In the Frame for April

This month’s In the Frame is ‘Red and Blue Abstract’, an anonymous work produced as part of a series of experiments, overseen by Maudsley doctors Eric Guttman and Walter Maclay in the 1930s, into the hallucinogenic effects of the drug mescaline. Since “mescaline hallucinations are predominantly, though not exclusively, visual,” they wrote, “a description of them by  means of drawings and pictures could be expected to be somewhat more impressive, and perhaps more realistic, than a verbal account”. “Artists who were willing to volunteer their services” were “given enough mescaline to cause hallucinations and were asked to sketch what they saw”.¹

The Archivist has chosen to highlight ‘Red and Blue Abstract’ on the strength of his reading of Oliver Sacks’ latest book, Hallucinations, which (according to one reviewer) is “a superb synthesis of the literature on these arresting, disturbing and sometimes terrifying phenomena” as well as “a profound work of humanity”.² In the public imagination, hallucinations are most closely associated with the experience of schizophrenia, and are often highly feared on that account, but Sacks writes relatively little about schizophrenic hallucinations (phenomena that demand separate consideration, in his view), preferring to focus his attention on hallucinations arising from “organic” psychoses – “the transient psychoses sometimes associated with delirium, epilepsy, drug use, and certain medical conditions”.³

Anyone who has read the description, cited by Sacks, of the drug-induced hallucinations written by Daniel Breslaw – a participant in a 1960s experiment not entirely dissimilar to Guttman and Maclay’s – might be forgiven for detecting shades of ‘Red and Blue Abstract’ in his account.

“I closed my eyes. ‘I see stars!’ I then burst out, finding the firmament spread out on the inside of my eyelids. The room about me receded into a tunnel of oblivion as I vanished into another world, fruitless to describe…The heavens above me, a night sky spangled with eyes of flame, dissolve into the most overpowering array of colours I have ever seen or imagined; many of the colours are entirely new – areas of the spectrum which I seem to have hitherto overlooked.”⁴

‘Red and Blue Abstract’ is by an anonymous artist, but another participant in the mescaline experiments, Basil Beaumont, wrote to Dr Guttmann in 1936 that his “appreciation of beauty, particularly flowers; is still enhanced greatly” and that his “painting is becoming more brilliant in colour”. Another of Guttman’s correspondents, a medical colleague, drew attention to a far less welcome by-product of the experiments:

“I hope you will not feel that I am interfering in writing to you, but I wonder if you know what sort of an experience taking mescaline can be in some cases? Have you taken it yourself? … In the case of the younger man [to whom you gave mescaline last Friday] it was an experience so hideous that no human being ought to undergo it without the very gravest necessity.  No one would go into it voluntarily if he had the slightest notion what it was going to be like; also in his case, it might have had disastrous consequences.  … I must tell you that but for luck, in that I happened to see him and detain him, I firmly believe he would have murdered his friend that night in a state of hallucination and I think also that if he not been under observation at the Maudsley he might at one point… have committed suicide.”

Sacks’ chapter on drug-induced hallucinations, in which he describes visionary experiences – in turn elevating and terrifying – that resulted from his own habitual drug use in the 1960s and 70s, makes for equally unsettling reading, and invites as much wonder concerning the abandon shown by previous generations of researchers as ‘Red and Blue Abstract’ does concerning the vision of the artist.

¹ W. Maclay and E. Guttmann, ‘Mescaline Hallucinations in Artists’, Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, vol. 45, no 1 (1941).

² Raymond Tallis, ‘Oliver Sacks on Drugs’, The Times Literary Supplement, 13 February 2013.

³ Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (Picador, 2012), p. xiii.

⁴ ibid, p. 99.

Kaleidoscope Cats: A Clinical Perspective on Louis Wain

After more than a year’s absence from the museum, for exhibitions in Brent Museum and the Nicholson Art Gallery in Leek, the Louis Wain collection is back at Bethlem for a winter show, which opened earlier this month. Humorous and whimsical, or psychedelic, Wain’s cat images were much loved in the Victorian and Edwardian era, and remain so today. Wain was one of the last patients to be treated at Bethlem before the move to Beckenham. Certified insane in June 1924, Wain was transferred to Bethlem after a year in the Springfield Hospital in Tooting, following a newspaper appeal to “animal lovers and admirers” of his work. He stayed at Bethlem for five years, and moved to Napsbury Hospital in May 1930, as Bethlem was emptied prior to the move to Monks Orchard. As Wain settled in well at Napsbury, he remained there.

There has been much speculation over the years about the relationship of Wain’s art to his mental health, for the artist continued to paint and draw almost until his death, aged 78, in July 1939. In particular, the work of Drs Eric Guttman and Walter Maclay (whose interest in art has formed the basis of previous exhibitions) in the later 1930s encouraged efforts to arrange Wain’s pictures to form a supposed clinical progression, from conventional to psychedelic. There has also been much debate about how he might be retrospectively diagnosed: either following his certification at the age of 63, or earlier in life when, according to certain accounts, the artist was shy and eccentric.

Both of these ideas will be discussed in a free talk in the museum on Saturday 1 December, when consultant psychiatrist Dr David O’Flynn (Chair of the Adamson Collection) refutes many of the myths surrounding Louis Wain’s “Kaleidoscope Cat” series. The Adamson Collection, a remarkable collection of around 5,000 artworks, has recently been protected in a move to the Wellcome Library. Named after Edward Adamson, a trained artist who served as a medical orderly in the Second World War, the collection emerged from the art studio established by Adamson in the 1940s at Netherne Hospital.

As well as our regular opening hours, the museum will open on Saturday 1 and 8 December, from 11am – 5pm, for an extra opportunity to see the Louis Wain exhibition. Dr O’Flynn’s talk will take place at 2pm on 1 December, and the Archivist will talk about Wain’s later work and life at Bethlem at the same time on 8 December. The Bethlem Gallery’s Art Fair and the museum shop will also be open for Christmas shopping. For full details, visit our website.

 

Louis Wain – Cats’ Christmas

In the Frame for April 2011

One of our volunteers has chosen to write about Herbrand Ignouville-Williams’ Purple Finger Painting, and the mescaline experiments conducted by Drs Eric Guttman and Walter Maclay in the 1930s (which was the subject of a temporary exhibition at the Bethlem Gallery last September) which inspired it. She writes:

In previous studies, Guttman and Maclay had noticed that although schizophrenic sufferers often wanted to create art in an attempt to ‘explain themselves’, only a small proportion of sufferers possessed the technical ability to translate these hallucinations into art. Therefore, like-minded professional artists such as Ignouville-Williams, who shared the doctors’ interests in the unconscious and irrational, were invited to take part in these experiments exploring experimental psychosis and the results offer a revealing insight into the psychology of those involved.

Herbrand Ignouville-Williams was an active member of an art collective called The White Stag group, which he co-founded in 1934 with Kenneth Hall and Basil Rakoczi, who was to remain a close friend until Herbrand’s untimely death in the 1940s. Rakoczi had a lifelong interest in gypsy law and the occult, and turned his hand to commercial art before turning his attention to painting and psychology. When they met in 1933, after recently serving in the first world war, Herbrand was a mature student of medicine at Cambridge, and in the midst of a disintegrating marriage. This world of bohemian art to which Rakoczi belonged intrigued Herbrand. He wrote in a letter to his mother; “I should be so much happier living quietly with Benny [Rakoczi], meeting artists and musicians and interesting people with ideas.” Ignouville-Williams had also started to study psychology. He introduced Rakoczi to the subject and this remained a lifelong interest to him. Rokoczi’s subsequent work in psychology, which was extensive, was based on his own experience in the mid 1930′s with analyst Karin Stephen, with whom he underwent a “full Freudian analysis”. In late 1933, Rakoczi and Ignouville-Williams set up the Society for Creative Psychology at Rakoczi’s studio in London with the aim of developing the techniques of Freudian Psychological analysis.

In an attempt to avoid conscription, the members of the White Stag group based themselves in Dublin during the war, where they developed a reputation in the city as leading ‘cutting edge’ artists with their calendar of lectures, parties and exhibitions. In all of their exhibitions, the works were diverse in character, ranging from surrealist-inspired images to abstract, semi-representational and symbolist pieces.

The major event in the White Stag calendar in 1945 was the publication of Herbrand’s book, Three Painters, which studied the work of Basil Rakoczi, Kenneth Hall and Patrick Scott, and is the definitive statement of the philosophy of Subjective Art as interpreted by the White Stag artists. In its preface, Herbert Read said ‘modern art allowed greater freedom of artistic expression’. It was, he said, ‘the imagination itself that… lost its shackles’ and Freud was considered to be the source of that release. The group employed the method of Subjective Art where ‘the theme, instead of being drawn from objects in the external world, is elaborated by the workings of the imagination turned inwards upon the memories, dreams and phantasies of the Unconscious’. To Herbrand, the unconscious, and in particular the creative power of the numen, ‘the fountain-head of all artistic and cultural achievement’ was the source of such activity by means of which art obtained ‘its elusive, magical quality’ . These observations seem to be heavily influenced by his experiences with experimental psychosis.

In the Frame for September 2010

This month one of our museum volunteers has chosen to highlight not a painting in the Archives & Museum’s collections, but an envelope inscribed in black ink by William (or Lillian) Angus, a patient of Berkshire Mental Hospital in Wallingford. The envelope is addressed to ‘Central Board Visitor’ and dated, ‘21/6/46’.  Our volunteer writes:

“At first glance the envelope, like the six page letter inside it, appears to be a combination of word strings of unfathomable meaning and characters that are actually undecipherable – it is even difficult to say whether its author was named ‘Lillian’ or ‘William’.  Yet a sense of intense urgency and anxiety hangs over this communication. The words of the addressee were first written in pencil and then overwritten in ink, as was the ‘Strictly Personal’ stricture. The words ‘Jesus’ and ‘Bible’ also appear on the envelope, within sentences that may continue the account contained in the enclosed letter, or may constitute the writer’s afterthoughts once the letter had been sealed. In any event, the writer wanted there to be no mistake about the letter’s destination or the importance of its contents.

“The envelope (and enclosed letter) evokes an acute sense of organised necessity within a disorder that is otherwise apparently unrestrained. The presumed failure of the writer’s intentions gives it a poignancy which is almost unbearable. Did it ever reach its intended destination? If so, did its recipient take pains in attempting to read and understand it to match those of the writer in its composition? What response (if any) was made? We do not know. This item simply came into the Archives & Museum’s collections via Drs. Guttman and Maclay, the two Maudsley doctors responsible for mescaline experiments, the results of which are currently featured in the Bethlem Gallery’s Phantasmagoria exhibition [see blog post of 19 August 2010]. We cannot say how and why it came to them. Can we say, perhaps, that the intended communication has not utterly failed, given its continued survival and accessibility within our collections?”

Phantasmagoria: New Exhibition Explores Hallucinations in Art

A new exhibition opens at the Bethlem Gallery next week, exploring hallucinations in Surrealist paintings and drawings from the collection of the Bethlem Archives and Museum. Artworks, by Basil Beaumont, Herbrand Williams, Julian Trevelyan and others, were created as part of series of experiments at the Maudsley Hospital into the hallucinogenic effects of the drug mescaline in the late 1930s.

In the late 1930s two of the Maudsley doctors, Dr Eric Guttman and Dr the Hon Walter Maclay started a series of unprecedented experiments. In previous studies both doctors had noted that many patients suffering from schizophrenia wanted to make art in an attempt to ‘explain themselves’. However, they also noted that only a minority of patients had the capacity to translate their hallucinations into pictorial form. These findings led the doctors to invite professional artists from the Surrealist movement, who they believed shared their interests in the unconscious and irrational, to take part in experiments involving the drug mescaline. The results of these Mescaline hallucinations or ‘experimental psychosis’ are a vivid and revealing insight into the psychology of those involved.

All are welcome at the Opening Event, which takes place on Wednesday 25 August, from 3 – 6pm.

Exhibition continues: 26th August – 10th September
Opening times: Wed, Thurs, Friday, 11am – 6pm
(including Saturday 4th September 11am – 6pm, when the Archives and Museum will also be open)
Address: The Bethlem Gallery, Bethlem Royal Hospital, Monks Orchard Road, Beckenham, Kent BR3 3BX
Travel: Nearest British Rail: Eden Park (or a short bus ride from East Croydon on route 119 or 194)