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What is madness?
Madness is a shift from the norm
and from reality.
Madness can have multiple meanings, it is infinite.
As is the norm.
We have a view of madness today,
but what was the view of madness
in the 17th century, the 18th century,
in the Middle Ages?
Hieronymus Bosch depicts fantastical worlds,
linked to madness and chaos.
He shows the complete lack of reason
of the world,
populated by chimeras and monsters.
In 1494, Sebastian Brant
published The Ship of Fools.
listing the vices
of Brant's contemporaries,
allegorically embarked on a drunken boat.
The ultimate allegory of madness is the jester.
He becomes the iconographic theme of
the lack of reason of the world,
of which he is a grotesque mirror.
There is the greatest contempt for madness as an allegory,
because the madman is by definition an immoral being.
The stone of madness, or stone of the head,
dates from the 16th, 17th century.
It comes from the Flemish school of painting.
The realism of certain scenes suggests that
those operations may have taken place at fairs
where people also went to get a tooth pulled out.
Everything has been tried to cure madness,
and nothing has succeeded,
but it is precisely because nothing succeeded
that they constantly tried other treatments.
Which lead a madman of the 19th century to say:
"the more skilled they are, the more they scare me".
The melancholy figure is that angel,
its face is leaning on its fist,
surrounded by disturbing
cabalistic and hermetic signs.
There is also a disembowelled bat in the sky
on which reads "Melancholia".
Here are two much darker visions from Goya.
One is a painting from 1794 that represents
the Yard with Lunatics in Zaragoza,
a violent scene with two naked men fighting.
The other one is The Madhouse
with similar scenes of naked, agitated men.
They are left alone to themselves and their animality.
In the Sainte-Anne asylum collection,
the oldest works are
representations of madness
made by artists
who were hospitalized at that time.
The most famous one is
the Monomania of Envy by Géricault.
It was during Géricault's internment
that his psychiatrist asked him
to paint portraits of people around him.
This is the beginning of activities offered to patients.
Pinel and his assistant understood that
when the patient was offered things to do
or things to create,
it was a huge step in giving them more freedom.
This is also the beginning of a secret artistic production,
as art therapy did not really exist then.
This is the start of a lot of artworks
that are now considered Art Brut.
William Bouguereau, Oreste pursued by the Furies.
Orestes killed the two murderers of his father for revenge.
He is now pursued by the three Frinyes,
the furies of the Romans.
He is driven mad by their persistent screams.
Orestes tries to escape
while his mother collapses behind him,
a dagger in her heart.
This is The Mad Woman by Otto Dix.
Otto Dix also painted Nocturnal Encounter with a Lunatic,
and The Madwoman of St. Marie-à-Py in his series on war.
No illness has been more
represented in art than madness,
it inspired artists to paint madness,
but also inspired madmen to paint.
It is a condition that still can't be cured today.
We can channel it, try to suppress it,
but we can't cure it.
Instead of attracting compassion,
madness sometimes attracts derision and scorn.
We reject it because it scares us,
as it can threaten any of us, at any time.
So I understand why this strange condition,
which is not foreign to us,
inspired painters and artists so often.
Some of these artists were visionaries.
But does this mean they were mad?
Some artists suffered from visions,
and their art was a reflection
of their unconscious,
They painted in a completely different way,
far from the rational view of the world,
creating hallucinatory works.
Goya became ill from 1793
and he suddenly went deaf.
He was completely locked up in his inner world
because of his deafness,
and this completely changed his iconography
as he turned towards the dark side of himself.
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,
we see Goya himself
half asleep on his work table,
with nocturnal creatures above him
invading his space.
They're an entry to the nocturnal world,
the nightmare and the unconscious.
The animals represented are all nyctalopes,
they have nocturnal vision,
they see what others do not see,
and this visionary side
is what Goya wants to show,
the artist is able to see beyond reality
and see what everyone else can't see.
The Sabbaths, the witches,
but also madness and the madman,
Goya explores the world of the extraordinary,
showing a humanity that is always at the margin.
The Romantics turn to themselves,
give more importance to passion than to reason
and give free rein to their imagination,
and this also lead to the unconscious.
We are far from knowing what happens
in the brain during the creative process,
but one theory is that there is
an unconscious maturation that occurs
during artistic activities or mathematics.
We see it on brain imaging,
a person can have a lot of brain activation,
without consciousness.
There is an extraordinarily complex system
of unconscious activity
constantly happening in the brain,
which is partly responsible for ideas
that arise suddenly in consciousness
and take the form of artistic or scientific creation.
Towards the end of the 19th century, psychiatrists
started to take an interest in art made by their patients.
They called it the art of the insane.
They were open-minded doctors that
saved these productions from being destroyed.
Many simply threw them away
or saw them as symptoms of degeneration.
There is also the Scottish collection of
the Crichton Psychiatric Hospital, from 1870.
The Crichton Asylum is a two-tier asylum,
like the English society of the time,
where poor patients are kept busy
with work, gardening and workshops,
but rich patients couldn't be made to work
so were kept busy with various activities,
including of course art workshops.
It's at the beginning of the 20th century
that doctors really became passionate
about the art of their patients.
Marcel Réja published Art in Mad Men in 1907,
and Dr. Marie, from the same department,
also set up a museum in Villejuif.
This gallery opened in Paris this week,
resembling all other galleries
But all their artworks were painted by lunatics,
and some resemble the greatest masters.
This is also the beginning of modern art,
and people discover prehistoric art and African art.
1907 is also the year Picasso paints Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
He made a clean sweep of everything,
he reinvented arithmetic, geography, metric systems.
This epic story is supported by a very complex system.
It all makes sense, albeit in a very delirious mode.
The Prinzhorn Collection was then used
by the Nazis in their degenerate art exhibitions,
where the works of patients were shown
next to art by avant-garde artists
to demonstrate that these artists were madmen
and that their works could be destroyed.
Surrealism was born in the late 191 Os,
with a certain number of artists, poets, painters,
that gathered around André Breton,
who published the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924.
Everything was possible,
the Surrealists gathered
and undertook rituals in Paris...
People were meeting each other
thanks to fortuitous chance.
André Breton was, as Marcel Duchamp said,
"the lover of love in a world where prostitution reigns".
His ecstasy, his youth and
his vitality of thought inspired the others.
The definition is quite simple:
Surrealism will be a pure psychic automatism
by which one proposes to express,
the actual functioning of thought.
Surrealism will try to highlight
the unconscious mind in their art,
previously discovered by psychoanalysts
and especially by Freud.
Freud's discoveries about dreams showed
that there was an unconscious part of our minds,
that allowed us to visualize
the psychic reality of dreams.
"The ego is not even master in its own house."
Without necessarily being psychotic or crazy,
we all have this unconscious behavior
in everyday life and in dreams.
The unconscious produces images,
and the Surrealists tried by different techniques
to reproduce these images
that originated from their psyche.
Dali read Freud's writings on paranoia.
From a psychoanalytic point of view,
paranoia is a frenzy of interpretation,
it is not a hallucinatory phenomenon
where we imagine things.
The paranoid individual
creates an interpretation of reality
with elements drawn from reality,
guided by an obsessing idea.
Dali recognized himself in this process
and he self-diagnosed as paranoid.
Dali produced many paintings
in which hidden images
questioned the functioning of the mind.
This "Paranoiac-Critical" method let him
translate the visions and hallucinations
that he experienced
He wanted to express his fantasies
through painting.
Dali goes back and forth between
the rational world and the irrational world,
between the conscious and the unconscious,
without falling into madness.
He knows that some people did not manage to
and have gone crazy,
passing a point of no return.
Thanks to Stefan Zweig,
Dali meets Freud in London
in July 1938.
I brought Freud a painting, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus,
and he liked it a lot.
I also brought him the text I wrote
about paranoid-critical activity.
And Freud didn't want to look at it,
so I punched the table and said,
you have to read it or the painting is worthless!
Dali sought Freud's approval regarding
the psychoanalytical depth of his painting.
Unfortunately Freud refused to play this game.
Freud told me that
Surrealism didn't interest him much
because the hidden meaning
was already obvious in the paintings.
Freud admits that after meeting
this "fanatic Spaniard",
his point of view on Surrealism changed,
Freud no longer took them for lunatics
but thought there may be something interesting about them.
André Breton worked as a psychiatric nurse from 1916,
and he is sent to Saint Dizier
in a neuropsychiatric center.
He meets soldiers coming back from the front,
transformed by the experience of war.
Breton discovers madness through their words
and think their psychic dysfunction create
an extremely interesting form of poetry.
André Breton was especially interested in poetry.
One of the thing that played a big role
in the history of Surrealism
was his approach of psychiatry
and mad people.
He focused on what we can call alienation,
which is often close to both genius and poetry.
Their creative process meant that
madness was not just something destructive
but sometimes enabled the creation
of totally unconscious and superb work.
Breton and Philippe Soupault decided
to quickly write everything
that passed through their heads.
Those sentences and words formed
a poetry of spontaneity and chance.
A consciousness that lets itself go,
far from any acquired morality,
far from all culture,
the conscious self must express itself,
the real becomes the surreal.
Breton takes a great interest in the experiments
that Charcot conducted at the Salpétriére hospital,
experiments on hypnosis and hysteria.
Charcot's work showed that madness and hysteria
weren't just hereditary conditions
but were pathways of dysfunction of the psyche
that could be understood differently.
Many Surrealist experienced
periods of internment in asylums:
Leonora Carrington,
Hans Bellmer's wife, Unica Zürn,
and Antonin Artaud,
one of the great figures of Surrealism.
These artists had the experience
of both being in the norm
and at the same time
of being interned
in asylums.
They tried to transcribe this experience
into their art.
Breton used to say:
"Be careful not to go too far when painting,
when searching for the unconscious, for automatism"
as there was sometimes a point of no return.
These experiences could be dangerous psychologically.
Leonora Carrington was completely
inhabited by her art,
Her work draws on esotericism,
magic and occultism.
It's a door to the wonderful world
of Carrington's universe.
There was a similar context for Unica Zürn,
she met Hans Bellmer,
moved to Paris,
and got involved in Surrealism.
Her works reflected an unease and her madness
and she was interned in psychiatric hospitals.
In a book called Dark Spring,
Unica Zürn
experiences with a writing
that goes through more or less normal phases
but also into a descent into schizophrenic crises.
We can see in her writing this crossing of borders
between madness and non-madness.
She talks about her illness
with clarity and a lot of humor,
she also describes her hallucinations.
Both her book and visual productions
are beautiful.
Antonin Artaud said:
"I am already dead, but I accept madness as life."
Madness was his life.
He wanted to challenge the official culture,
specific to our Western way of thinking,
where culture is placed in a dominant position,
This culture is inhibiting, especially for art.
It cuts you off from your creative roots.
Augustin Lesage was at the bottom of a coal mine in 1912
when he heard a voice telling him
that he must become a painter.
He told one of his friends
and they joined a spirit circle.
During a seance, Lesage's hand takes a pencil,
and starts drawing without control.
Mediumnic artists fascinate me,
these great delirious artists inhabited by God.
Their hand move freely,
inspired by spirits and the dead.
This is not far from big psychotic delusions.
George Widener has the same syndrome as Rain Man:
the extraordinary memory capacity.
You give him a page and in a split second
he memorizes it all.
George Widener tries to predict the future,
having invented
a whole system of grids of numbers
to anticipate what will happen.
In his artwork called Sunday Crash,
he wrote down all the plane crashes
that will happen on Sundays during the next 100 years.
Henry Darger's great work is
this 15,000-page novel,
The Realms of the Unreal,
which is a great saga with a war between two clans.
The story is centered around the Vivian Girls,
seven little princesses who fight
against the bad adults,
the Glandelinians.
All the clichés about the purity of the artist
are actually true for Darger,
he is the ultimate self-taught outsider
and his work was discovered after his death.
People who are considered marginals or abnormals
are suddenly the best example of individual freedom.
Art brut can even remain secret.
This is the freest act of creation.
The artists do not create to be recognized,
they do not create to sell or to eat,
the artists only create to exist.
It's an extraordinary lesson on a human level.
These artists invent a new system,
the ability to invent
new forms and languages.
It appeals to us because
I think that this system
uses ancient mental structures
that we all have when we are babies.
The mind of these artists function
in a complete different way than ours.
Normal people compartmentalize everything:
history, geography, God, science, etc.
Psychotics don't.
We performed experiments on schizophrenic patients.
Their unconscious treatment of information was fine,
even slightly increased,
but their awareness of conscious information
was abnormal.
It means that reality always appears abnormal,
at all levels of the brain.
The consequence is that
patients start confabulating,
thinking there are hidden levels of reality,
that they are being spied on,
that people know too much about them,
a certain sense of paranoia.
We can speculate
on what it does to their mind:
a liberation of some unconscious behaviors,
that are repetitive and automatic.
You very rarely find representations
of the suffering mad man in art brut.
In the history of art,
this extreme pain has been shown many times.
When Goya paints madness,
he shows the anguished madman,
the hallucinated madman,
but they never showed
the psychic, creative richness
of this ability to create.
Only mad people can.
Art and madness have always coexisted.
It is obvious that there is often
a form of creativity in psychiatric conditions.
Alienation can lead to creativity,
which reminds me of Edgar Poe's famous statement:
"Men have called me crazy,
but science has not yet decided
whether madness is, or not,
the greatest intelligence.
Madness is not fun or enjoyable,
so we must also demystify it.
It fascinates me, because it allows me
to understand areas of the brain
that are extraordinary
but that does not mean
that it is wonderful to be mad.
One can have a rejoicing view of madness
through Art Brut,
but the artists suffer from their difficulty
to fit with the reality of the world.
But they also have an experience
and understanding of the world
totally different from ours,
and at times, what comes out of these experiences
is magical, a great work of art.