Portrait of Peter Altenberg (1909). Picture © Wien Museum
Exhibition: Madness & Modernity – Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900, Wellcome Collection, London, until June 28 2009
Even the most stellar critic could find themselves teetering over the line separating detachment from insanity during a wander through Madness & Modernity.
The heads of hypochondriacs, lecherous fops, arch rascals and utter simpletons gurn and pout on one side of the room while, opposite, a video installation paces through the corridor of a former asylum in stop-start motion, passing skeletons and echoing dorms like something out of the X-Files.
Josef Karl Rädler. Picture © Christian M Nebehay Antiquariat und Kunsthandlung, Vienna
The perception and treatment of mental illness forms the major consideration of the show, illustrating plans of Austrian architect Otto Wagner's transformations of hospitals into niche buildings, even stretching to a model patients made of one of the first modern churches in the 1920s.
Church pulpits overlook "unbroken sightlines" and "easy access for nurses" to drag off congregants experiencing crazed throes.
There are 1904 sanatorium pictures and plans by Josef Hoffmann, a student of Wagner who was creating buildings for affluent Viennese hoi polloi who saw recuperative stays, prescribed by their doctors, as fashionable.
One of the earliest electrotherapeutic cases stands nearby, accompanied by a portrait of Freud by Max Oppenheimer which was rejected by his daughter, Mathilde, and a room full of contorted faces and shocking imagery.
Character Head. Picture © Wien Museum, Vienna
"This exhibition is about a specific place and a specific period – one in which extraordinary things were happening in the worlds of psychiatry, the visual arts, architecture and design," explains James Peto, Senior Curator at the Wellcome Collection.
Co-curator Gemma Blackshaw feels the "revolution in the visual arts" was already underway by the time Freud published his first writings on psychoanalysis.
"Vienna's artists, designers and architects were already interested in mental illness and psychiatry," she says.
Character Head. Picture © Wien Museum, Vienna
A section charting work by patients themselves feels like a precursor to the second part of the exhibition, Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings - a selection of works taken from 711 drawings made by the respected performance artist during her 11-year battle with mental illness, from which she emerged last year.
"I never intended these drawings to be shown to anyone," she says, a wish made clear in her vision of herself about to leap from a cliff, which she formed just nine days into her spell in a day centre and kept hidden from her family.
"I feel strange, I hate it," reads the subtext to her first day, juxtaposing a picture of a man under a sun in a typical example of the contrast between her actual situation and inner feelings.
Charcot historic photographic plates. Picture © Rockefeller library, London
These are brave, harrowing insights into the despair Baker went through, revealing the full extent of the turmoil she isolated from her hugely successful professional life as an artist.
Her friends at the day centre approve – "especially of the horrific ones" – and the bleak reality of her mental state is frequently dissipated by her scything wit.
"They seem to communicate, more effectively than words, aspects of what my experience of mental illness has been, on so many unexpected levels," she observes.
"From their desperate origins they grew into an essential part of my life as an artist. A good dollop of humour sometimes comes in handy when looking at the darkest times."
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