Scientific Romanticism

Far from a recognition based on its own merits, the visual production of outsiders (namely that of the mentally ill) served to illustrate and reinforce the Platonic ideals of creative possession implicit in the Romantic orientation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Neatly dovetailing with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pervasive notion of madness as the root of all true genius, the work of the insane sparked widespread interest among physicians and theorists alike (MacGregor 1989:72-73). No longer viewed as the mindless scribbling of hopeless psychotics, the art of the madman was now regarded as an elemental key to the mapping of transcendent artistic brilliance.

Among the many professionals engaged in the study of the art of the mentally ill, the work of Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), a prominent Italian psychiatrist and anthropologist, stands as the first fully engaged attempt to systematically prove the relationship between genius and insanity. Working with a collection of artifacts culled from inmate populations throughout Europe (now housed in the Museum of Criminal Anthropology in Turin), Lombroso sought to prove his strangely antagonistic theory that “genius was a form of moral insanity,” and therefore, “all geniuses should be diagnosed as suffering from a degenerative psychosis” (MacGregor 1989:94). Regardless of the shadowed motivations backing such venomous ideas concerning creativity and the origins of talent, Lombroso’s work remains influential in its groundbreaking attempt to address the art of the mentally ill in the same systematic fashion employed by art historians. By elucidating thirteen fundamental tendencies commonly recognized in the art of the insane (these being originality of materials, uselessness, repetition, imitation of imagery, degeneracy, minuteness of detail, absurdity, ornamentation, atavism, eccentricity, insanity as subject matter, obscenity and symbolism) Lombroso established the first unifying criteria for work that had previously existed beyond the accepted realm of art historical language and theory, thus legitimizing the work of the outsider as a phenomenon worthy of aesthetic discourse (MacGregor 1989:95-99).

Although Lombroso’s scrutiny did little to penetrate the specific meanings inherent in the imagery of his subjects, he was the first to note the connection between images and the specific pathologies of their creators. This revolutionary idea of a symptomatic link between image and illness would eventually come to enjoy reciprocal influence with predominant theories of the unconscious during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Influential in their own right, these newly articulated connections between art and insanity eventually proved to be particularly susceptible to corruption in the hands of the Fascists. Manipulated by the Nazi agenda, the scientifically oriented association between aesthetic practice and physiology quickly degenerated into indignant justification for the wholesale condemnation of modernist practice and rationale for its ultimate obliteration.

Posted by admin on April 6th, 2007 | Filed in outsider art | Comment now »

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