Madness and the artistic imagination

By Neville Hawcock
Published: April 18 2009

Josef Karl Rädler’s self-portrait

No wonder Lotte Franzos didn’t like the portrait Oskar Kokoschka painted of her in 1909. Her skin is blotchy, her expression downcast; her skinny hands look awkward, with the middle and index fingers of the left drawn tensely back; the background has all the hues of a livid bruise.
Although Franzos was a friend of the Viennese artist, she wrote to him to complain about the likeness. Her reaction was vindicated by the reception that critics gave the picture when it was exhibited in Vienna in 1911: “What a foul smell emanates from the picture of Frau Dr Franzos!” exclaimed one. But Frau Dr Franzos was at odds with the zeitgeist, or so Madness and Modernity, on show at the Wellcome Collection argues: many a wealthy, arty Viennese was only too happy to have a portrait painted in this anguished style. Kokoschka’s show included some 23 portraits of Viennese intellectuals, depicted, as a contemporary critic put it, “with all the signs of quiet or raving madness”. In the years leading up to the first world war, the Austro-Hungarian capital was a city of the highly strung, revelling in their own anxieties like miserablist teenagers. If 1900s Vienna, city of Klimt, Freud and Mahler, was the cradle of modernism, it was hardly a joyous birth.

Other pictures at the Wellcome attest to this pathological aesthetic. Like Franzos, the writer Heinrich Mann looks down in Max Oppenheimer’s portrait, his face gaunt and gloomy, contemplating the clawlike hand that he has raised to the level of his midriff, the murky khaki tones of the background lightening around his head to produce an aura of contemplative intensity. Similar tricks are played in the next portrait, also by Oppenheimer – Kokoschka’s arch-rival in the “psychological portrait” market – of the essayist Franz Blei, whose skinny hands are artfully crossed, corpse-like, on his chest. The attention to hands, in fact, is striking, and seen too in a sequence of self-portraits by Egon Schiele. These are mannered, nervous, attenuated hands – hands that suggest a shrinking away from the world rather than a readiness to grasp it.

Oskar Kokoschka’s 1909 portrait of Lotte Franzos

The show doesn’t delve deeply into just why the city’s intelligentsia should have been obsessed with its nerves. One could point to urbanisation and immigration, to political troubles in the empire, but such factors were not unique to Vienna, and artists elsewhere in Europe, notably Edvard Munch (much admired in Vienna), had explored similarly anxious terrain. It’s hard not to draw parallels with our own insecure, high-tech, stressed-out times. But the curators’ more modest aim is to emphasise the degree to which the worlds of art and design and of psychiatry intersected. As progressive architects such as Otto Wagner designed new institutions for the mentally ill, so artists drew inspiration from the theories and practices of psychiatrists. The Schiele sequence, for example, hangs near a set of photographs by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, depicting naked male patients with various conditions; the awkward, angular poses of these figures find a clear echo in Schiele’s tortured images of himself.

The most sane portrait is of Freud, pupil of Charcot and father of psychoanalysis, looking at us with calm gravitas from another Oppenheimer canvas. (Not that you’d want your therapist to appear as anything other than a safe pair of hands.) It would be too perverse for the show not to mention him – yet Freud, with his analysis of neurosis in terms of repressed childhood trauma, was at this time a marginal figure. There is a couch on display, a richly patterned Persian rug thrown over it, and a selection of archaic figurines on loan from the Freud museum in Hampstead, but this moody antique clutter points up a contrast with the prevailing model of psychotherapy in Vienna, which saw nervous ailments as arising from physical causes and therefore susceptible to physical treatment. Near the couch are an exercise chair, a sturdily elegant piece of gym equipment with plush velvet seat and big steel flywheels, and an electrotherapy cage, an octagonal wooden structure studded with porcelain insulators and circled with electric cables; patients would sit within it and soak up the supposedly therapeutic electric field generated when the current was switched on. So much for talking cures.

Architecture was a crucial part of this mens sana in corpore sano approach. Clean, modern lines could bring psychological benefits, as at Josef Hoffmann’s Purkersdorf Sanatorium, built in 1904-05 on the outskirts of the city. A coolly functional building, all squares, rectangles and no frills, it featured large windows to bring light and air to its enervated inmates and flat, unornamented surfaces to facilitate hygiene and to promote calm. Every detail was carefully thought out, furniture, light fittings, fabrics: this was the health resort as Gesamtkunstwerk, a place where the best of modern design and technology – a photograph shows the lofty mechanotherapy room, with exercise chairs like the one on display – could alleviate the stresses of modern urban life.

A poster advertising the Steinhof complexPurkersdorf, though, was not for everyone.

More seriously disturbed – and poorer – patients would be treated in the state asylums, but similar design principles applied. Things had moved on since the 18th century, when, as we learn at the start of the show, the city had built its remarkable Narrenturm (“Fools’ Tower”), a circular structure intended simply to confine the insane. Otto Wagner, Hoffmann’s mentor, laid out the huge Steinhof asylum complex, opened in 1907, as a spacious arrangement of villas in landscaped parkland; at the highest point is one of the masterpieces of early modernism, the St Leopold church, which, while far more ornamented than Purkersdorf, shares its monumental blockiness. Steinhof aimed to serve (and profit from) the neurotic bourgeoisie with a state-of-the-art sanatorium: a poster on show extols its many comforts, including a billiard room and ladies’ salon. In one of the many arresting juxtapositions at this exhibition – and, for that matter, at Wellcome shows in general – it hangs next to a massive, battered wooden door, with a small glass aperture, behind which Steinhof’s doctors would confine dangerous patients. But perhaps the most striking contrast in Madness and Modernity comes at the end – after the mannered neuroticism of the portraits by Kokoschka and Oppenheimer is an extraordinary display of paintings by the genuinely mentally ill artist Josef Karl Rädler.

Rädler, a master porcelain painter and schizophrenic who was confined to psychiatric hospitals for many years until his death in 1917, painted watercolour portraits of his fellow patients, annotated with rambling reflections and framed within intricate patterns. Some of the outdoor scenes, with recurrent images of birds and dark trees set against a twilight sky, have a faintly menacing air, but the portraits are gentler affairs, painted in a naive, sympathetic style. It’s moving to look at the forgotten individuals who passed through these anonymising institutions. And, unlike Vienna’s anxious elite, these men look straight at you.

‘Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900’, Wellcome Collection, London NW1, to June 28. Tel: +44 (0)20 7611 8888, http://www.wellcomecollection.org/exhibitionsandevents/exhibitions/Madness-and-Modernity/index.htm

The Financial Times Limited 2009