Mental illness and degenerate art

As I was hurrying out of the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid one day, close to being late for an appointment, I took a side corridor to get to the exit more quickly and was suddenly struck by a painting I’d never seen before.

Tertulia by Ángeles Santos

It was Tertulia, The Gathering, by Ángeles Santos. She was just eighteen when she painted it in 1929. It is a gathering, but a weird one. No one’s sitting comfortably, with one woman apparently gripping the back of the couch, to stop herself slumping against her companion. Another is sitting on a stool apparently supported by four springs that don’t look as though they’d take a child’s weight. One or two of them are smoking, at a time when that might have been shocking. Santos herself later said that she and her friends would smoke in secret to feel modern.

No one’s talking to anyone else, and no one’s even looking at the others. Indeed, one of them seems to be looking at us directly instead. No one’s smiling.

It’s a fine structure of flowing lines, rather than lifelike figures, in a grey setting where even the splashes of colour are subdued. The picture is troubled and therefore troubling. Perhaps it reflects the tormented world when the slaughter of the First World War was still a living memory, and where surrealism might seem a preferable alternative to reality.

This was the world in which Hitler sought power. Something that never ceases to amaze me about him is how limited a character he was. Rather like other dictators, or would-be dictators like Donald Trump, he was shallow, trivial and untalented. Good at getting into power, certainly, but with no depth of creativity to him.

I appreciate that this isn’t the most striking aspect of his character, which is obviously his indifference to the suffering of others, his ability to murder without remorse, and the casual way he could send millions to kill and be killed. But the limitations and the monstrosity weren’t unrelated, as was made clear to me recently by a Guardian article about the ‘Degenerate Art’ obsession of the Nazis.

You may know that Hitler himself lived for a while as an artist of sorts. He failed in his attempt to get into the Art Academy in Vienna, but he would do water colours from postcards of Vienna scenes and sell them to visitors. They were copies and therefore unoriginal, uninspiring and unchallenging.

Hitler copied postcards. Here, the Vienna Opera House

Take the case of Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler by way of contrast. She was painting as Hitler was beginning to move stealthily towards power. Her self-portrait of 1931 is strikingly powerful if, perhaps, a little perturbing or even frightening. The vivid colours, her unsmiling face, her hair with its green tinges and her face with a patch of red that matches her dress, border on the aggressive. The men in the background look almost like ogres.

Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler Self-portrait 1931

Like the Santos painting, Lohse-Wächtler’s also expresses uncertainty, though rather more loudly. The woman in the painting, her presentation of herself, is someone we might expect to have had a few drinks – though she would no doubt assure us, if challenged, no more than she could cope with – and would declaim on any topic, probably without letting us get a word in edgeways. The silence and cool stares of the Santos painting are nowhere to be seen. Lohse-Wächtler is smoking like Santos did, but there’s nothing secret or private about it, as she brandishes a fine cigarette holder which, no doubt, she’ll use to drive home her points.

When it comes to passion or even fear, though, nothing beats the self-portrait by Franz Karl Bühler of 1919. Doesn’t it remind you of Edvard Much’s The Scream? Now Bühler had every reason to scream at his existence, even more than just because of the horror of the war just over. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and would spend 42 years in mental hospitals in his native Germany. There, he learned to paint, and did himself a lot of good by painting not just self-portraits, but portraits of many of his fellow patients.

Franz Karl Bühler Self-portrait 1919

Hitler didn’t approve. Paintings like Bühler’s or Lohse-Wächtler’s were, in the Nazis’ view, degenerate art (entartete Kunst). The Propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, even organised an exhibition of degenerate art that travelled to eleven German and Austrian cities to underline to decent Aryans just how shamelessly Jewish and Communist tendencies were polluting fine German art. In future, proper art would be like Hitler’s little water colour of the Vienna State Opera House.

Some of Bühler’s works were included in the exhibition, as were others by Lohse-Wächtler. By then, she too was in a mental hospital, also diagnosed with schizophrenia. As many surrealists knew, mental ill-health could lend itself to surrealist creativity.

Lohse-Wächtler was asked to submit to voluntary sterilisation, since the Nazis believed that this was the only way to prevent this condition – perhaps from their point of view I should say perversion – might be passed on. She refused. But in 1935, she was sterilised against her will. Traumatised by the experience, she never painted again.

She would only have had another five years in any case. Like Bühler, she was transported in 1940 to what had once been a humane psychiatric institution in Castle Sonnenstein. There she and Bühler became just two of the victims of the ‘T4 Action’, the euthanasia programme that gassed 13,720 mental patients.

The degenerate art of the surrealist or avant-garde painters was far too troubling for the Nazis, who wanted something far more traditional and unworrying.

What about Ángeles Santos? 

Well, she avoided the fate of Bühler or Lohse-Wächtler. Indeed, she lived till 101, and died honoured in her native Spain, the recipient of numerous awards and medals. But by then she’d long turned her back on works as remarkable and disturbing as Tertulia. Soon after she’d finished it, she escaped from her parents’ house and was found by farmers behaving weirdly near a local river. Her father had her interned in a mental hospital, another parallel with her German contemporaries.

He had a change of heart and she returned home two years later. However, she never painted in her early style again. From then on she focused on a far more conventional style.

Still, let’s not get ourselves thinking that the mentally ill always produce paintings like Tertulia. The Guardian article about degenerate art quotes a 1923 psychological examination of Hitler which found he was “a morbid psychopath … prone to hysteria”. And look what that produced in art. To say nothing of what it produced in the world.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, back then when I stopped to look at the Santos painting, I still managed to get to my appointment in time.