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WD_344/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 4 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.7 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 450 | | Catalog #: | WD_0344 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Art and Psychoanalysis. - book reviews
Art Journal, Summer, 1995 by Laurie Wilson
Laurie Schneider Adams. Art and Psychoanalysis. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. 366 pp.; 135 b/w ills.
Eighty-five years ago Freud made his initial excursion in a psychoanalytic exploration of visual art with his 1910 essay "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood." This much contested essay is studied today from a variety of perspectives. Using insights garnered from his clinical work with a patient who reminded him of Leonardo (minus the genius), Freud set out to show how a vivid early memory can reveal core patterns of personality that are later expressed in a person's life and work.
Using Leonardo's journals, the biographical material available at the time, and iconographic and formal patterns he discerned in Leonardo's oeuvre, Freud constructed explanations for certain enigmas in Leonardo's life and character. In his only extended psychobiographical study, Freud artfully demonstrated his talent for psychoanalytic reconstruction. While working with his patients Freud had developed a remarkable skill of hypothesizing some of the forgotten early events and experiences in a person's life that had shaped adult behavior. Garnering clues from apparently minor discrepancies, inexplicably repeating patterns, and shards of various sorts from the distant past, Freud had successfully found keys to unlock the puzzling and troubling behavior for besetting his patients. In other words, by deciphering the unconscious and applying his method to a known biographical figure, Freud could demonstrate the power and universality of the unconscious and reveal some of the ways memory and fantasy entwine and distort childhood experiences.
Candidates at psychoanalytic institutes read the Leonardo essay to learn about Freud's early theorizing on childhood sexuality, memory, narcissism, and in particular, a narcissistic type of homosexuality On the other hand, the essay is sometimes offered to art history students as a cautionary exercise in the dangers of applying the theories garnered from one discipline to another and the consequent risks of ignorance. For Freud bashers from any discipline, it has served as a straw man--the small- and medium-size flaws in it are held up as proof of the irrelevance of the artist's inner life to his work--or worse, as confirmation that psychoanalysts are only interested in turning artists into "cases." The mad artist is a concept so compelling and ancient that few readers of Freud's essay have been able to discern that Freud's strenuous effort to explain Leonardo the man was not diagnosis or "pathography" but the effort of an exceptionally tolerant and nonjudgmental physician and humanist to understand his fellow man.
In 1914 Freud published "The Moses of Michelangelo"--his second venture in applied analysis and the visual arts. Using an entirely different approach from the Leonardo essay, Freud did what too few art historians do today. He looked hard at a single work, sketching, studying, measuring, spending hours and days on end in front of the work itself, questioning his own responses and trying to get inside the mind of the artist by learning to read the formal and iconographic messages encoded in the art object. Additionally, he studied previous scholarly responses to the work, seeking to comprehend the artist's intention by observing audience response. As usual, he found discrepancies within the work and the responses to it that could only, or best, be explained by his consideration of the artist's unconscious as well as conscious thoughts and feelings. Placing the work in the emotional context of its commission by a tempestuous, ambitious man of genius like himself, Pope Julius II, Freud unveiled a complicated reconstruction of passion and counterpassion simultaneously expressed by the Moses, befitting the author of conflict theory in psychoanalysis.
Freud's early attempts unleashed a flood of case studies of artists by psychoanalytically oriented authors, many if not most written with far less scrupulous attention to detail and often falling into egregious pathologizing-turning the artist into a patient. Until recently, much less has been written from a psychoanalytic perspective by art historians, either because they have had the modesty to know what they don't know about the intricacies of the inner life or because of a surprising repugnance for psychoanalytic approaches. By comparison, scholars of literature, history, and even economics have gone freely where art historians have feared to tread.
The books by Laurie Schneider Adams and Mary Mathews Gedo may be harbingers of better times for interdisciplinary work in psychoanalysis and art history. Fortunately for both disciplines, they are clear and fruitful examples of the possibilities.
The two books share several features: they address art and artists from the combined perspectives of art history and psychoanalysis, they are written by scholars with expertise in both disciplines, and they include previously published essays along with new material providing the reader with a large enough sampling of their respective approaches to demonstrate the diverse possibilities of felicitous interdisciplinary work. They are also both clearly written with a minimum of jargon; nevertheless, the two books are vastly different in style, scope, and aim.
Gedo's book follows the pattern set by Freud's second essay, using individual works as focal points for her observations about the artists. She begins with two recent essays, the first on Edouard Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergere and the second on Paul Gauguin's Vision after the Sermon. These are followed by four essays on Pablo Picasso previously published as articles between 1974 and 1979. The concluding essays are both on Rene Magritte.
The first essay, "Final Reflection: A Bar at the Folies-Bergere as Manet's Adieu to Art and Life," is an excellent example of Gedo's "psycho-iconographic approach." Gedo deftly uses many of the tools available to art historians: detailed examination of the formal aspects of the painting, both in its final version and by comparison with X-radiographic analyses of earlier versions; a consideration of sources, e.g., Fra Angelico's Christ Rising from the Tomb; a detailed discussion of the manifest subject itself--the bar and theater of the Folies-Bergere, its inhabitants, and its place in the social, cultural, and economic life of Paris in the 1870s and 1880s; a careful study of Manet's work immediately preceding the creation of A Bar at the Folies-Bergere; and a study of the evolution of the painting itself. Thoughtfully citing the contributions of previous authors, she reviews and interweaves arguments and counterarguments as she builds her case for a biographical and psychological interpretation of this work as Manet's statement to the world about his illness and imminent death.
A hallmark of Gedo's approach is her insistence on founding her understanding on the artist's bodily experiences and his psychological response to them. By examining and then astutely questioning the contemporary evidence of Manet's deteriorating physical condition, which he attempted to hide from his friends and colleagues at the time of this painting, Gedo offers a probable diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. She adds that Manet not only was ignorant of that diagnosis but actually believed that he was the victim of a chronic syphilitic infection he had contracted in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival when he was a seventeen-year-old naval cadet.
Deftly tracking Manet's unfolding responses to his physical condition via his work and behavior, Gedo weaves a plausible picture of the artist's inner life. For example, she shows how he superimposed the image of the barmaid, Suzon, over his own self image, representing through her aspects of the artist's past, present, and future, "psychologically isolated from the world, still in this world, but not of it, increasingly distanced from everyone and everything he had once held dear by the inexorable approach of death" (p. 50).
As everything in a dream reveals the dreamer's inner life, every object on the canvas conveys something of the artist's state of mind. The customer represents Manet's somber elegance and reputation as Paris' leading painter; "the still life objects--champagne and ale, once opened go flat" (p. 52)--serving as funereal references. We may not agree with each interpretation, but the author's bold willingness to discover meaning in every detail rests upon solid scholarship--her own and that of others.
The next four essays in Gedo's volume are also built around single works and use a similar combination of art historical methods and empathic hunches. The sum of Gedo's interpretations is invariably complex and not reducible to a simple formula reflecting her view that the inner life of artists like all human beings is made up of many interdigitated facets. It is Gedo's particular talent for empathic attunement to the life stories and art product that fuels her convictions about the symbolic meaning of parts and whole. She reflects long and hard on what biographical data she is able to discover and fits it together with both formal and iconographic patterns in the artist's oeuvre. Although I do not agree in every particular with Gedo's interpretations, I find her approach convincing and effective because it is based solidly upon what she sees on the canvas, rather than being concocted from theories she has borrowed for the moment--as has been the prime failing of art historians approaching the interdisciplinary work.
Adams has hewn closer to Freud's "Leonardo" essay by organizing her book around psychoanalytic concepts rather than specific works. The concepts Adams elucidates are usually classical Freudian ones--the Oedipus complex, primal scene, castration fears, as well as occasional post Freudian examples--transitional object, Lacan's mirror stage. Clinical material from her practice is introduced to supplement the art historical examples illustrating the concepts she presents.
Adams's vast erudition and wide-ranging interests allow her to draw together anecdotes from the entire history of art, weaving them into a tapestry on any given subject or psychoanalytic theme. This feature is usually exhilarating but at times can be exasperating. Frequently the concept being discussed is expanded and more broadly understood via the unexpected combinations Adams assembles; however, an informed reader is sometimes assaulted by the sense of a reductionistic patchwork.
Adams does the reader a great service when she reviews the controversies stimulated by Freud's essays on Leonardo and Michelangelo. She has carefully detailed the ins and outs of the controversies, clearly explaining the psychoanalytic concepts discussed and attacked. She succinctly states the case for each of the combatants and often adds astute remarks of her own.
The chapter "Some Psychological Aspects of the Mother-Child Relationship in Western Art" fulfills all the aims of the author. Adams explicates a number of psychoanalytic concepts with convincing material from a broad range of Western art. Both expert and novice reader will find that the psychoanalytic discussion is compelling and opens up insights into well-known ideas. Adams's witty and thorough discussion of "His Majesty the Baby" elucidates Freud's original insight about the egocentric nature of early childhood as characterized by thoughts of magical control over the environment. She includes Sandor Ferenczi's equally astute observations, which carried Freud's ideas further--that a step on the way to the development of the baby's sense of reality is a period of "unconditional wishful omnipotence" when the infant is convinced that his wish is the world's command. In using the metaphors provided by Freud and Ferenczi, Adams tracks their path with illuminating depictions of medieval and Renaissance Madonnas.
Adams is at her strongest when she writes about Renaissance and classical art, her areas of deepest expertise. Her erudition gives the broad strokes of her interpretations a sense of specificity and grounding that can feel absent when she writes about twentieth-century artists--Henri Moore, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, or Picasso. Relying on the research of others and the confidence of her ability to grasp the larger psychoanalytic picture, her hypotheses sometimes appear too general.
Adams's discussion of Picasso's Guernica is a case in point and useful for the purpose of comparison in this review since the painting is also the subject of one of Gedo's previously published studies and is included as an essay in her book.
Beginning with a study by her father, Daniel Schneider, who was also a psychoanalyst interested in art, Adams reiterates his point that Guernica is one of the most powerful examples of primal-scene imagery. Primal scene is a psychoanalytic term for the universal recollection or fantasy of young children watching adult sexual activity.
Adams disallows Gedo's insights and observations about the crucial impact and crystallizing power of the three-year-old Picasso's traumatic experience watching his sister's birth concurrent with an earthquake in Malaga, which forced the family to flee from its home in the middle of the night. Adams relegates these events to the sideline, calling them "precipitating factors [which] do not account for the mythic primal power of Picasso's images" (p. 249).
Adams argues that Picasso's knowledge of his parents' sexuality had much more impact on him and his overall work than his experience observing his sister's birth coincident with a frightening natural catastrophe.
One key to the difference of approaches is Adams's use of the word mythic. She looks for evidence of psychoanalytic constructs, in this case the primal scene. In contrast, Gedo begins with the memory of specific event and trauma, seeking confirmation in life and/or art to corroborate her hunch that a specific event was like the irritating grain in the oyster that Picasso transformed into a pearl, although it left lasting effects because it was combined with such other events as the loss of closeness between son and mother, who, in turning to her new infant, left Picasso to rely on his father for support and nurturance. Gedo thus stays with the specificity of the psychological dynamics within the Picasso family, placing the traumatic event in context.
Adams is comfortable not addressing details of family life that she calls "biographical." When she sees "the required cast for a primal scene": "the bull, the dying horse, and the woman with the lamp" (p. 248), it is enough for her to proclaim the centrality of her preferred concept. By dismissing Gedo's contribution as insignificant, she unfortunately misses an opportunity to demonstrate how multilayered and interwoven psychological themes can be for artists and for everyone. Picasso was a quintessential voyeur. He gobbled up the world with his eyes and produced extraordinary results. That a highly visual, gifted child would be impressed by significant visual events should surprise no one. Most children are impressed and affected by mysterious scenes of adult behavior in the middle of the night. Why not posit that both primal scene and a traumatic vision of childbirth were combined in the artist's mind and served as powerful internal stimuli aroused when the contemporary disaster of Guernica occurred? By reducing Gedo's hypothesis to "Guernica [was] a reference to the Malaga earthquake and the birth of Picasso's sister" (p. 250), Adams indulges in either/or thinking that is antithetical to a psychoanalytic approach. In this instance Gedo points to the more complex and realistic fluidity of the mind, observing that, for Picasso, all the figures represented in the painting as separate individuals were probably originally interchangeable. She reconstructs a childhood confusion concerning his separate role and identity related to a very close tie to his mother. "The painful associations that the bombing of Guernica aroused led him, momentarily, to reexperience that confusion" (p. 175).
Gedo comprehends that Picasso identified with all of the images in the painting and that the transformation of the personal origins of the work into imagery that could be read universally constituted his genius. Adams knows something similar but remains at a general level seeking echoes of "mythic primal fantasies," which makes her work both easier to attack and easier to accept. Gedo's specificity can be misunderstood or can offend readers who wish to find great causes and palatable sources for their heroes. In overreacting to the mundane ordinariness or even improbability, readers may miss the profound and complicated resonances Gedo interweaves as she completes her picture of the artist's psychology.
Adams's use of mythic themes is also susceptible to misreading as an intellectualized understanding of psychoanalytic concepts. To some, her broad strokes may seem true but not so interesting because they reveal truths that apply to most if not all human beings. This would be an unfortunate response because Adams's insights are so often illuminating. As myths are wont to do, they answer the profound unspoken questions inherent in the human condition and displayed in the work and lives of artists.
LAURIE WILSON, professor of art therapy at New York University in the Department of Art and Art Professions, a psychoanalyst in private practice, is completing a book on Alberto Giacometti.
COPYRIGHT 1995 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
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