The final New Year's Eve entry at memepool is
It is interesting to compare art composed by those under the influence of LSD, and those experiencing psychosis.
There are two links. The first leads to a series of portraits done by one fellow who took LSD and then, throughout his trip, rendered a handful of sketches of the same subject. As one expects, the portraits become more and then less abstract as the trip rises and then falls away. The second link, which is "memepooled" as I write this, shows a gallery of a couple of artists suffering from psychosis, one of which is Louis Wain.
Louis Wain, whose best tribute is found at Catland, was an artist who rose to prominence by painting fanciful representations of cats. His cats are normally quite whimsical, shown playing around in anthropomorphized form. He was eventually committed and diagnosed with schizophrenia. During his time in an asylum, he continued to paint cats. Some of these cats were rather psychedelic, and Wain has since been used as an example of the art of schizophrenics.
As Catland notes, Dr. Walter Maclay purchased eight of Wain's paintings and then arranged them in an arbitrary order to show a progression of madness, as Wain's paintings grew ever more abstract. Maclay wanted to tell the story of a fellow losing his grip on reality, as depicted in the schizophrenic's art. While what we have from Wain's time at the asylum certainly contains some abstract, "out-there" art, the story of a fellow losing his mind as portrayed by the melting reality of his portraiture is just a story. Catland describes how Maclay's assembled series was taken out of order to tell a story of a descent into madness, they were not assembled chronologically. Wain's art has been reorganized and selectively presented in order to spin a simplistic yarn that isn't true.
Let's look at one of Wain's cats from the asylum period, for example. This Wain picture is accompanied by an inscription:
The solitary one more real persian cat is the one that is now going to be the one that is the real living animal left alone until the call is given to it at night time this evening at the same time as the rabbit can be again put to the test. This can be done by giving the call directly the light is seen after the first sleep is over. The colour is the direct soft tone in the red chalk. The whole is the (?) even (?) tints.--Living its own lonely life this old can (sic) can now come ot the newer existence. It is the perfect cat made the more perfect by the willingness given to it. The whole is the old time rabbit and this has now the greater life given to it to be. The deer too can now be the same in the same way.
To adopt the methods I'm decrying, the telling slip of "can" lends a pathetic sadness to the affair, Wain celebrating his desire for escape from pain as a perfection of willingness.
The text contains the same sort of mad poetry of schizophrenics like Francis Dec, which places the work in a period of psychosis. Yet the painting is extremely normal. The cat is not exploding into a kaleidoscope of variegated patterns. Though the foliage has some menace to it, Wain has clearly not lost the capacity to render in a realistic fashion.
And yet people are tempted to create a tragic myth. This series is accompanied by a text:
The cat pictures are the work of Louis Wain, a prominent British artist of the early 1900's, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was under psychiatric care but lived at home surrounded by his pets. Over a period of years he painted their portraits, which are in a way self-portraits, revealing the tragic odyssey of his feelings. The first one shows a soft and gentle cat whose only alarming trait is the wildness of its eyes. The second cat is not only wild but has become aggressive and evil. The third maintains the aggressiveness, but in the meantime the personality is breaking up, merging into the background. The fourth is like a stupid and inoffensive owl, with all aggressiveness subsided. There is no animal personality whatsoever in the fifth picture, just a charming design.
The handful of paintings are arranged in a presumed chronological order to show a deteriorating schizophrenic. We are made to think that Wain had lost all identity by the time that he made the final cat in the series, as tragically foretold in one of Wain's so-called "wallpaper cats."
In 1964's Life Science Library edition The Mind:
One man's progressive withdrawal from reality to fantasy is cleary traced in the extaordinary seris of cat paintings on these pages.
Again, a presumed order is presented, based only on the abstractness of the paintings, in the oddity of the emotion they evoke in the viewer. Again, this order is meant to tell a tale of increasing psychosis, in this case a "withdrawl from reality."
The text from The Mind makes additional claims, that "images of the body...are almost never drawn without distortion," a claim which is betrayed not only by the orange Perfect Cat, but also by a wallpaper cat further down the page! Furthermore, there had to be a tragic end to Wain's tale, and so "Wain's images eventually lost all coherence," despite the coherence mentioned above, though we are to be soothed by the fact that "the baroque, infinitely detailed designs he produced were far more powerful and original than his former realism." Please note that, in addition to the realistic representations noted above, that the owl-looking cat reproduced on this page bears a very normal, very clear, undistorted signature. Shouldn't this be some illegible psychedelic goo from a 60's concert poster? That it is normal is indicative of an artist simply trying something else. Which is not to say that Wain's psychosis didn't inform his art, simply that the tale of an artist's descent into madness is a bit overly dramatic. As we've seen, Wain did create less abstract works while he was creating the psychedelic art.
It is additionally amusing to see works like these described as "realism."
Since I already stole my Dec links from Corndog, the now-defunct yet still legendary group weblog which flew to close to the sun on wings of collective indifference, let me say that I also ran into an example of this, of psychiatrists inventing a tale of woe, in this picture of a woman psychiatric patient who was made up to look like Ophelia. In this case, as in Wain's, people imposed a simple story on a complex situation and held it up as insight.
Wain's cats are delightful to see, please do visit Catland and enjoy Wain's work. You can see other freakadelic cats there, like Early Indian Irish and The Fire of the Mind Agitates the Atmosphere (a wonderful title which reminds me of another great title: A Huge, Ever-Growing, Pulsating Brain which Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld [Lovin' You]).
Finally, I'd like to say that I really like kitty-cats, as they are very pretty, soft, and elegant.
Posted by mattb at January 04, 2004 12:22 AM