Written by Amanda Smith
During the afternoon of February 19, I attended a lecture from the Mysterium Humanum series on madness, titled “The Flag of Imagination: The Surrealists and Artists on the Schizophrenia Spectrum”. Presented by Dr. Julia A. DeLancey, was this fascinating talk about Hans Prinzhorn’s 1922 study of Schizophrenic spectrum patient’s art work and the surrealism era of the 1920-1930s.
Breaking down the title of her lecture, Dr. DeLancey wanted to first introduce \what disability studies is. Her definition was simply stated as socially constructed and performative; how society constructs disability. She allows explains the three main categories a disability can be seen as: medical, social, and interdependence. Medical is the physical impairment one has (paralyzed), whereas social is the how environment effects the individual (stairs are a problem), and interdependence refers to need for assistance. The disability she focuses on is Schizophrenia spectrum. Which is when an individual has poor executive function, thought disorders, psycho-social factors, and hallucinations.
Working towards the other section of her title she introduces the start of surrealism. Dr DeLancey remarks the World War 1 plays a major role in how surrealism starts. During World War 1, soldiers that fought in the trenches were coming back with significant psychological trauma. During this time, Sigmund Freud was developing his form of therapy, called psychoanalysis. This form is believed to delve into the subconscious and unconscious mind, the sources of all problems or traumatic experiences, which was a major focus to surrealist.
The founder of surrealism, Andre Breton, was a war veteran who saw shell shock first hand, it was in1924 when Brenton writes his manifesto ( his statement of beliefs) of surrealism, a movement that will reconcile two different realities (the real world and dream world, the world in between those being surrealism) which can be accessed through things like hallucinations and visions. Surrealist took a page out of Freud’s book by trying to access surrealism in the mind by doing “waking dreams” sessions and automatism drawing and writing (where a person draws or writes without thinking about what came to them). It was only then when theorist and writers began to explain that there are only three types of people that are truly creative: Children, people from primitive cultures, and people with mental illnesses. As Brenton had put it, “I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.”
After explaining these two main concepts (Disability and Surrealism), Dr DeLancey excites us with the bulk of her research on Hans Prinzhorn’s 1922 case studies. Prinzhorn, in his time, had training as an art historian and experience in psychology. Later in his life, he began working in a psychiatric clinic in Germany. The patients there created many pieces of artwork that doctors examined so they could diagnose the patients. Prinzhorn inferred with the notion pieces were art-worthy studies. Prinzhorn then began to conduct his research on ten different patients in this clinic where he would find common traits such as expressive, playful, patterned order, symbolic system, obsessive copying, and ornamental elaboration.
One patient, Agnes Richter, had the whole room jaw dropped. Agnes was a seamstress until her family committed her to the clinic. She then began her project on her straight jacket embroidering her file number, statements, feeling, and thoughts. Dr Delancey told us that her doing this was a way for “her words to touch her”. The audience identified that her artwork was a form obsessive copying of her words.
Another patient Prinzhorn studied was Adolf Wolfli, who was hospitalized most of his adult life due to mental and physical abuse. Wolfli had to different types of artwork he created, his bread art and his book art. In order to do his book art, Wolfli would create small individual pieces of his work such as collages of labels, pictures, and recipes to sell. After he sold enough, he would put the money toward materials for his book art. One piece we examined was his bread work, titled “Saint Mary Castle Giant Grape”. This work was identified as elaborate ornamentation, pattern order (orange bubbles color-pattern), and playful (The hidden faces).
During the 1920s, people believed that those with mental illnesses had the true creativity to create surrealism art. Based on Hans Prinzhorn’s case studies, it can be observed that his patients can create art work based on their pure imagination. It was unclear if in fact the patient’s art was based on the this “in-between” surreal world they could be in, but looking at the characteristics of schizophrenia such as hallucinations, it can be interpreted that these patients have the ability to access pure imagination and portray it in an art form.
