Certifiable Art Some Palette-pushers Got Real Gone by Dick Blackburn
The image of the mad artist is forever set in the old pop consciousness, thanks to such wild-eyed perfs as Robert Newton's in Odd Man Out, Alec Guinness in The Horse's Mouth, and beatnik sculptor Dick Miller (pouring plaster-of-paris over his just-felled victims) in Bucket of Blood. Personal fave: Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh in Lust for Life. Who could forget intense Kirk, eyes aglitter, teeth clenched, exhorting a pissed-off Tony Quinn (as Gaugin) during a windstorm to "Nail your easel down!"
Actually, the number of famous nutso daubers is quite low. The majority who turn to painting after a psychotic breakdown are said to produce work that is more interesting medically than artistically. Ah, but if they were artists before their trolley left the track, the story is often quite different. Witness the aptly named patricide Richard Dadd, a skillful British mid-nineteenth painter/ illustrator of Shakespearian scenes. When a lord took him on a Middle Eastern trip to make sketches--much as one might take a pocket camera today--mad Dadd began limning tiny figures in a vast expanse. According to nut docs of the day, such drawing denoted the kind of acute alienation that precedes a big crack-up.
The Vast Detail
Sure enough, Dadd returned to London in the throes of what was then diagnosed as monomania (being in the grip of an all-consuming delusion, viz: that the devil was inhabiting his father). Dadd mortally stabbed his pater on a trip to Kent, fled to France, was apprehended and tossed into the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum attached to Bedlam Hospital where, continuing to paint, his art became... different. He spent nine years working maniacal detail into what is often acknowledged as his fantasy opus, The Fairy Feller's Master-stroke, in which misshapen little folk stand about as one of their brethren raises an axe to split the smooth surface of a hazel nut that resembles the polished pate of one intently staring elfin oldster.
Other canvases were equally bizarre. The heads of two mean-looking 18th century officers are at the bottom of Patriotism, a watercolor largely given over to crabbed writing and chimerical geography. Or dig The Child's Problem (1857), which features a hyperthyroidal urchin trying desperately to suss out a chess move on the lap of a sleeping crone. On the wall: a framed picture of a shackled slave.
Pussy Paranoia
Up to the time Louis Wain started selling his treacly, late nineteenth century drawings of kitties gamboling at the beach, in the parlor and around the dining table, cats were largely regarded solely as mousers for farmers. Wain's candybox fantasies helped popularize them as house pets well into the 1920's. After his wife kicked three years into their marriage, he either came suddenly unstuck or the event sped up a process that was well under way. Oh-so-cutesy felines developed the large staring eyes of paranoia. Colors and expressions turned so fierce they broke through the outlines, exploding Indian rug-like into pure abstraction. Wain went to the laughing academy while middle-class legions, ignorant of his way loco motion, continued to coo over the cat scans.
Years later, psychiatrists arranged eight of Wain's drawings in a chronology of their own devise, to chart what they thought was his progressive flipout. This simplistic stunt, never questioned, was taken for gospel and often reprinted. Subsequent shrinkwork suggests that the cat-man was wacko from the start, and may have deliberately intended many of his weirder works for textile design.
For years, famed cartoonist/crossbow collector Chas Addams was considered a key link in the art-insanity chain. Rumor held that Chas, the New Yorker legend and creator of Fester, Lurch and Pugsley, would tip his shrinks when he was ready to wig -- by drawing the same cartoon over and over (allegedy a sketch of a vampire accepting a newborn from a maternity nurse, with the caption "No thanks. I'll drink it here"). New Yorker associates have branded the tale a fabrication. Yet, a collection of morbid memorabilia (old photos and engravings of elephant electrocutions, torture instruments and rat hunts), Dear Dead Days (Putnam's, 1959) shows the Family's patriarch to have been somewhat unhinged. Nail your easel down, Chas.
SHOP AROUND. Raw Vision magazine covers the art of the "outsider," including self-taught visionaries and eccentric craftsmen.