Art Brut &
Psychiatry
Dr Leo Navratil, founder of the Haus der Kunstler at the Gugging Hospital explores the development of Art Brut and its relationship with psychiatry.
Initially, starting in the second half of the last century up to the twenties of our century, only certain psychiatrists were dealing with the art that originated in mental institutions: Foremost, Cesare Lombroso, whose work Genio e follia (Genius and Insanity) was first published in 1864. In 1907, the French psychiatrist Paul Meunier published his L'Art chez les fous. Interestingly enough, for this he used the pseudonym Marcel Reja. Walter Morgenthaler, whose book on Adolf Wolfli Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler was published in 1921, many years later told my friend Alfred Bader, that at the time this book had been more harmful than beneficial. His colleagues in psychiatry simply did not take it seriously. Similarly, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, published one year later by Hans Prinzhorn, while causing quite a stir among contemporary artists, remained without perceptible impact on the psychiatric establishment. As late as 1956, the famous psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger saw in the lack of any relationship to artistic images and tradition proof positive for his thesis that fine arts and the creations of schizophrenics were mutually exclusive concepts.
But now, precisely that criterion that moved Binswanger to not regard the work of psychiatric patients as art - the lack of a relationship to cultural art - has become one of the main criteria of a species of art which the French painter Jean Dubuffet called 'Art Brut' (Raw Art). Even as a young man, Dubuffet had been fascinated by the illustrations in Hans Prinzhorn's Bildnerei der Geisteskranken. In 1945, Dubuffet travelled to Switzerland. There, in the mental asylum of Waldau near Berne, he viewed the works of the schizophrenic patients Adolf Wolfli and Heinrich Anton Muller. In Lausanne, he came to know the schizophrenic Aloïse Corbaz and her remarkable drawings. Dubuffet was deeply impressed by the originality of this kind of art, which had been created far from models and the artistic mainstream in the seclusion of life in mental institutions. To him, the art of these people represented a kind of extreme individualism, free from all social and cultural constraints.
Dubuffet decided to acquire such paintings and to make them known to the public. For a full forty years, up to his death in 1985, he devoted his life to this art - collecting, exhibiting, and publishing it, as well as fighting for its recognition. His Collection de l'Art Brut was the first art collection outside a mental institution containing the art created by psychiatric patients. Its founding caused a dramatic re-evaluation of works of this kind, the impact of which can hardly be overestimated.
What his predecessors, the psychiatrists, had not been able to achieve, Dubuffet succeeded in doing. He managed to bring many people into contact with these expressions, and to gain for them recognition in the world of art. There have been some special circumstances contributing to his success. First and foremost, the fact that Dubuffet himself was an artist to whom competence in matters of fine arts had to be granted. Second, however, came his 'antipsychiatric' bias and his rather idiosyncratic views on psychiatry. Above all, Dubuffet emphasized the fact that Art brut was not the art of lunatics, neither was it 'psychopathological art'.
Only then did art historians as well as the public start to become interested in these works, and now they command their proper value in the fine art marketplace. Art Brut has become fashionable. (In the English speaking world, 'Art Brut' is preferentially called 'Outsider Art', a term originated by Roger Cardinal in his book (1972) of that title.)
Dubuffet insisted on a strict separation of Art Brut from cultural art. In this respect his concept corresponded to that of Binswanger in that he regarded the works of untrained schizophrenics tied to no tradition as something totally apart from cultural art. However, while for Binswanger these were without intrinsic value, to Dubuffet they appeared to be worthy of highest praise.
Dubuffet was reluctant to equate Art Brut with the artwork of psychiatric patients, since on the one hand the results of so-called art therapy in psychiatric clinics rarely had anything to do with Art Brut and since, on the other hand, persons not living in psychiatric clinics can produce Art Brut if they are to a great extent socially isolated. According to Michel Thevoz, nearly half of the works in the Collection de l'Art Brut are by patients in psychiatric clinics who are generally classified as schizophrenics. A small group of Art Brut artists is composed of persons who, as adherents of spiritualistic creeds and teachings, believe they do not create their works by themselves, but rather at the behest or under the guidance of spirits. Thevoz cites Laure Pigeon, Augustin Lesage, Madge Gill, Jeanne Tripler, and Michael Lonne as examples.
A third group of Art Brut artists had little or no formal education. These did not become artists after looking at other works of art. nor had they studied historical and contemporary styles and periods in art history, as is normally the case with professional artists, but turned out to be capable, as adults, and sometimes even at an advanced age, to resume as draftsmen or painters at the very point at which they had stopped when they were still children, and did so with considerably more intensity and endurance than when they had been young. Roger Cardinal calls this group of artists 'the innocents'.
Thus by no means all creators of Art Brut are schizophrenics, but many of the great ones among them remained hospitalized for life and were suffering from severe schizophrenic psychoses. Here I am thinking of Adolf Wolfli, Heinrich Anton Muller, Aloise Corbaz, Carlo Zinelli, Gaston Duf, Jules Doudin, and the Mexican Martin Ramirez, whose works, as far as I know, are not yet in the Collection de l'Art Brut, yet who is an outstanding representative of Art Brut.
Among the 15 Gugging Artists who were, early in the eighties, accepted into theCollection de l'Art Brut, and who featured the Fascicule entitled 'Gugging', August Walla, Oswald Tchirtner, Johann Garber, and Franz Kernbeis were suffering from chronic schizophrenia. The late patients Rudolf Horacek, Otto Print, and Max were similarly hospitalized for decades and had the same diagnosis. In the cases of Johann Hauser, Philipp Schopke, Franz Gableck, Johann Scheibock, and Johann B., a manic-depressive disturbance had been diagnosed, and their manic phases reached the proportion of full psychosis. Josef Bachler and Johann Korec, too, were manic-depressives; they were, however, not psychotic, and remained hospitalized for different disturbances with other diagnoses. The reason which led to their being hospitalized, and which subsequently also manifested itself in their art, was a slight chronic mania, so-called hypomania. Fritz Opitz was an epileptic and occasionally suffered from twilight states.
Also among the so-called 'mediumistic' artists who create their works in some kind of trance, Seraphine Louis and Jeanne Tripler ultimately were hospitalized in psychiatric institutions. Roger Cardinal writes that Madge Gill probably escaped the same fate only because friends and her two sons saved her from it. The miner Augustin Lesage seems to have been suffering from schizophrenia as well.
Over half of the Gugging Artists are characterized by inadequate education and schooling as well as a low level of intelligence. In most cases, brain damage in early childhood and consequent disturbances in maturing are the cause of this. But not only the 'innocents', but all of the Gugging Artists are totally free from any personal confrontation with the social and cultural phenomenon commonly referred to as the 'fine arts'.
It was Dubuffet who coined the oft-quoted statement 'There is no art of the insane any more than there is an art of dyspeptics, or an art of people with knee complaints'. My respect for Jean Dubuffet as the man who discovered Art Brut and as a friend of the Gugging Artists is in no way diminished by the fact that in this matter I do not wholly agree with him. One simply cannot equate psychotic disturbances which alter the entire personality with physical diseases. Of course we do not know an art of dyspeptics or of people with knee complaints; yet we do know an art of schizophrenics, of manic-depressives, of epileptics, and of people with cerebral damage. Art Brut is, after all, by and large an art created by mentally severely deranged persons. Although Dubuffet was not without psychiatric knowledge - he had met some patients personally, and was acquainted with some psychiatrists - his concept of mental diseases nevertheless was partially in conflict with reality. As he sees it, Wolfli and Aloise lived their art and were locked up because they were artists. Apparently Dubuffet could not realize that psychosis not only represents a state of internal independence and freedom from social standards and constraints, but at the same time primarily also a severe psychological disturbance, a handicap, and suffering. Even if they are not fully aware of their otherness, when they in later years regard their fate as bearable, and if at times their suffering is minimal, schizophrenics still are yearning for social acceptance, for being sane or Śnormalą once again. Based on decades of dealing with schizophrenics, the psychoanalyst Recamier stated succinctly but with full justification: 'Schizophrenics seem to have a passion for mental health'. It is quite true also that people who are not psychotic can create Art Brut, provided they are to a considerable degree socially isolated, live on the fringe of society, or are mentally retarded. The rigid concept of Art Brut established by Jean Dubuffet appears to be practically tailor-made for schizophrenics. And thus of course the people who impressed Dubuffet initially - and actually for life - most deeply (I have previously named them: Adolf Wolfli. Heinrich Anton Muller, Aloise Corbaz) were all schizophrenic patients.
With schizophrenic patients, their total independence from cultural art is caused not only by their isolation in a mental institution, but also by the primary loss of reality of psychotics. In Dubuffet's opinion, Art Brut artists did not need a special gift for drawing. He believed that everyone had the talent required, but in most it was repressed by cultural conditioning. If, as in psychosis, this conditioning is not effective, the chance for original artistic creation exists.
Also the 'extreme individualism', on which Dubuffet bases his concept of Art Brut, is found in its most extreme forms with schizophrenics. We must realize that schizophrenia does not make all patients alike. On the contrary, the individual peculiarity of psychotics is much more marked than in people of unimpaired mental health. Thus psychiatrists were right when they, as early as in the last century, saw psychosis as 'individuality raised to its extreme.'
Dubuffet also stressed that the typical Art Brut artist creates his art for himself, not for others. He valued the fact if such an artist was hiding his works, would not relinquish, or even only show them to anyone. Perhaps these works had an 'imaginary addressee', perhaps they didnąt and only were messages of the artist to himself. Michel Thevoz tells the story of a 75 year-old lady who lived in a home for the elderly and created extravagantly beautiful knitted 'pictures'. When he learned of this, he went to see her and found her engrossed in her work. She was knitting a woollen picture of astonishing originality strictly from her imagination. Thevoz wanted to buy it from her and told her of his museum, and suggested putting on an exhibit of her works. She refused all this and explained to him that she always unravelled everything she had knitted so .....
SEE THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE IN RAW VISION MAGAZINE #15
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