A Disquieting Feeling of Strangeness?: The Art of the Mentally Ill
Authors: Allan Beveridge
Journal: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2001)

The art of the mentally ill is currently the focus of great interest. There have been numerous books on the subject, the emergence of specialized journals, international exhibitions, and the sale of work at ever-increasing prices. The creations of mentally ill patients have been given various names, such as ‘outsider art’, ‘psychotic art’, ‘art brut’ and ‘art extraordinary’. The area has attracted psychiatrists, artists and historians.

Psychiatrists have been interested in what such art reveals about the mental state of the artist; for example, Sims1 used a picture by a psychotic patient to illustrate the cover of his textbook on psychopathology. Here art is being used as a visual demonstration of mental illness. Artists have claimed to find in the pictures of the psychotic a liberating disregard for cultural convention and orthodoxy, and have hailed these patient—artists as intrepid explorers of new artistic landscapes. Historians have been interested in several aspects of the art of asylum patients. Why was such work produced in the first place? What can it tell us about the asylum world? And, finally, why is such patient-work, which was initially considered to be artistically worthless, now held to possess significant aesthetic value—a process that MacGregor2 has called ‘the discovery of the art of the insane’. These disciplines bring with them contrasting perspectives, but at the core of these discussions are two questions: Is there anything distinctive about the art created by those deemed mad? If so, is it possible to recognize and describe its distinctive features?

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, two major factors contributed to the awakening interest in the art of the insane—the Romantic movement, which identified madness as an exalted state allowing access to hidden realms; and the emergence of the asylum, which provided a location for the production of patient-art. Romanticism saw madness as a privileged condition: the madman, unrestrained by reason or by social convention, was perceived as having access to profound truths. The Romantics emphasized subjectivity and individualism, and hailed the madman as a hero, voyaging to new planes of reality. Although the equation of madness and genius originated with Plato, it was only in the nineteenth century that it became an important feature of cultural discourse3. From the proposition that the genius was a kind of madman it was logical to ask whether the mad themselves create works of genius.

The growth of the asylum and attendant rise of the psychiatric profession has been the subject of intense debate, stimulated by Michel Foucault's ground-breaking Madness and Civilization4. While recent scholarship has painted a complex picture, which finds evidence not only of oppression but also of humanity, it is undeniable that the asylum era witnessed the creation of large, captive and often long-term populations of the mentally disturbed. It also saw the emergence of asylum doctors, some of whom began to take an interest in the artistic productions of their patients.