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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.