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.

In the Frame for March 2013

In the Frame usually showcases a work of art from the Archives & Museum’s own collections each month, but the list of places to which it has occasionally gone ‘on holiday’ to highlight something held elsewhere is growing. To Flanders, Ontario and Northern Ireland, we now add Lille, the 2004 European Capital of Culture. There a work of street art by Yayoi Kusama, entitled Tulipes de Shangri-La, sprouts incongruously from a concrete esplanade near the international railway station.

An exhibition of Kusama’s work at Tate Modern was the point of departure for a series of posts on this blog in March and April last year. Her story – one of a battle since childhood against nightmares of obliteration, hallucinations of polka-dot patterns pervading and threatening to destroy not only her, but also her family, her home and her world – is profoundly moving, not least because she has chosen to fight this battle by deploying her artistic talents to depict these very patterns. This decision is reminiscent of the one made by Vincent van Gogh, as communicated by him to his sister in a letter of 1888: “We need good cheer and happiness, hope and love. The uglier, older, meaner, iller, poorer I get, the more I wish to take my revenge by doing brilliant colour, well-arranged, resplendent”.¹

This is not the place to resume the ongoing discussion of the hackneyed ‘myth of the mad artist’, as if the significance of Kusama’s artistic output (let alone that of Van Gogh’s output) was reducible to that discussion. Yet the word ‘resplendent’ well describes Tulipes de Shangri-La. The scale and colour of the work is suggestive of something actually poisonous or otherwise dangerous. To those of a certain generation who, in their teenage years, imbibed British science fiction writing of the 1950s and 60s, there is something slightly Wyndhamesque about it. In any event, there is no doubt that the work brims with vitality. It is tempting to detect a further layer of meaning in its concrete, ostensibly inhospitable setting, as if it were representative of the artist’s own flowering in the face of adversity. Whatever else may be the case, Tulipes de Shangra-La has certainly become emblematic of Lille’s urban regeneration.

1 L. Jansen, H. Luijten, and N. Bakker, N. (eds.), Vincent Van Gogh: The Complete Letters (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), vol. 4, p. 265, as cited by Colin Gale in ‘Will the Real Van Gogh please stand up?’, March 2010.

In the Frame for February 2013

This month we have chosen to highlight O.S. Odin’s The Ku Klux Klan, a disturbing portrayal of the moments leading up to the lynching of a naked African American at the hands of a hooded gang. The horror of this scene of lethal violence is intensified by the casual, pop-art style which is employed to render it. In this respect Odin’s work is reminiscent of that of Kimberley, to which we drew attention on this thread some eighteen months ago. At that time we observed that misogyny proceeds from, and collapses back into, misanthropy. Here we are prompted to say the same of racism.

By painting the hands (and feet) of every member of the frenzied mob blood-red, Odin leaves us in no doubt concerning their shared responsibility for the murder of the defenceless man within their midst. A woman sits to the left, pointing accusingly at the central, hapless figure. She is white-skinned and clothed in white, yet she is not hooded, and her clothing seems to have been disturbed. Her left hand grasps the captive’s leg, while her right points directly at his phallus: the accusation appears to be one of rape. Though she does not have a hand on the rope which is tied around the victim’s neck, her hands and her feet are drenched in as much blood as those of the gang around her. It is tempting to see this woman playing a role like that of Mayella Ewell in a reprise of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Yet no courtroom drama – not even the drama of a kangaroo court – features in this scenario. Odin’s vision is one in which no possible recourse is apparent against brazen injustice – unless the clear-sighted refusal to avert one’s gaze from the reality of such injustice is itself the first necessary step towards redress.

In the Frame for January 2013

This month, one of our volunteers has chosen to comment on the artwork of Nadia Chomyn.

 

There are over 200 drawings by Nadia Chomyn in the Bethlem Archives, covering scraps of paper that include receipts, lined pages from notebooks and slips torn from illustrated children’s books.

 

Lines, drawn invariably with a ball-point pen, are repeated and repeated again. As in the image below, they usually build up – almost sculpturally – images of horsemen, horses and, occasionally, chickens or roosters. There’s an obsessive quality to the unvaried subject matter – as if the artist wants to perfect her horses and horsemen – but they’re all drawn with the same loose, vivid style, the lines overlapping and interrupting each other in a manner chaotic, yet purposeful.

 

The repetition of themes across Nadia’s work made me think of an otherwise very different artist – Gwen John (1876 – 1939), who felt compelled to repeat the same painting with small variations many times over. But Nadia’s story is an extraordinary one. She drew all the pictures we have in the archives before her tenth birthday. Her drawing ability first manifested itself around the age of three – when she started drawing all over the walls – and the image below was produced at the age of five and a half. Her point of reference was a picture book she had, whose illustrations she would study and – several days afterwards – reproduce from memory. She drew by herself with no reference to others (always refusing to draw to order) and she showed no interest whatsoever in what others thought of her work.

 

Yet in other areas of her life, Nadia demonstrated ‘lethargy and impassivity’, slow and poorly co-ordinated movements, extreme clumsiness, bad motor control, a passion for arrangement (she would become distressed if her toys were not arranged as she wanted them) and obsessive behaviour. She was unable to do up buckles or use a knife and fork. At the age of six, her vocabulary consisted of about ten single-word utterances. She was diagnosed with autism around this time, which – the 1970s – was the same period that Bethlem began working with children.

 

These drawings and Nadia’s history have naturally been of interest to psychologists, since children’s drawings have played a major part in assessing their intellectual development and intelligence going back to the early twentieth century. Indeed, asking a child to ‘draw a man’ and studying the competence of the result has in many cases been used as a standard IQ test. Perhaps Nadia’s case proves this reliance on standardised representational development misplaced.

 

Educational psychologist Lorna Selfe wrote a case study on Nadia in 1977, followed by a wider study on ‘normal and anomalous’ drawing ability in children in the eighties. She suggests that Nadia’s ability to draw so well – her tendency to ‘photographic realism’ – may have been the result of her inability to ‘conceptualise’ what she was drawing (the standard approach of ‘normal’ children).Nadia’s story gives some context to the many images we have by her in the collection. I suppose the question is: is that context necessary? What does it tell us? Many artists at Bethlem have drawn as a result of mental illness or distress; others were drawing long before they became ill. But the natural temptation for any visitor to the museum is to look for the context – the illness as ‘explanation’ for the work. Nadia’s work has been offered as evidence of her emotional state, her desire for self-expression, even as a response to an (unproven) early trauma. Selfe dismisses much of this. I think – whatever their provenance – they’re intrinsically interesting to look at.

 

Lorna Selfe, Normal and Anomalous Representational Drawing Ability in Children (London: Academic Press, 1983).

In the Frame for December 2012

Throughout the history of Western art, painters have time and again returned to the Christian Bible for solace and inspiration. The artists whose works are represented in the collections of Bethlem’s Archives and Museum form no exception to this. Yet, of all the books of the New Testament, we might think that its last – the Revelation of St John – would be the least likely to feed the imagination. We might think this…but we’d be wrong. When we read that Thomas Hennell, the artist and sometime Maudsley patient, was “reduced to tears of misery” and “threw away the Bible which had been not long before the intensest source of inspiration”, saying “How disappointing the books of Revelation and of Daniel now appeared!”,¹ perhaps we are tempted to counter “Don’t start with apocalyptic!” But that is precisely what artists from Jonathan Martin to ‘Little Flower’ have done. Whether this was good for their mental health is, of course, open to question.

This month the Archivist takes In the Frame ‘on holiday’ again to feature the work of another artist (with Maudsley connections like Hennell) who was inspired by Revelation. The Leaves of the Tree were for the Healing of the Nations is a stained-glass window constructed by the Irish artist Wilhelmina Geddes and installed into St John’s Church, Malone Road, Belfast in 1920. The title is taken word for word from Revelation chapter 22 in English translation. The Archivist saw the window on a recent trip to Northern Ireland, and cannot improve upon the description given of it by the art historian Nicola Bowe in 1984: it “positively sings in a patchwork forest of greens through which throng small meditating souls in bright pink, ruby, blue and gold, each piece of glass chosen and painted with the greatest thought and care”.²

This is a vision easily recognisable within religious iconography, one of a future paradise in which the Tree of Life quells the strife and conflict ushered in by the primordial Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. A relatively uncommon choice of subject for a stained-glass window it may be, and perhaps all the more poignant for that. It was commissioned in the immediate aftermath of World War I to express the hopes, then widely shared, of a better future; yet within a year of its installation, Ireland had been partitioned amid bitter wrangling, and four years later Geddes herself was temporarily admitted to the Maudsley Hospital in London following a breakdown in her mental health. In 1923 The Irish Times reacted to the modernism of her work by opining that “her glass is quite unlike that of most other stained glass workers; the religion which it reflects is the religion of power and fighting, not the religion of peace and restfulness”.³ But Geddes’ passion was not poured into sectarianism; she accepted commissions from Catholic and Protestant churches alike. On the evidence of the window at St John’s, and on that of her own biography, her passion was to heal and not to harm.

¹ Thomas Hennell, The Witnesses (University Books, 1967), p. 167.

² Nicola Gordon Bowe, ‘Wilhelmina Geddes’, Irish Arts Review, 1984, p. 58.

³ The Irish Times, 14 July 1923, quoted in Nicola Gordon Bowe, ‘A Window with Punch’, Apollo Magazine (September 2008), pp 74-79.

Detail from Wilhelmina Geddes’ The Leaves of the Tree were for the Healing of the Nations