December 28, 2011
How a mental disorder opened up an invisible world of colour and pattern
Joseph Milton in Scientific American:
As Wain’s condition worsened, so his pictures of cats became more abstract until, towards the end of his life, they were barely recognisable as cats at all, instead becoming intricately detailed, fractal shapes full of unnaturally (at least for a cat) bright colours. The foreknowledge that they are images of felines allows the viewer to pick up on certain shapes – the pointy triangular ears and some features of the face – but without it, you would be hard-pressed to realise these are cats.
The tale of Wain’s life is a sad one. For a time he was a successful artist, but a series of poor investment decisions left him penniless and he began to develop mental health problems in the early 20th century. He deteriorated quickly, becoming a suspicious and sometimes violent man, prone to incoherent, rambling speech. In 1924 he was incarcerated in the pauper ward at Springfield Mental Hospital in Tooting, south London, not far from where I live. After intervention by some famous and influential figures, including Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister of the day, and H.G. Wells, Wain was transferred to more pleasant surroundings. He ended his days in Napsbury Hospital, north of London, which had a garden and, happily for Wain, a colony of cats. In this environment he was able to resume drawing, and it was here he produced some of his most spectacular work.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 11:52 AM | Permalink
Comments
Good to see this unusual artist given some attention. He has long been cited as an example of what being mentally ill can do to imagery, but before becoming ill, he painted cats in human clothing doing human things. The late Victorians found this amusing, and indeed he painted like that to amuse his ill wife. Those cats now look either cute or appalling, depending on your point of view, but almost everyone is fascinated by the later cats that are artistically superior but that speak of deterioration in another way.
It is true no one really knows what illness overtook Louis Wain -- late onset schizophrenia is rare, and he was known to suffer a head injury, which his sisters believed precipitated his increasing inability to care for himself. It's an urban myth that you can track the course of his illness through the ever-harder-to-recognize cat paintings. His more conventional cats were produced throughout his lifetime, they did not give over to the more patterned cats that can seem typical of madness. Wain thought of them as cat-wallpaper -- something else he did. In the psychiatric literature on Wain and his paintings, the cue that he had some unusual thought processes going on is the hyper-alert look he painted into the widened eyes of the fully recognizable cats -- you can see that above in the top two, leftmost.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Dec 28, 2011 12:53:59 PM
Bull Puckey. Like homelessness and other forms of poverty, insanity holds no honor for pity or attention. I have been insane most of my adult life. Never once did I lean on art, medication or others to help me. We're all burdened equally and well. When a man stops crying and starts working in the only direction that is best, he will become obscure and happy. To the light!
Posted by: JosephHuntington | Dec 28, 2011 1:06:03 PM
Just like Elatia said, there's no evidence at all that the supposedly later cats actually came later. As a matter of fact, Wain is known to have painted them in a comparatively conventional fashion years after he did the patterned cats that are assumed to signal his schizophrenia.
I'm a little skeptical at the idea of unusual processes in his brain being recognizable by the exaggerated alertness of the first two cats in the picture. To me it's just caricature.
Posted by: Pepito | Dec 28, 2011 2:00:32 PM
This article may have interested some readers in looking at art by people who have created it while being, actually, mad -- rather than incapacitated for self-care and eccentric.
Jean DuBuffet, the French artist, had an intense interest in this subject. His Collection de l'Art Brut, in Lausanne, houses many works by institutionalized people. Art Brut, the category he identified, included art by children, art by non-professionals, and almost all art that is proudly non-mainstream. We most often hear of it as "Outsider Art" -- art from (way) outside the art establishment.
Some of the hallmarks of Outsider Art have in the last 30 years been found firmly within the art establishment, however. Chris Ofili's Fecal Madonna certainly takes a leaf -- a sad comment on how, in order for a prizewinner to look fresh and outrageous, he must ape the art of people who have no choice but to be fresh and outrageous.
For a quick view of the range of art created by people who were desperately and/or dangerously mentally ill, I would suggest looking at the art of Richard Dadd, a Royal Academy-trained parricide
of the Victorian era who spent his life in confinement, August Wolfli, an institutionalized Swiss painter, and Aloise Corbaz, a highly sensitive woman who broke down in the inter-war years and spent the rest of her life under medical supervision drawing on long rolls of paper.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Dec 28, 2011 2:59:55 PM
And then there was Van Gogh!
Posted by: Sam | Dec 28, 2011 3:23:30 PM
Sam, there's too much going on for Van Gogh to be just mad. Too many explanations for what might have happened, medically, to produce those results -- right down to his preferred palette and the swirls around his stars. I prefer the ordinary explanation -- he was a genius.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Dec 28, 2011 3:52:15 PM
Genius and madness are not necessarily disconnected; and particularly in his case. Or it could be the absinthe....
Posted by: Sam | Dec 28, 2011 5:34:43 PM
I love the idea of the "fire of the mind" agitating the atmosphere. But what kind of connection was there between that thought and Wain's condition, whatever it was?
Posted by: Sagredo | Dec 28, 2011 10:42:49 PM
Louis Wain's wikipedia page references a psychologist who speculates that he may have had Asperger's rather than schizophrenia, noting that the technique in paintings he made late in life is better than is usually seen in schizophrenics (I have seen paintings by autistic artists that are very geometrical and colorful though less abstract, look at the art of Jessica Park here for example). The page also mentions that no one knows the actual order in which he painted the cats that are often presented as evidence of increasing insanity, and quotes a biographer of his saying: "Wain experimented with patterns and cats, and even quite late in life was still producing conventional cat pictures, perhaps 10 years after his [supposedly] 'later' productions which are patterns rather than cats."
Posted by: Jesse M. | Dec 28, 2011 10:50:57 PM
Wain may have been somewhere on the autism spectrum -- but that goes for lots of us. Beginning in the 1960s, his life and work began to be heavily romanticized -- it was the time of R.D. Laing, as my parents would attest, and his view of the art of mad people as a form of truth-telling too radical to be interpreted by the many, was the lens through which Wain's art was seen. That quote kind of demonstrates the vibe, Sagredo.
I have not read much that suggests Wain ever received a sound diagnosis -- fuel for speculation of the very most romanticizing kind. The distinction I have always liked, between one kind of Wain cat and the other kind of Wain cat, is that the more conventional paintings -- cats in neckties, cats mailing letters -- were done to please others and to earn money, while the patterned cats were done by the artist for himself.
Jesse M., there's an exception among artist/autists -- a little girl named Nadia, written about in 1977 by Lorna Selfe, who drew thrillingly, starting at the age of three. I am not kidding. All I know of her subsequent history is that as she acquired language, her drawing was less compelling to her. Then, her mother died. No more art after that from this remarkable child.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Dec 28, 2011 11:39:53 PM
Oh, so it's not even Wain's title? That changes things rather.
Posted by: Sagredo | Dec 29, 2011 7:06:00 AM
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