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adness and modernity: mental illness and the visual arts in vienna 1900

Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1.

Until June 28, www.wellcomecollection.org


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Changing attitudes led to the transformation of mental health treatment environments in


Vienna at the end of the 19th century

A model of the Narrenturm (Tower of Fools), built in Vienna in 1784 along the lines of a
prison for dangerous lunatics is displayed alongside David Bickerstaffs 2009 video
installation recording the passage of time within its forbidding walls.

By the late 19th century, critics of such institutions gathered voice, revealing the harshness
and injustice of a system built on secrecy. At the same time, a rapidly increasing urban
population brought about a huge requirement for mental health treatment, for which large
asylums seemed the solution.

The corollary of cultural sophistication appeared to be an increase in mental unease, the


result of overworked brains, for which the prescribed cure was rest and physical exercise in
sanatoriums outside the city. An exhibition in Vienna in 1898 was held to demonstrate
reformed views towards mental health treatment, and to change public perception of
asylums.

The Wellcome exhibition concentrates on two examples: Otto Wagners Am Steinhof, and
Josef Hoffmanns Purkersdorf Sanatorium. Am Steinhof housed an astonishing 2,500
patients, and was designed as a series of villas in a park on the edge of Vienna. Sixty
buildings in all provided a range of residential buildings, with men and women housed
separately and according to types and severity of conditions, around the communal
buildings kitchens, theatre, church. The buildings have a neo-classical formality softened
to the rear by loggia spaces providing deep balconies to sit on and overlook the extensive
gardens around the buildings.

The spatial clarity inherent in Am Steinhof, from the disposition of the buildings around the
gardens to the wide corridors and the shining white clarity of the church interior,
demonstrate a new-found physical freedom for the patients at the same time as providing

the means by which order was maintained. Patients were free to wander in spaces that were
easily overlooked; even the church pews were specially short so that patients could be
quickly reached if causing a disturbance: lock and key was replaced by clear sight lines in a
way that still underpins the design of psychiatric space today.

Meanwhile in the city, Freud was developing an antithetical approach to psychiatric


treatment with the exploration of a patients inner impulses and dreams; Freud saw his
psychoanalytical role as drawing his inference from the fragments of memories. Treatment
was conducted with the patient lying on Freuds couch and surrounded by his memory
theatre of ancient artefacts, his old and dirty gods, figures of gods and mythic creatures
representing a range of human experience and fantasy resonant with our inner life.

The impact of the complexities of the inner life on the human body was explored by artists,
both under the arm of scientific research (the exhibition includes two sensitive drawings by
Erwin Dom Osen of psychiatric patients, some of Franz-Xaver Messerschmidts comically
exaggerated character heads, as well as copies of the Parisian neurologist Charcots
photographic vocabulary of disease), and also by artists intent on a representation of inner
turmoils. Egon Schieles self-portraits show a fascination with the limits of human
experience, pushing and pulling his thin body. Max Oppenheimer and Oskar Koko-schka vied
to be inventors of the psychological portrait, producing portraits that upturned
conservative conventions to the consternation of their patrons, revealing inner disquietude
through nervous hands and staring eyes.

The final room of the exhibition looks at the works of two asylum inmates at this time,
operating within a vacuum of artistic recognition and reward, and refreshingly
unselfconscious as a result. The exhibition contains just one work by the patient Frau St, an
elegant, meticulous collage of delicate drawings on newspaper scraps pasted together. In
contrast, the steady catalogue of paintings by Josef Karl Radler, a former ceramic painter,
give a unique view of asylum life in a series of annotated paintings which describe with quiet
detail and naf charm his surroundings and fellow inmates.

With prescience he comments on the status of the inmates (Half or Wholly Imbecilic people
are what I see here. But all on all good sorts, they stand around me as I paint I myself see
this home as a church these poor souls as living saints!!!), and the value of his work
(Price 300 crowns true and useful art should, must, be worth it!): a life wholly apart.
Among the movements which flowered in the first decade of the 20th century were Fauvism,
Cubism, Expressionism, and Futurism.

During the years between 1910 and the end of World War I and after the heyday of cubism,
several movements emerged in Paris. Giorgio de Chirico moved to Paris in July 1911, where

he joined his brother Andrea (the poet and painter known as Alberto Savinio). Through his
brother he met Pierre Laprade, a member of the jury at the Salon d'Automne where he
exhibited three of his dreamlike works: Enigma of the Oracle, Enigma of an Afternoon and
Self-Portrait. During 1913 he exhibited his work at the Salon des Indpendants and Salon
dAutomne, and his work was noticed by Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, and several
others. His compelling and mysterious paintings are considered instrumental to the early
beginnings of Surrealism. Song of Love (1914) is one of the most famous works by de Chirico
and is an early example of the surrealist style, though it was painted ten years before the
movement was "founded" by Andr Breton in 1924.

World War I brought an end to this phase but indicated the beginning of a number of anti-art
movements, such as Dada, including the work of Marcel Duchamp, and of Surrealism. Artist
groups like de Stijl and Bauhaus developed new ideas about the interrelation of the arts,
architecture, design, and art education.

Modern art was introduced to the United States with the Armory Show in 1913 and through
European artists who moved to the U.S. during World War I.
After World War II

It was only after World War II, however, that the U.S. became the focal point of new artistic
movements.[14] The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, Color
field painting, Pop art, Op art, Hard-edge painting, Minimal art, Lyrical Abstraction, Fluxus,
Happening, Video art, Postminimalism, Photorealism and various other movements. In the
late 1960s and the 1970s, Land art, Performance art, Conceptual art, and other new art
forms had attracted the attention of curators and critics, at the expense of more traditional
media.[15] Larger installations and performances became widespread.

By the end of the 1970s, when cultural critics began speaking of "the end of painting" (the
title of a provocative essay written in 1981 by Douglas Crimp), new media art had become a
category in itself, with a growing number of artists experimenting with technological means
such as video art.[16] Painting assumed renewed importance in the 1980s and 1990s, as
evidenced by the rise of neo-expressionism and the revival of figurative painting.[17]

Towards the end of the 20th century, a number of artists and architects started questioning
the idea of "the modern" and created typically Postmodern works
Early 20th century (before World War I)

Abstract art Francis Picabia, Wassily Kandinsky, Frantiek Kupka, Robert Delaunay,
Lopold Survage, Piet Mondrian
Fauvism Andr Derain, Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Braque
Expressionism and related Die Brcke, Der Blaue Reiter - Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wassily
Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde, Axel Trneman, Karl
Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein
Futurism Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carr, Gino Severini, Natalia
Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov
Cubism Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Lger,
Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, Francis Picabia, Juan
Gris
Sculpture Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Constantin Brncui, Joseph Csaky, Alexander
Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Jacques Lipchitz, Ossip Zadkine
Orphism Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Frantiek Kupka
Photography Pictorialism, Straight photography
Suprematism Kasimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky
Synchromism Stanton MacDonald-Wright, Morgan Russell
Vorticism Wyndham Lewis
Dada Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters

World War I to World War II

Pittura Metafisica Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carr, Giorgio Morandi


De Stijl Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian
Expressionism Egon Schiele, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine
New Objectivity Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz
Figurative painting Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard
American Modernism Stuart Davis, Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe
Constructivism Naum Gabo, Gustav Klutsis, Lszl Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Kasimir
Malevich, Vadim Meller, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin
Surrealism Marc Chagall, Ren Magritte, Jean Arp, Salvador Dal, Max Ernst, Giorgio de
Chirico, Andr Masson, Joan Mir, Marc Chagall

Bauhaus Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Josef Albers


Sculpture Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Gaston Lachaise, Henry Moore, Pablo
Picasso, Julio Gonzalez
Scottish Colourists Francis Cadell, Samuel Peploe, Leslie Hunter, John Duncan Fergusson
Suprematism Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandra Ekster, Olga Rozanova, Nadezhda Udaltsova,
Ivan Kliun, Lyubov Popova, Nikolai Suetin, Nina Genke-Meller, Ivan Puni, Ksenia
Boguslavskaya
Precisionism Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth

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