ABSTRACT

Since the end of the 19th century, various attempts have been made to establish a relationship between the personality of the artist and the work he or she creates. Such writers as Abroise-Auguste Tardieu (1872), Paul Max Simon (1876) and Cesare Lombroso (1895) drew attention to the drawings and paintings of the mentally ill and proposed that these products of the imagination provide insight into the psychological state of the patient. The next decades saw an increasing interest in the art of psychotic patients, and psychiatrists began to collect samples of the work of patients incarcerated in the asylums for the mentally ill. Soon major publications appeared, some of which attracted an audience that extended far beyond the medical community (Morgenthaler, 1921; Prinzhorn, 1922; Reitman, 1951). With the notable exception of Hanz Prinzhorn, most writers considered the drawings and paintings of mental patients symptomatic of their mental disorder and, especially in the case of schizophrenia, as confirming such a diagnosis. Thus, a drawing or painting could reveal the pathological condition of the patient’s mind or psyche, his alienation from the social and physical world, changes in his perception of self and others, distortions in his experience of time and space and, above all, chronicle the cognitive and affective disorganization wrought by the schizophrenic illness.