Disturbing Perspectives and Schizophrenic Artwork

I found Arnheim’s chapter on form interesting and thought provoking. In particular, his observations about perspective and how foreshortening or distorting perspectives can have such a confusing and intriguing effect on the way we perceive things. When I think about these shifts in perspective I think of Arnheim’s discussion of Eidetic images and visual concepts. Eidetic images are “physiological vestiges of direct stimulation” (107). They are similar to afterimages and can enable a person to see a space and project a previously viewed image on the space. Visual concepts on the other hand, are concepts that people have in their minds of the three dimensional appearance of an object. Visual concepts enable people to mentally “see” all the way around an object. Works of art that have an odd perspective or are foreshortened are disturbing or shocking to us because they pick a view of an object that is not as prominent in our visual concept and cause us to struggle to integrate this perspective. For example, the image by Fernand Léger from Ballet Mécanique, offers the viewer an uncommon perspective of a person, our visual concepts of people don’t normally focus on this perspective. We struggle to integrate this view into our existing perception of a woman. (I don’t know if I’m taking Arnheim’s theories too far here but these are the connections that formed for me while I was reading.)

I was also drawn to Arnheim’s discussion of art by people with schizophrenia. He explains that order and pattern are central aspects to this work. “Since the sensory sources of natural form and meaning are clogged and the vital passions dried up, formal organization remains, as it were, unmodulated…In some of Van Gogh’s last paintings, pure form overpowered the nature of the objects he depicted” (148). This made me think of the work of Louis Wain (1860-1939), an Englishman who only painted cats and developed schizophrenia. Pattern and form do seem to overpower the cats as his schizophrenia worsened. The cat itself becomes less and less the focus of the image, as the radiating patters and halos surrounding the cats grow larger, ultimately overtaking the cat. When I first saw his paintings of cats I thought about Van Gogh, because I remembered the radiating lines that Van Gogh used in his work. Looking at his "Self-Portrait with Felt Hat," (1888) one can see these radiating lines. He used small short and defined strokes throughout his paintings but in particular made energetic encircling rings in the background surrounding his head. This painting also has these energetic strokes throughout, for example defining the collar of his jacket, and the hair of his beard.

The effect of these lines and radiating patters both in Van Gogh’s work and in Louis Wain’s is that they bring a tremendous amount of energy to the painting. One wonders how this aspect of the form of the painting provides a glimpse of how the world actually looked to Van Gogh and Wain. Were these radiating lines, these halos part of how they perceived their visual surroundings? Arnheim continues to talk about Van Gogh’s work and his schizophrenic mind: “The violence of his disturbed mind transformed the world into a tissue of flames, so that the trees ceased to be trees and the cottages and farmers became calligraphic brush strokes. Instead of being submerged in the content, form interposed itself between the viewer and the theme of the work” (148). The “tissue of flames” seems to describe the form of Wain’s work. In the lower left picture of a cat, one can organize the picture perceptually both as a cat or as an eruption of flames. I wonder if Wain and Van Gogh fought to see the cats and the trees and not a mass of flames, whether their schizophrenia caused them to organize their visual perceptions in hallucinatory ways and struggle to see the actual images and objects before them?