Beyond the Romantic Mythos, What Life Is Really
Like for Artists Living With Mental Illness
February 29, 2016
By Moze Halperin
I was startled one day, several months ago, when a new security guard in the usually silent lobby
of the Soho building that houses Flavorwire’s offices said, “Good morning.”
Over the next few days, I began to overdo my own greetings, almost as a challenge to my fears
that I’d become disconnected by concentrating so hard on being busy. But from these
compensatory platitudes came conversations, and conversation led to my finding out that our
security guard is also an artist with a fascinating relationship to New York jazz clubs and some of
the genre’s most iconic musicians. (He’s been written about in the New York Times due to this
very relationship.)
He eventually invited me to the opening of a show that features his art. The exhibition is at the
Fountain House Gallery, which describes itself as “the premier venue in New York City
representing artists with mental illness.” Because of the obvious stigmas, it requires a certain
openness to invite a relative stranger to a show mounted beneath that label; the label makes it
both an invitation and a declaration.
The gallery is a nonprofit owned by the community-oriented organization, Fountain House,
which helps rehabilitate and integrate people with mental illnesses into the workforce. If a
Fountain House member is unable to work a shift because of their condition, the organization
sends one of their own staffers to fill in. The clubhouse, which is home to the gallery, is run in
part by Fountain House’s members — none of whom have to pay to participate.
Like the 60 artists whose work the gallery consistently exhibits, the organization faces the
paradoxes of carving out a space for marginalized creators, while aiming to focus on their work
itself, not just the stories about why the work is on display there. The artists often contend with
the contradictions of being deemed “outsider” artists based on mental illness — and the need to
brand oneself within the capitalist carnival of the New York art scene — while also trying to
stabilize their lives.
Attending the exhibit raised some persistent personal questions for me. When I went on SSRIs,
one of the biggest fears I’d had was that my ability to write in a style I considered “comfortably
frantic” would be compromised. The mythical conflation of mental illness and creativity made
me fear that making emotionally impactful art and being emotionally impacted — to the point of
dysfunction — were inextricable.
Through the Fountain House Gallery and its artists, I went looking for answers about how artists
with mental illness manage to function beyond the seductive but harmful mythos of heightened
pain as the path to heightened art.
‘Celebrity Heaven 2,’ by Martin Cohen
Martin Cohen is a prolific artist who has been involved with the Fountain House Gallery since
the mid-’90s, helping expand it from a blank space for an “Artist of the Month” on a wall in the
clubhouse into an entire gallery. He had a breakdown while he was an undergrad at SUNY
Purchase, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder as a result. As
it’s described in a profile from 2007 in Schizophrenic Digest, he hallucinated his rock-star idols
— whom he now often paints — “flying out of the sky, led by Peter Gabriel as the Antichrist.”
Though he was hospitalized, he returned to school, and ultimately went on to get his MFA at
Carnegie Mellon, where he studied with acclaimed abstract expressionist Sam Gilliam.
Cohen does link much of his work directly to the suffering implicit in his condition. He has
explained that he’s “a mood-oriented artist” and that his “illness has informed [his] work and
made [him] more willing to experiment.” His series of “satirical photomontages,” as Artspace
dubbed them, sees the heads of celebrities, politicians, and porn stars superimposed on heaven/
hellscape backgrounds by Renaissance painters, in particular Hieronymus Bosch; he tells me
these came from a cynical state following a breakdown. But the desire isn’t for his art to keep
him mired in those states — rather, he says the art itself is “therapeutic.”
His adult life has been marked by enduring, varyingly successful attempts at stability through a
“bumpy road” of shifts in medical treatment.
Flavorwire’s building’s security guard, Jonathan Glass, became an admirer — and a friend and
mentee of sorts — of Cohen’s when, after years of counseling at the Postgraduate Center for
Mental Health, his then-girlfriend brought him to Fountain House. Cohen, Glass says, has helped
him “accept that being an artist is, itself, worthy of celebration.”
Like Cohen, Glass’ mental health issues arose in college, where he suffered a series of
schizophrenic episodes, which, as he told Clinical Psychiatry News, saw him purchasing a
tuxedo and running onstage at a New York fashion show with a marriage proposal. His diagnosis
was depression and schizoaffective disorder.
When Glass went through a four-year phase of deep depression, he hardly drew whatsoever —
with the exception of one sketchbook, which he would take with him to draw deliberately in the
worst conditions New York had to offer: “I would draw in 20-degree weather, I would draw in
fierce winds, I would paint in the rain and everything would be washed out, but I would still
paint.” Perhaps due to the idolatry of the “suffering artist,” it was this sketchbook that sold for
the highest amount he’s earned for his art to date: $6,000. Glass says he doesn’t question the
motives of buyers, but rather tells himself to see any sale as a minor miracle. Here the weighty
paradox emerges: his biggest sale came from a particularly difficult mental health period, but the
work he sold was the only thing he’d made in four years.
Glass has moved past that phase, and he notes how even the lines of his portraits have
become less lugubrious: “My illustration teacher said that you have to have life in order to give
life, and that’s true with art.” Before coming to Fountain House, he participated in years of art
therapy, whose aim is typically staunchly non-careerist; yet, based on his work, his art therapist
encouraged it as a professional pursuit.
“It might help to have something to grapple with,” Glass says of the idea of
psychological adversity inspiring art. “If you look at the history of art, in Greek sculpture you’ll
see there’s a tension in those perfect bodies, between the motion and the stillness. They were
going against the grain even though they were achieving perfection.
And the Renaissance had to deal with the perfection of human nature in order to buoy themselves
to do these incredibly realistic, high order art pieces. Sometimes Michelangelo would paint the
Sistine Chapel three days and nights in a row. There’s always something artists have to work
against, if it’s a rebellious thing or a creative impulse, that predisposes them to feel a certain way.
But it doesn’t mean that your whole life is a struggle, it doesn’t mean you can’t make art when
you’re happy. If you look at Matisse’s work, for example, it’s very joyous.”
For the last ten years, Glass has devoted his artistic time almost entirely to sketching jazz
performers. His process is remarkable: he draws performers in the midst of concerts at jazz clubs
(like New York’s Zinc Bar, Birdland, and Jazz Gallery), where he’s known to spread out across
tables and sketch kinetically to the cues of the music.
Chucho Valdez with-Pedrito Martinez at the Rose Theater, by Jonathan Glass
He doesn’t restrict himself to the more capacious tables at clubs, though: if he’s going to a larger
concert hall, he’ll often buy two tickets to shows so that he can make way for his behemoth pads
across two of the cramped seats. (He has friends he can bring who aren’t too put off by having
their laps used as easels.) Since childhood, Glass has been an avid collector of autographs, and
his artwork is no exception. Frantically scrawled next to his fluid, expressionistic portraiture,
you’ll often see the signatures of the jazz musicians portrayed — small, incidental, interpretive
self-portraits commingling with Jonathan’s own interpretations of them. As such, the artists are
aware of his presence at their shows. Some have become friends — Ravi Coltrane, for instance,
who performed at one of Glass’ openings.
For Glass, often the biggest challenge is making art in a country that provides a noteworthy
support system for neither artists nor the mentally ill. In order to be self-sufficient enough to
create, he has to work two jobs.
His drawings — especially when he’s depicting big band musicians — can take up to four sets to
complete, and he often doesn’t get out of a show until 1am, though he has to be up by 5am to
work. (On weekends, he also works as a gallery attendant in Long Island City.) Beyond the costs
of attending jazz clubs, he’s needed to pay for his own medication for the last nine months: he
describes how Obamacare’s equivocating version of universal healthcare has seen him in a backand-forth with the Medicaid offices for almost a year.
Because of Jonathan’s unmistakably modernist style, he also feels disconnected from the
contemporary art world’s self-reflexively capitalist drive. Like many, he cites Jeff Koons as the
locus of his disdain for contemporary art. It interests him as little, he says, as “the Rococo period
— which was about showing rich people doing fun things and lavishing in their richness — and
there was a huge underbelly of poor people who didn’t get represented in art. I hate that, and
we’re seeing it again in a different form, in a way that pokes fun at just poking fun.”
He may not have a considerable urge to participate in this aspect of the contemporary art sphere,
but he’s seen a surge of productivity over the last five years, following a seeming attempt on the
part of the Fountain House Gallery to ease him out of relying on them for solo shows.
“A lot of the [Fountain House] artists are ambitious, but it’s really hard for anybody to navigate
the New York City art world and what it means,” says Ariel Willmott, Fountain House Gallery’s
director, who emphasizes that the space is in many ways supposed to help artists transition
beyond its confines. “Especially with individuals who are coming with a lack of connections. A
lot of our artists are older and farther away from school. Being in the art world is all about
connection. We foster connection through the gallery, but then the artists have to be able to go
out there themselves. Many artists don’t necessarily want to be pinned as an ‘outsider’ artist
living with mental illness. But in a lot of ways that’s the one door that’s been opened to them.”
Like Glass, Cohen doesn’t particularly fit the “outsider artist” description — he too is highly
trained, and has seen some traditional success within the New York art scene, with various solo
shows and a smattering of corporate buyers. But “representing himself has not always been easy
for [Cohen],” Jonathan tells me. “That’s his grey area — we all have something we’re
contending with, but for Marty, I think he worries more about success than failure.”
Willmott explains that there’s a balance between “promoting your work and navigating that
world of sob stories and feeling objectified by the desire for [those stories].” She notes that
although courting exposure through the “outsider art” label seems necessary, it can also lead to
awkward moments with buyers: if a piece looks too skilled or reminds them of an artist who’s
found mainstream acceptance, they might question its “outsider” status. “‘Well, I could tell you
the sob story about his life and how he struggles and was isolated and institutionalized,'” she
says, describing how those conversations tend to go. “People seem scared that someone will
sneak in that’s had some kind of arts education — like God forbid that person wasn’t just totally
isolated their whole life and only suffered. It’s really bizarre.”
The greatest recent conflation of artistry and mental illness helped define the very foundations of
20th-century artistic expression. Modernist ideals of mental illness “occurred precisely when the
distinctly modern disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis began to establish
their scientific ‘foundations’ and to achieve the intellectual, institutional, and professional forms
in which we largely know them today,” writes Mark S. Micale in his 2003 book, The Mind of
Modernism.
Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus,’ which Hal Foster links to Hans Prinzhorn’s collection of art from a
psychiatric clinic
In 1922, German art historian-turned-psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn published a book that would
have widespread influence on modernism. Artistry of the Mentally Ill, which featured the works
of ten schizophrenia patients from the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic, was published only a
decade after the word “schizophrenia” was brought into existence by Eugen Bleuler: the surge of
psychiatric diagnoses was accompanied by a swell of mimetic art that would overturn the most
basic conceptions of what art had always been.
The book caught the eyes of modern artists like Alfred Kubin, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Salvador
Dali, and Jean Dubuffet, and a cursory glance at it could easily lead to the assumption that it is,
itself, a catalog of a modern art exhibit, rather than a clinical collection. Dubuffet was so
influenced by Artistry of the Mentally Ill that he later coined the term “Art Brut,” which
propagated the idea that art was only valid if it was a projection of its creator’s purest essences,
and idealized the unfiltered work of the mentally ill as epitomizing this idea. “Art Brut”
encompassed a body of work by people beyond the margins of art world norms: namely,
psychiatric patients and children. Dubuffet rhapsodized about “those works created from solitude
and from pure and authentic creative impulses” — a notion linked specifically to the manic
stages of bipolar, and perhaps more incorrectly to schizophrenia.
In “Blinded Insights: On the Modernist Reception of the Art of the Mentally Ill,” Hal Foster
examines various modernist “projections that use the art of the mentally ill to propose a
metaphysical essence of art.” These interpretations, he suggests, “obscure more than reveal the
import of the art of the mentally ill.”
Interestingly, Foster notes, modernist affiliations with the art of sufferers of mental illness were
so deeply entrenched that the 1937 Nazi exhibition Degenerate Art — which accidentally
became a major showcase for the artistic zeitgeist it scorned — “attacked modernists like Klee,
and… drew on images from the Prinzhorn collection in doing so.” The difference, of course, was
that while these artists’ works were being stigmatized, hundreds of thousands of sufferers of
mental illness were being systematically sterilized, and a few years later, transported to
euthanasia centers.
Though the trendiest trends within contemporary visual art have evolved past centralizing the
artist — or even the viewer — as the subject, patrons of the various arts still tend
to lionize pain as an expression of authenticity. The way people treat the music of Daniel
Johnston, for example, often comes with an air of fetishism for the “devils” he’s experienced
through his bipolar. Even for artists who’ve not publicly suffered with mental health issues,
personal tragedy often results in augmented interest: David Bowie’s Blackstar skyrocketed in
sales when people realized the album was written as Bowie was confronting imminent death, as
opposed to abstractly meditating on mortality. The capacity to bolster an empathic culture is one
of art’s great potentials. But the value of pain also clearly has its complications. For mentally ill
artists, it can make for another quandary to navigate and overcome.
Neither psychopharmacology nor art therapy really existed until the middle of the 20th century.
Prior to that, the mentally ill had been brushed under the Victorian institutional rug, emerging
only for theatricalized portraits by the likes of Charcot, and while modernism’s projections of
ideas about authenticity onto the mentally ill certainly increased mental illness’ visibility, it
didn’t help patients so much as provide a subject of fascination for more mentally stable artists
and patrons.
By the middle of the century, though, deinstitutionalization movements in the US and Europe,
along with the advent of art therapy in the 1940s and the psychopharmacological boom of the
1950s, meant that people with mental illness were seeing a wider range of actual avenues toward
stability. In a world where such avenues exist, romantic notions of the supposedly heightened,
hyper-connected feelings that arise from mental illness seem more detrimental than liberating.
The advent of psychiatric medicine coincided with the advent of postmodernism. Postmodern
ideas about the “death of the author” and the fluidity of the self certainly aren’t at odds with the
use of psychiatric medicine — if the self isn’t seen as inalienable, the idea of somehow polluting
one’s access to it loses potency. Art has largely moved beyond modern notions of the self, and
the mentally ill artist has thus — with advances in therapy and the increasing destigmatization of
psychiatric medicine — moved beyond the institution.
But the legacy of the tortured-artist myth remains potent, perhaps because it’s one of the
foundations on which a movement as immense as modernism was based.
This continues to lead artists grappling with mental illness to question whether to give in to
dysfunction or find a stable way out of it.
“With our advances in psychiatric treatment, I must acknowledge the tension that exists between
our culture’s attitude toward creativity, which is always extraordinarily positive, and our more
ambivalent assessment of psychiatric treatment, which has both risks and benefits,” writes
psychiatrist and poet Richard M. Berlin in his introduction to Poets on Prozac, a collection of
essays from poets on the effects of psychiatric medicine on their work, addressing both
preliminary fears about medication and the writers’ ultimate experiences on meds.
Berlin discusses how “an entire generation of poets, including Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert
Lowell, and Dylan Thomas… became famous for the dramatic excesses of their often
ineffectively treated psychiatric disorders and substance abuse.” He questions “if our current
treatment options would have altered the lives of these poets and enhanced their work,
or if some poets may have avoided psychiatric treatment, fearing that treatment might have
deleterious effects on their creativity.”
In an email to me, Berlin writes: “The main common factor in highly creative people is
motivation. It’s the Thomas Edison ‘1% inspiration, 99% perspiration’ [factor]. It’s tough to be
creative when you are having symptoms of mental illness, and the poets in my book were almost
unanimous in their experience of medications being helpful for their creativity, mainly by not
being so impaired by depression, anxiety, etc.” He notes that, of course, medication is
individualized and needs to be “fine tuned” and monitored “to avoid side effects that can make a
person dull.” In his book, he quotes Plath, espousing a sentiment that was echoed throughout all
of my interviews: “When you are insane, you are busy being insane — all the time… When I
was crazy, that’s all I was.”
Willmott says she knows that artists with whom she works “struggle with that myth and the
romanticism of being off their meds.” Some, she suggests, “take it as a strength — maybe their
mania, for example. And it’s very dangerous.” She explains that she’s experienced bipolar
disorder firsthand in her family, and is herself “really familiar with feeling manic. Maybe at that
moment you’re going to be more ‘productive,’ but if you use all that energy, it’s coming from
somewhere. You can’t just create energy out of nothing, and to recover from that, you can lose
months and months.”