The joys and challenges of working with historic patient art collections
When I started this placement, I did not expect to become so knowledgeable about Goan folk music, but researching historic objects can take you down some wonderful rabbit holes like this. Sometimes there is no answer at the end of it though and you’re left obsessing over a riddle left by a person 70 years ago to which you might never know the answer.
I am in the middle of a PhD on Bethlem during the First World War. My PhD is an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership, and one of the main attractions of the CDP scheme is that there is built-in time for a placement in a field of your choice, unrelated to your research, for professional development. Unable to put Bethlem aside, I chose to spend my three-month placement at Bethlem Museum of the Mind working with Rebecca, the Collections & Exhibitions Officer, on the temporary exhibition that was then in the works, Manasa Chitra.
One of my main tasks at the beginning was to research the historical artworks that were to feature in Manasa Chitra in order to help with writing their captions. These artworks had been produced by patients at Bangalore Mental Hospital (which later became NIMHANS) in the 1950s, and probably collected by Dr Wilhelm Mayer-Gross, a friend of the Superintendent at the time Dr M V Govindaswamy. Mayer-Gross had an interest in the power of patient artwork to reveal something about psychiatric conditions, and he gave the works he collected in Bengaluru to his colleagues Drs Eric Guttman and Walter Maclay, whose art collection now belongs to Bethlem Museum of the Mind. It is likely that these artworks were taken without the knowledge of the creators, and no information accompanied them in the collection. Therefore, the only information available to understand them is what’s in the artworks themselves.
The decisions around the ethics of displaying these artworks had already been made before I joined. It would be too practically challenging, and in some case impossible, to contact the artists or their relatives, and could cause emotional harm by reminding them of difficult times, so no attempt was made to match up the artworks to patient records or display any details of the artists’ medical histories. Instead, the interpretation of the artworks focuses on what they can reveal about the history of the hospital from the rarely seen patient perspective. Displaying them in frames, with titles, artist credits and captions, alongside the contemporary works whose artists gave consent for them to be displayed, goes some way towards restoring agency and personhood to these individuals.
The remaining challenge that comes from working with a collection with no accompanying information, is that all you have to go on is what is in the artworks themselves. This made researching the artworks for the interpretation more like detective work, a fun puzzle which was at times immensely satisfying and at other times equally frustrating.
Some of the artists left clues in the artworks. For example, ‘Fort St. George’ was helpfully identified by its title as the 17th century British-built fortress in Chennai. Similarly, another drawing has an inscription that reads ‘Parle’s Biscuit Factory, Bombay’, and shows a colourful rendition of the factory in what is now Mumbai. These works contribute to a picture of patients coming to Bangalore Mental Hospital from across India, which helped us when deciding on the arrangement of artworks within the exhibition. We put these works alongside a contemporary painting ‘A Desert Journey’, depicting life in Rajasthan which is 2000km north of Bengaluru, and together they speak to the continuity of NIMHANS as a national centre for mental health care. We also included a map in the exhibition to enable visitors to appreciate how far away these places are from Bengaluru. In delving into the artworks, it became apparent that we needed to address partition, to understand life for the artists in Bengaluru in the 1950s. Although the state of Karnataka (formerly Mysore) in which Bengaluru is situated was not part of the British Raj, the effects of dissolving British India and partitioning it into Indian and Pakistan were felt across the entirety of the country. Violence broke out in many of the states along the border regions. For people in mental hospitals, the new borders meant patients were transferred long distances to other hospitals, often away from their homes and families. At the same time, India was forging a new identity, as was the Indian psychiatric profession, now free from its British roots. This is the context in which these artworks were created, and knowing this helped to inform the interpretation of languages, religions, cultures and regions represented in the artworks.
For example, although Hinduism and Christianity are well-represented in the 1950s artworks, Islam is barely present. There is one artwork by a person is Muslim origin, and no notable Islamic imagery. This could be because Muslim artists would not depict figures, but there are also no geometric or floral patterns or Arabic writing present either. This is despite the Muslim population being significantly larger than the Christian population in both Karnataka and India more widely. We can learn a lot from what is not present in the archive as well as what is. The under-representation of Islamic art in the 1950s collection may be a genuine reflection of the patient population at the time, or it may point to a suppression or fear of expression of Muslim culture as a result of partition, or to a bias in the doctors collecting the works in favour of Hindu or Christian imagery. Christianity was overrepresented in the collection due to a single Catholic artist who was responsible for a quarter of the collection.
The collection features several different languages, some of which were recognised and translated by staff from SLAM and NIMHANS Heritage Museum who consulted on the exhibition. One of them remained unknown when I started researching the artworks and I identified it as Konkani, a language used in Goa and in a region of Karnataka called Mangaluru. This aligned with the artist’s name being of Indo-Portuguese origin. The inscription appeared to be a rhyming couplet, possibly from a hymn, poem or song such as a Mando, a Konkani folk song. This led us to include a few examples of Mandos in the exhibition for visitors to hear this language being sung. The Konkani inscription uses the Roman script, and there is a lot of Catholic imagery in this artist’s work suggesting they were Christian, which helped to build a picture of the diversity of religions among patients at Bangalore Mental Hospital.
Insights came not just from researching details in individual pieces but also from comparing different artworks from within the collection. Looking at the collection as a whole, it became evident that a few of the artworks had almost identical compositions to one or two other works by different artists. Some of these were given different names, such as Litho Works and Fort St George, which feature the same skyline. Three works featured two crossed palm trees next to a figure in a rowing boat, and varied only by the style of the individual artist. You can see two of these in the exhibition in the ‘Nature’ section. Two works included a figure in the exact same unique pose, carrying a briefcase, book and apple, but with different clothing and hair (these are not featured in the exhibition). This led us to believe that they were made together, possibly in a group setting. Although art therapy was not amongst the forms of occupational therapy on offer at Bangalore Mental Hospital until the 1960s, these artworks indicate that there were some kind of group art classes going on at the hospital. We hung these works one on top of the other to bring out this story as you look around the exhibition.
Some of the details in the artworks remain a total mystery. In all the artworks by D’Costa, their signature is followed by the letters ‘H.E.H.C.G.G’. No combination of search terms could reveal any meaning to this acronym, and none of the experts who consulted on the exhibition could tell us either. It will remain a mystery (unless someone out there can solve it and let us know!).
Through spending time with these artworks, getting to know the details in them, and considering them alongside the contemporary works, some themes emerged in the subjects of the paintings which shaped the interpretation. The first three historic artworks in the exhibition nicely encapsulate the history of the hospital at the time in which they were created. As mentioned earlier, many of the works depict places from across India, which cemented into a theme of ‘memories of home’. The other artworks sorted themselves into the sources of support in times of distress that they depicted: expressing emotions, nature, culture, religion, and enjoyment. The final section brought together the works that had something to say, in an umbrella term of ‘visual testimony’.
Seeing these artworks I had been researching and writing about going up on the walls during the installation of the exhibition was very exciting. It struck me how the placement of the works supported the narrative in a visual way, such as hanging the works with similar compositions together. It has been a fascinating experience not only seeing how an exhibition is put together, but also learning about this time period in India. It’s been nice to take a break from focussing only my own research and look up and outwards to a different period of history in a different part of the world. I am so grateful to Rebecca and everyone at Bethlem for giving me the opportunity to be a part of it.