Art and 'madness'

This course offers the opportunity to study a range of artworks with links to ‘madness’. We will consider how the definition of ‘madness’ has changed over the centuries and what impact that has had on art and artists. We will look at works by artists with known mental health issues and consider whether their mental frailty made them more or less creative. Was their mental illness always present or did it result from the pressures of the society they lived in, damage they inflicted on themselves and the stress of maintaining their artistic output.
Each class will focus on a different period in the history of western art looking at attitudes to mental illness, how it was depicted, and how the idea of ‘madness’ influenced popular and artistic culture in the period. We will look at both artworks and artists that have been thought of as examples of ‘mad’ over the centuries. We will consider how definitions of ‘madness’ have changed over time. We will look at both the history of art and recent research to examine the links between creativity and art.

“The teacher was excellent and made learning fun. Very polished presentation.”