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.

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 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?”