by Gabriel Byng

At the turn of the 20th Century in Vienna, madness was in. Psychiatrists enjoyed a boom in business, academics mused on new and outlandish treatments for insanity and the fashionable classes frequented luxury, purpose built sanatoria to restore their tired nerves. In the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, Madness & Modernity, this trend’s influence on art and architecture is framed with another, broader story: the bewildering pace of Vienna’s growth into a modern metropolis.

The exhibition begins with three different buildings in Austria, exemplifying three different approaches to the housing of the mentally ill. First of all the 18th Century ‘Tower of Fools’: little more than a prison to hide away the insane, a gloomy, forbidding cylinder resembling the kind of tower a Dumas hero might be unfairly locked up in. By 1907 attitudes were changing, neurasthenia had become a common illness among society ladies and treatment was replacing incarceration. Otto Wagner’s ‘Am Steinhof’ is a perfect example of this new attitude to madness. An enormous modernist complex of handsome buildings and landscaped gardens topped by a magnificent church and widely publicised in large, attractive posters to those worn out by city living. Only the most dangerous of patients were kept inside permanently, others spending their time outside or in morning rooms that would not have looked out of place on the Titanic. At the very height of fashion were sanatoria like Purkersdorf where weary urbanites could enjoy ordered lifestyles, diets and furnishings, taking the very latest, if usually pointless, technological cures – the exhibition includes a clunky exercise bike and an electrically charged tube. It is a testament to the skill with which this exhibition is curated that just a few objects and a change in lighting are able to conjure up not only an institution’s attitude to its clients but also a whole society’s.

Freud was just one of many contemporary thinkers proposing innovative theories on the nature of madness and new methods for its treatment. His great contribution was to suggest mental rather than physical causes, and solutions, for mental illness. The exhibition changes suddenly from displaying exercise bikes and models of rural sanatoria to a richly upholstered couch and some of the suggestive antiquities that Freud would use to stimulate the internal examinations of his clients. There is almost a palpable change in mood as subsequent rooms concentrate on madness rather than treatment; individuals rather than institutions; the internal rather than the external. Paintings by Egon Schiele and Max Oppenheimer scrutinise their own bodies along with their friends and patrons for madness – even using photographic journals of mental patients as their inspirations. The effects scandalised at the time and Schiele’s emaciated, contorted, twisted self portraits make for difficult viewing today. In every case the viewer is left wondering whether the madness is in the artist or the sitter – whose psyche is projected onto the canvas?

By the time we reach the artistic productions of the art classes in the big mental hospitals the work by middle class intellectual artists seem like childish pretentions, a silly vogue. Compared to the regularised, frank depictions of hospital inmates by fellow patients Frau St and Karl Radler their work seems pompous, overwrought, even ridiculous, much like the nervous disorders treated at Purkersdorf. Real madness, it suggests, is far less obvious, not conveniently displayed in physiognomy or wonky fingers, as one Parisian neurologist suggested. The mood of the exhibition changes again, the rooms and views becoming more ordered and straightforward as we reach the art of the, apparently, insane. The very first objects in the museum are a series of grimacing heads made by Franz-Xaver Messerschmidt who may or may not have been mad, but certainly titillated Vienna in 1907. Like the work of Frau St they seem to contain surprisingly few clues to his own madness, the Wellcome Collection ending and beginning its exhibition with a very suggestive begging question.

Madness & Modernity: Mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna 1900

1 April-28 June 2009