works, now restored and renamed the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel). The most affecting tribute to him came many years later, in his son Giles’ judgement of the respective professional merits of George Gilbert Senior and Junior: “Grandfather was the successful practical man, and a phenomenal scholar in Gothic precedent, but Father was the artist”.³

1 Gavin Stamp, An Architect of Promise: George Gilbert Scott Junior (1839-1897) and the Late Gothic Revival (2002), p. 334.

2 ibid., p. 337.

3 ibid., p. 361.

Richard Dadd Exhibition at Orleans House Gallery

Readers in West London will be pleased to take note of another opportunity to see the Richard Dadd paintings exhibited at the Bethlem Gallery earlier this year. From 28 May, Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham will host an exhibition on Dadd, showcasing his work while at Bethlem and Broadmoor. The exhibition will also include items from private collections, charting Dadd’s early career, travels to Europe and the Middle East, descent into madness and work created while at Bethlem and Broadmoor Hospitals.

To complement the exhibition, young people with disabilities who attend the gallery’s regular Octagon group have worked with a professional artist to create a collaborative work inspired by Dadd’s famous fairy paintings. This project has been generously supported by the Double O Charity.

Located near the river, in secluded woodland gardens, Orleans House Gallery is an eighteenth century building and the principal art gallery for the borough of Richmond upon Thames. The Gallery is open Tuesday – Saturday, 1pm – 5:30pm, Sundays and Bank Holidays 2pm – 5:30pm, and the exhibition runs until 2 October.

Dangerously Young: Child and Adolescent Psychiatry from a Historical Perspective

Staff from the Archives and Museum recently attended the 3^rd International Conference on the History and Heritage of Psychiatry, which was held at the Museum Dr Guislain in Ghent on the 28^th and 29^th April.

The theme of the conference was Dangerously Young: Child and Adolescent Psychiatry from a Historical Perspective. Bethlem’s archives were featured in two papers: Colin Gale and Caroline Smith examined the cases of several child and adolescent patients treated at Bethlem in the nineteenth century and Zbigniew Kotowicz of the University of Lisbon drew upon his extensive research in the Bethlem archives to examine the development of child psychiatry. Surprisingly few children were treated at Bethlem; of the 1069 patients under the age of 21 admitted between 1815 and 1899 only 58 were 15 or under.

The Belgian perspective was provided by a number of high-profile speakers, including the Flemish Commissioner for the Rights of Children. Belgium has relatively high levels of teen suicide, children in prison, child abuse and domestic violence (shockingly it is statistically more dangerous to be a Belgian woman than a Belgian soldier) and several papers explored the connection between child abuse and delinquency.

The role of DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in the ever-increasing number of mental disorders being diagnosed in children was a recurring theme, and Lisa Appignanesi (Chair of the Freud Museum) questioned how far an attempt is being made to medicalise ordinary emotions such as sadness, shyness and anxiety in order to benefit the drug companies.

Overall this was a thought-provoking conference and an excellent opportunity to meet representatives from museums of psychiatry throughout Europe. There was also a chance to pay a visit to one of Bethlem’s paintings: The Anger Within by Elise Warriner, on loan to the Museum Dr Guislain as part of their exhibition The Weighty Body: Fat or Thin, Vanity or Insanity. The exhibition explores the history of fasting, including those who stopped eating for religious or political reasons, and includes several works on the theme of anorexia nervosa. The exhibition has now closed but is due to be reprised at the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden in 2012.

Impact Arts Fair, 20-22 May 2011

The work of artists associated with the Bethlem Gallery features in this weekend’s Impact Art Fair at Candid Arts Islington. Over the next three days, the Fair will showcase the work of artists who have experience of mental health difficulties, substance misuse, ex-offenders, homelessness, physical disabilities or mental disabilities. The artists are highly talented practitioners with unique world views, producing works which provoke, stimulate and satisfy in equal measure. It promises to be an exciting opportunity to see a wide variety of high quality work at affordable prices. Three pages of the current issue of The Big Issue is devoted to the Fair, and more details can be found on the Fair website.