Fairies, schizophrenia and other distractions

The other day I found myself at a loose end and so, as I’d been meaning to do for quite some time, I went with Hurricane Jack to the Richard Dadd exhibition at Orleans House in Twickenham, which as it happened was in its final week.

Richard Dadd is primarily famous for two things – fairy paintings and being insane. Outsider art, particularly that produced by the mentally ill, holds a strange fascination for me. I suppose it’s because art, perhaps more effectively than any other form of expression, offers a view into the mind. Art is heavily reliant on emotion and imagination, and as such is an ideal gauge of the mind. I’m not the first one to suggest this, of course, and art therapy is these days a popular form of psychiatric treatment.

In the 19th century, of course, there was no such thing as art therapy. Hell, there was hardly anything you’d even call therapy in the modern sense. However, during Richard Dadd’s periods in Bedlam and Broadmoor, he produced a number of works of art that are these days regarded as classics of outsider art – although given that he was an established and respected mainstream painter, it’s debatable whether you could really call him an “outsider artist.”

Come Unto These Yellow Sands, 1842

I’m getting a little ahead of myself here. Dadd was born in 1817 and, from a young age, was considered a highly talented artist. A number of his works were put on show at the Royal Academy and he received several commissions from wealthy patrons. Unfortunately, he also exhibited a number of unusual personality traits which were amplified during a trip to the Middle East. He became violent and deluded, hearing voices and developing the belief that he was descended from Osiris and obliged to fight the Devil. The Devil, he believed, was capable of taking human form, and one of the forms he took was that of Dadd’s own father. Therefore, on 28th August 1843, he murdered his father and fled to France. He was arrested and put in Bedlam. Among his personal effects were a number of sketches of friends and family members with their throats cut and a list of people who he felt had to die. The general consensus now seems to be that he was afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia.

The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke, 1855-64

During his period in Bedlam he produced his most famous works, including the intricate fairy painting, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. This is commonly regarded as his masterpiece, inspiring a song by Queen and the Terry Pratchett novel The Wee Free Men. The intense detail in this and his other fairy paintings tends to be seen as a sign of an obsessive mind (although you might also argue that it’s a sign of someone with a lot of time and very little to do, but then, I’m not an art critic or therapist).

The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke wasn’t in the exhibition, nor were any of Dadd’s other fairy paintings. Actually, the exhibition seemed almost apologetic about this fact. I think this was unnecessary – it’s very often the case with artists, particularly notorious ones, that a particular work or type of work they did has been allowed to eclipse other, equally worthy works.

Sketch to Illustrate the Passions: Agony – Raving Madness

So what we have in this exhibition is, basically, The Rest. A selection of Dadd’s art from before his arrest and throughout his time at Bedlam and Broadmoor. Quite a lot of it is, I’ll be honest, rather pretty. If you didn’t know its origins, you wouldn’t be able to tell it was the work of a schizophrenic. I rather liked his stained glass work. However, there were a number of works seemingly produced as a deliberate expression of his mental state – the evocative “Passions” series stood out for me, which features allegorical figures representing various negative qualities. Some of these appear to have been painted from life, including a couple of representations of the architecture of Bedlam.

 

I wouldn’t have described the exhibition as what I was expecting from a Richard Dadd show, and that actually doesn’t bother me at all. I came away with what I felt was a fuller understanding of a very complex artist. Frankly, the chap deserves better than to be known simply as a mad artist.

 

Oh hey, look at this

Izzi has a new blog devoted to art. Take a look at it, do.

Caturday

While a-wandering aimlessly through Primrose Hill yesterday, I came across the Museum of Everything. This is a pretty lofty claim for any museum to make, particularly one that small. The Museum is, in fact, an exhibition of Outsider Art.

Outsider Art is another of those very broad terms. It theoretically means art produced by someone outside of the mainstream art world. However, a few of the artists on display at the Museum (notably Alfred Wallis) are fairly respectable these days, so I suppose an easier definition would be “art by weirdoes.” No doubt someone will tell me off for that definition, but it’s the simplest one I can think of. Outsider artists are often untrained, naive and primitivist in style. The Outsider Art movement started in the 1920s when the psychiatrist Dr Walter Morgenthaler began studying the art produced by mental patients in his care. The concept was enthusiastically embraced by world of anti-establishment art and, over the years, has broadened in scope to the point where I have trouble summing it up in less than a hundred words.

The artworks on display, as you might imagine, were fascinating. Some were childlike, some obsessive, some bizarro and disturbing. Each artist’s work was displayed with a plaque giving some critical perspective, often serving primarily to show how very much cleverer the critic is than you, the plebeian viewer.

One exhibit they had was easy to overlook – a single painting, only about the size of a postcard, hung on the corridor wall. It depicted what appeared to be a cat in abstract pattern form. This was a work by Louis Wain. The critical perspective was by Nick Cave and simply said, “Louis Wain. My all-time favourite artist.” Thanks, Nick.

Louis Wain is a favourite artist of mine. I’ve never really thought of him as an outsider artist, as he enjoyed a great deal of commercial success in the Edwardian era. However, he’s now probably as famous for his mental illness as he is for his actual work, so I suppose it’s a justifiable label.

I first became aware of Wain’s work when I played him on stage a few years back (see Further Reading for a review, below). His thing, as an artist, was cats.

His most successful works depicted anthropomorphised cats, such as the ones on the left. In the Edwardian era, these were hugely popular, and there was even a series of Louis Wain annuals. It’s even commonly suggested (not least by Wain himself) that the popularity of cats as a household pet is in part due to these cartoons.

He was born in Clerkenwell in 1860 and was a sickly child with a cleft lip. He wasn’t sent to school until the age of ten, and was never what you’d call a good pupil, preferring to play truant and go off exploring nature. He trained as an artist and became a teacher and commercial illustrator. In 1883 he caused something of a scandal by marrying Emily Richardson, his former governess. The concept of a younger man marrying an older woman being considered bizarre and perverted at the time (whereas the other way round is, of course, absolutely in line with the natural order of things). Sadly, Emily died three years later from cancer. To entertain her during her long illness, Louis bought a black and white cat named Peter whom he taught to perform tricks. His pictures of Peter gave him his first major commercial success, and things took off from there.

His cartoon cats were, as he saw it, a means of getting closer to human nature. He would satirise current human trends by depicting its practitioners in feline form and even produced cat-caricatures of prominent figures of the day. He also produced semi-realistic portraits of cats (although they almost always had cartoonishly large eyes) and, famously, abstract “pattern cats.”

Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the popularity of his cats proved to be a fad, and by the end of the First World War his work had ceased to be popular. What made things worse was the fact that while he was stylistically versatile, he only really had the one subject. He never quite got the hang of art that didn’t involve cats. An inability to adapt, coupled with his appalling business sense, resulted in his being reduced to poverty. Many of his sketches from this period were actually done in lieu of payment for goods and services.

And at this point I suppose we should get on to the reason he’s classed as an Outsider. From an early age, Wain was seen as something of an oddball. His speech tended to be disjointed and often zipping off on strange tangents. A drink he rather enjoyed was Bovril and soda. He developed strange beliefs about the properties of electricity and its effects on people. Worse, as time went on, he became increasingly delusional and violent towards his sisters (with whom he lived following Emily’s death) and in 1924 was institutionalised at the Springfield Hospital in Tooting.

The initial diagnosis was that he was a “neuropath,”  although he was later rediagnosed as having schizophrenia. A theory gaining increasing popularity is that he actually had Asberger’s Syndrome, which at the time wasn’t understood. This would certainly fit with his erratic behaviour, as well as his obsessive cat-painting. A popular but stupid theory has it that the progression of Wain’s mental illness can be traced in the abstraction of his work. That is to say, the abstract cats illustrate the way he actually saw the world at that point. As theories go, this is up there with “Hey, The Magic Roundabout is a bit weird, they must have been on drugs, amirite?” Detractors of the theory, including Yr. Humble Chronicler, make the following points.

1. Much of his work is undated, so we have no way of knowing how ill he was when he produced his unpublished work.
2. His father was a textile salesman. Wain’s “pattern cats” are more likely to have been influenced by fabric patterns than a disjointed mind.
3. He produced a number of pictures during his time in hospital which aren’t abstract.
4. If he was so nutty that he saw cats as colourful geometric patterns, how come he could still sign his name, smartarse?
5. Schizophrenics don’t see the world like that, you fail psychology forever.

Fortunately for Wain, while he may no longer have been popular commercially, the public retained a great deal of affection for him. In 1925, when he was found on the pauper ward at Springfield, an appeal was launched to assist him with such names attached as H. G. Wells and Stanley Baldwin, the then Prime Minister. He was moved to the rather more pleasant Bethlem Royal Hospital in Lambeth (now the Imperial War Museum) and then to the more countrified Napsbury Hospital in Hertfordshire. He died in 1939.

He is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, and his grave is, it must be said, in a somewhat dilapidated condition.

Further Reading

http://www.museumofeverything.com/ - The Museum of Everything

http://www.yat.org.uk/productions/index.php3?sid=93 - This is what happened when I played Louis Wain.

http://www.lilitu.com/catland/gallery.shtml - A Wain gallery.

http://www.chrisbeetles.com/gallery/artist.php?art=3077 - Another Wain gallery

http://www.cerebromente.org.br/gallery/gall_leonardo/fig1-a.htm - The theory about Wain’s progressive abstraction.

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8212267 - Wain’s grave