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Louis Wain’s Schizophrenic Cats
Recently, a reader sent me a link to a page on the fascinating case of Louis Wain. Wain was a successful illustrator in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s who made his career out of painting anthropomorphized cats.
Wain’s paintings were already pretty bizarre to begin with, but became even moreso as he developed late onset schizophrenia in his fifties. His work began to change drastically, becoming progressively more hard-edged and “psychedelic,” until he was essentially painting feline fractals.
The changes that occurred in his art over the years are definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in such things. For more links and images, check out Catland: The Art of Louis Wain, the Wikipedia entry on him, and Henry Boxer Gallery has a few additional images.
(I also just wanted to point out how awesome the title of this one asylum-period painting of his is: “The Fire of the Mind Agitates the Atmosphere”. I wish I had an album or book or something to use that as a title for.)
January 6th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
man i *LOVE* louis wain– thanks for the reminder. that guy is one of my artistic heroes.
you’re totally right about the “fire of the mind” thing.
January 6th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
If you like that, google “Henry Darger”.
January 6th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
darger’s art’s pretty cool, too, but he was something of a paedophile. kinda creepy. check out adolph wolfi, too.
my favorite work of ‘outsider art’ is cheval’s ‘palais ideal. art brut is fascinating– works produced by the “insane” are so frequently (pardon the pun) utterly mind-blowing!
January 6th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
o, and let’s not forget charles dellschau.
January 6th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
I have a hard time with the whole “outsider art” movement as it was popular in the gallery scene for a while. i remember going to the visionary art museum in baltimore and being tremendously underwhelmed by it all.
it’s not that i dont think it deserves to be looked at or anything - its just that putting a lot of this stuff into a gallery setting has a weird anaesthetizing effect a lot of times. plus the fact that they would have work by institutionalized schizophrenics right alongside people who were only “outsider” artists only because they didnt have an MFA.
its kind of a stupid category with a lot of really cool and important stuff in it
January 6th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
agreed. there’s an outsider art museum in chicago where m’eye friend works. the basement is supposed to be haunted by henry darger’s ghost–which is awesome. Aside of that, though, the art on display when eye was there was way underwhelming. It was Chicano Prison Inmate Art or something. And while some of it was pretty cool, mostly it was redundant–all the same images kept cropping up over and over (like were these all taken from the same cell block?) and overall, the quality of the art wasn’t beyond what that one bored heavy metal dude would draw during Math class in junior high. And the only reason it was hanging up somewhere was because these guys were prison inmates. Most of the outsider art eye gno of is kind of like that. the cat guy and darger are exceptions to that. When it’s not an excuse for marketing and selling artwork that is subpar in quality that otherwise could not be sold by the art industry vultures, outsider art *can* be pretty cool. It’s like a garage sale, though–every once in a while you find something totally amazing, usually though, you don’t.
JP–eye don’t think it’s quite accurate to call darger a paedophile. have you seen the documentary on him, In the Realms of the Unreal (also the name of his billion page fantasy war novel/comic book)? The guy ran away from an orphanage, died a virgin and apparently didn’t have a grasp of anatomy (in that he believed girls had penises and what differentiated them from boys was that they wore pigtails). There’s really no indication of any sexual feeling towards little kids in any of his work. It just happens to star kids that are naked a lot and at war with grown-ups (who, tellingly, are not).
January 6th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Ahh…just thought uv somethin.’ Did Louis Wain have own cats all his life (obviously he loved them)? Eye wonder if it could link up with the controversial theory uv Fuller Torrey that in many cases schizophrenia is triggered by a viral disease carried by cats…
January 6th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Viral diseas carried by cats, I have had many years of having such labels but thats a new one on me. I think maybe the cat in the field shows how he viewed cats, incidently if i was on a planet of my own with schizophrenia,psychosis and there where no other parties to judge would not then the reality i percieved be reality as such. place a “sane” person there and then there is conflict between the 2 realities hence none can be percieved as certain reality. place another “sane person there and reality becomes what the majority say it is. everyone is schizophrenic, they just dont know it?
January 6th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
Hebrides, do you mean “cat scratch fever”?
January 6th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
imo, Fuller Torrey is more insane than a majority of his patients.
January 6th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
nonono, that was a ted nugent song!
January 6th, 2006 at 7:26 pm
Are you guys referring to this whole cat apocalypse thing?
http://www.exitmundi.nl/meow.htm