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The Pathological body

was mental illness embraced In Vienna by artists as a means to channel the primality of emotional reality, or was it simultaneously abolished through the means of architecture and the manifestation of designed utopian worlds?

  • Sexual Excess
  • Caffeine
  • Alcohol
  • Socialism

Psychiatry in Nineteenth century Vienna

  • autopsies of diseased asylum patients
  • analysis of brain tissue

Design of Psychiatric Sanatoriums

it was considered in an idealistic approch that the reformation of the urban environment would in turn reform the moral fabric of society. These institutions developed into utopian environments, representations of modern rational living in counteraction to the irrational modernism of the urban city of Vienna.

It was this representation of the pathological body of these patients that Viennese artists such as Kokoschka, and Schiele to name a few were attracted to. It was not necessarily psycho analytic theory, nor the character of the patient, but the images of them that represented a dehumanized object suffering from disease, in which the artist represented, thus in turn contributing to the modern Viennese vernacular of anguish and alienation.

Kokoschka and Schiele

The depiction of fetishised bodies, emaciated and venous, and the pathological body were a common theme between the two artists.

Kokoschka visited the Steinhof Sanatorium painting patient and literary figure Ludwig Ritter Von Janikowski. Kokoschka’s interest in mental illness was expressed in his imagery, the yellow green hues, jittery brushstrokes and scraped surface indents in Janiskowski’s portrait, characterise a sense of anguish and illness

Altenburg”van Gogh was a famous painter who nevertheless interned in an asylum seven times. Madness is a chance additional extra...nowadays people have a colossal concern with madmen who are nothing but madmen”

The bodies of the two fieses are emanciated, bones potruding, in contrast the velvety glaze creates a smooth sensual texture against the jaunted bones of the figure, an image likened to the tubercular body, with its pseudo erotic characteristics of ethereal beauty that conceals a diseased body

Yes, it was concurrently embraced and rejected my different groups in 20th century Vienna, the preoccupation with the pathology of mental disorders in the body aided modernism in art, as represented through Kokoschka’s imagery of mental illness, and the marketing of this theme in his exhibitions, whilst the exploration of neurological treatment, within the psychiatric sanatoriums of Vienna inspired designed utopian worlds.

Clinical Psychiatry

Josephinum, Vienna, Austra

Psychiatry of Nervous Diseases

Simplicity in design through use of geometric tesselation, clean lines, and open spaces, were unlike any other historically influenced architecture of the times.

Patients room at the Purkersdorf Sanitorium

Photograph of a patient from Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpetriere

Egon Schiele

self portrait

1911

Oskar Kokoschka

Self portrait

Egon Schiele

Self Portrait with lowered head

1912

Oskar Kokoschka

L R von Janikowski

1909

Max Oppenheimer

The Operation

1912

Windows at Purkersdorf Sanatorium.

The healing qualities of the sun and fresh air were reiterated from the therapies developed in tubercular sanatoriums in the mid nineteenth century. The practice of regulated air therapies in turn influenced the architecture of the sanatoriums, the most notable design aspect being the large panelled windows that were designed to allow the control of air moving through each room.

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