Review
Art
Care
Culture
Mental Health
5 min read

Mental health: the art that move us from ostracism to empathy

Four current London exhibitions show the move towards compassion.

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A painting of a haunted looking old man dressed in an imagined military uniform.
A Man Suffering from Delusion of Military Rank.
Théodore Géricault, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrayals of mental health were revolutionised from the nineteenth century onwards. While previous generations had focused on the ostracism of those suffering mental illness, and the fear their condition aroused in others, modern artists began to focus on the dignity and humanity of sufferers. Four current London exhibitions show this move towards compassion. 

On display at the Courtauld’s Goya to Impressionism, Theodore Gericault’s A Man Suffering from Delusion of Military Rank, c.1819 -22, shows the artist’s sensitive response to ‘monomania’, the term coined in the early 1800s for people living with a single delusional obsession. It is thought this painting is part of a series of portraits on fixations including A Child Snatcher, A Kleptomaniac, A Woman Addicted to Gambling and A Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy, the face of the last rendered in an unsettling green tinge. 

The circumstances surrounding the painting of the series remain mysterious. The timing coincides with Romantic painter Gericault completing his most famous work, the monumental The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-19, depicting 15 survivors of a shipwreck, who had been adrift on a makeshift raft, originally containing 147 passengers, from the French frigate Meduse. Gericault’s preparation for the canvas included visiting morgues to check on the colour of decomposing flesh and building a model of the doomed raft. His difficulties in completing the huge work, over 23 feet long, and the possibility some of his close family may have suffered from mental illness, have supported the belief Gericault painted A Man Suffering from Delusion of Military Rank, and related portraits for personal reasons, possibly out of gratitude to the physician who cared for his family. But there is now doubt if Dr Etienne-Jean Georget commissioned the painting, and whether he was chief physician at Saltpetriere asylum in Paris. 

Even if a biographical motivation for the series falls down, and there is no way of knowing if the subjects of the portraits were individuals living with mental health conditions, these portraits remain unique in early nineteenth century painting. People deemed at the very margins of society are portrayed in the same manner as the most powerful, in half-length portraits emphasising their dignity and humanity, over their social estrangement and health challenges. 

The Raft of the Medusa, Louvre, Paris. 

A painting shows a wreck of a rafter holding survivors and corpses.

Van Gogh’s mutilation of his own ear is interwoven into his biography and his art. In The Ward in the Hospital at Arles and The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles, both 1889, the artist depicted the interior and exterior of the institution where nuns cared for him, during his mental health crisis. The paintings’ significance to his recovery is shown by Van Gogh taking them with him when he moved to another psychiatric facility 25 kilometres away at Saint-Remy-de-Provence. 

Blue is the dominant colour of The Ward, permeating the walls, the beamed ceiling, the crucifix and the door underneath it, and several patients. wear dark blue clothing, including the two nursing Sisters at the centre of the scene, whose Order of St Augustine black and white habits, have been realised in darkest blue. Van Gogh described the long ward as ‘the room of those suffering from fever’, most probably referring to patients with mental illness. The painting was reworked during the artist’s admittance at Saint-Remy-de-Provence, with the symbolic empty chair used in other works to represent him and his housemate Paul Gauguin added to the foreground, together figures gathered around a stove. The return to the painting was prompted by reading Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, a fictionalised account of the author’s spell in a Siberian prison, and the book’s characters may have provided the inspiration for the huddled men. 

The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles captures the grace of the hospital’s Renaissance building, by depicting the inner courtyard from the vantage point of the first-floor gallery. From this aerial angled viewpoint, the garden’s bright flora, radiating from a central pond, spreads out in all directions. Van Gogh’s description of the scene to his sister Willemien, hints at their Bible reading, clergy childhood: ‘It is therefore a painting full of flowers and springtime greenery. Three dark and sad tree trunks however run through it like snakes…’ 

Van Gogh’s images of healing were from memory rather than life, and document his own mental health recovery:  

‘I can assure you that a few days in hospital were very interesting and one perhaps learns how to live from the sick.’ 

The Ward, Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Van Gogh's painting of a mental ward in a hospital

Edvard Munch's Portraits, Evening 1888, shows the artist’s sister Laura, who had been hospitalised for mental illness, on and off, since adolescence. Although Laura is lost in her own world, staring fixedly ahead against a coastal landscape, the affection of the artist for the subject is palpable. Fashionably dressed in straw hat and summer dress, Laura’s dignity anchors the composition. Munch documented his own breakdown after alcohol poisoning in a portrait of Daniel Jacobson. His full-length portrayal of the doctor, arms akimbo, drew the reaction: ‘just look at the picture he has painted of me, it’s stark raving mad.’ Munch’s fascination with the doctor-patient relationship is evident in Lucien Dedichen and Jappe Nilssen, 1925-6, where Dedichen’s looming, purple presence, overshadows the diminutive, seated patient. 

Portrait, Evening. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

A painting of a  pensive young woman sitting and staring across a lawn.

Mental health and delusion form the wellspring of Grayson Perry’s Delusion’s of Grandeur. The artist responds to the Wallace’s flamboyant rococo collection in the persona of Shirley Smith, a character believing she is the rightful heir of the Wallace Collection. Eighteenth century style ceramics are decorated with outline figures resembling the Simpsons. Perry creates a family tree for Shirley from the Wallace’s miniatures, A Tree in the Landscape where every member has a condition from the American psychiatric guide Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 

Grayson Perry, Untitled Drawing, Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro. 

A image of a woman against a detailed red background.

In Alison Watt: From Light at Pitzhanger Manor, the artist’s still lifes of roses, fabrics and death masks responds to the collection of Regency architect Sir John Soane, and the ever-present fragility and complexity of human life and psychological flourishing. “With a rose it is impossible not to be aware of human intervention. Roses are bred, altered outside of nature and given names. In the history of painting the rose can be read as a symbol of beauty, innocence and transience, but also of decline and decay, echoing Soane’s preoccupation with themes of death and memorialisaton.” 

With the scientific and medical advances of the nineteenth century, life in all its psychological complexity, could supplant death as artists’ inexhaustible fount of inspiration. 

Le Ciel, Alison Watt.

A diseased rose.

Find out more.

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Review
Culture
Film & TV
Mental Health
5 min read

The C-list villains reviving Marvel's Cinematic Universe

A thunderbolt of sincerity shows the franchise can still thrill.

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

Four characters from a film loop warily to the side.
Anticipating the reviews.
Marvel Studios.

This article will contain spoilers for Thunderbolts* 

It’s not unreasonable to say that fan expectations for the Thunderbolts* was tepid at best.  Even the most diehard of them had to admit that the output for phase five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a mixed bag. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was deeply heartfelt, the Marvels was an enjoyable watch, but Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania definitely felt like a misstep, and the last Captain America: Brave New World certainly didn’t feel like it had exploited all the opportunities available. So, when Thunderbolts* arrived to round off this phase, featuring a team comprised of C-list villains, it was hard to generate a lot of enthusiasm. Thankfully, this film showed that Marvel still has what it takes to thrill and inspire us in equal measure. 

Loosely inspired by a group created from the comics, the Thunderbolts were a team of villains masquerading as heroes who in some cases, ended up genuinely reforming. If that premise sounds familiar, that’s because it’s essentially the idea behind Suicide Squad, (a film so bad that D.C. had another go at making a Suicide Squad film and we the audience, were more than happy to just let them).  

The original Avenger line up, whilst compelling, always had some distance between themselves and the core audience. A super soldier, a billionaire genius, a rage monster, a literal Norse god and a super spy carried the bulk of the story. That level of brilliance in a set of characters can be inspiring but also alienating. How for example, can a person relate to Steve Rogers? A character whose main defining trait is to always make the right moral choices and be universally respected for it? 

The Thunderbolt team is not so respectable. U.S. Agent, (Wyatt Russell) the Red Guardian (David Harbour) Bucky Barnes, (Sebastian Stan) and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) have all at some point been trained assassins. The film goes to great lengths to show all of these characters being broken in some way or other. None more so than the character of Yelena. 

Whilst this film is definitely an ensemble picture, they make no qualms about putting Florence Pugh‘s Yelena Belova front and centre of the story. Pugh’s star power showed that it could hold up alongside Marvel veterans like Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner, and it’s put to good use here. The film opens with Yelena having something of an existential crisis. “There is something wrong with me” her internal monologue says; “An emptiness. I’m just…drifting. And I don’t have purpose.” Granted having a job where most of the individuals you meet are people you are either going to kill or incapacitate would indeed make loneliness an occupational hazard. But despite the fantastical circumstances, many viewers will be able to relate to the feelings presented.  

It's this awareness of her own struggles then, that perhaps makes Yelena best placed to help ‘Bob’, an affable, self-deprecating young man. Bob (played pitch perfect by Lewis Pullman, son of the great Bill Pullman) is given god-like powers by Julie Dreyfuss’s Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, in the hopes of making him a protector for the earth against any inter-galactic threats. With his new powers, Bob is virtually unstoppable. There’s just one problem; Bob clearly suffers from some type of crippling depression, which when amped up with super-powers makes him ‘The Void.’ His appearance; a black outline sucking in all detail save for two pin pricks of light where his eyes should be, combined with the ability to effortlessly turn people into black scorch marks, is the stuff of nightmares. Move over Churchill’s ‘black dog’, we now have a new metaphor for depression and its all-consuming power.  

Battling depression is an area where the church is still lagging behind the world at large. “A depressed Christian has a double burden” writes Dr John Lockley in his book A Practical Workbook for the Depressed Christian, “Not only is he depressed but he also feels guilty because, as a Christian, he feels he is supposed to be full of joy.” 

In some evangelical circles, depression is either treated as something that doesn’t exist, is minimised, or mistakenly believed to be the result of unconfessed sin. Spiritual leaders who are ignorant of the nuance around mental health believe that depression can simply be prayed away. When that doesn’t work, they can often blame the sufferer for their lack of healing, putting them in a very lonely place. “One of the most painful elements of mental illness is that it’s marked by isolation, which is exactly the opposite of what people need” writer Amy Simpson said in a 2014 interview; “And one of the things people with mental illness most need is for this kind of loving community to tighten around them, not to loosen”. Why is this relevant to a superhero blockbuster? Well, the climax of the film does a great job of illustrating a positive approach to mental health.  

The finale of Thunderbolts* somehow manages to have its cake and eat it. Once again, New York is in need of saving, but also, it’s about trying to help a young person overcome their depression and not completely succumb to The Void. Being able to go into someone’s mind and see their core traumas writ large is the most comic book conceit in storytelling. Inside Bob’s psyche, we see him trying to fight The Void, and failing, and it’s only when he has help from the rest of the Thunderbolts* is he able to get a temporary release from The Void’s grip. It would be a mistake to over-state this scene as a full-on treatise on how to tackle mental health issues, but it might just have some clues as to how to go about it: 1) don’t expect that any battle with depression is decisive. It can always come back and it’s better to prepare for that possibility and 2) you don’t have to battle it alone, it would be madness to even try.  

It's a surprisingly sincere place for a seemingly wry film to end, but it really, really works. It could be that expectations may have been lowered, or that we were expecting a film with the emotional depth of a puddle. But Thunderbolts* wildly exceeded expectations, and as the best post-credits scenes often do, there’s a promise that the best is yet to come.  

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief