Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900

All in the Mind visits the Madness and Modernity exhibition at the Wellcome Trust in London

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  • Model of the Narrenturm or Tower of Fools (1784) which still stands in Vienna today as the Pathological-Anatomical Museum (Pathologisch-Anatomisches Bundesmuseum).
  • The Tower of Fools (1784) still stands in Vienna today as the Pathological-Anatomical Museum (Pathologisch-Anatomisches Bundesmuseum). The exhibition recreated the space with a video projection and soundscape of its ominous interior.
  • Wax models created by doctor and artist Karl Henning of two brothers with microcephaly, Leopold (b.1852) and Anton Koller (b.1856) who were both admitted to Kierling-Gugging in 1892. The researcher and curators of the Madness and Modernity exhibition went on a quest to unearth their identity when they found the wax models on top of a cupboard in an attic at the Federal Pathological-Anatomical Museum in Vienna.
  • A D'Arsonval Electrotherapeutic Cage c.1890-1910, Richard Heller, Paris. People stood inside the cage, supposedly treated by the electric field within.
  • in the modernist Viennese psychiatric hospital.
  • Artefacts from Dr Sigmund Freud's couch in Vienna. Imagine the setting...you lying on the couch, Freud behind you. Now start talking...and talking...and talking. Freud said, 'The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.'
  • One of the first modernist churches of Vienna, St Leopold's Church was built on the site of the Steinhof psychiatric hospital (1907). Part of the utopian vision of the famous modernist architect Otto Wagner.
  • Gustav Jagerspacher, Portrait of writer Peter Altenberg, 1909, watercolour and pastel applied wet on cream wove paper applied to board.
  • Self portrait. Artist Josef Karl Rädler lived at the psychiatric hospital Mauer-Öhling from 11 August 1905 until his death, at the age of 74, on 13 November 1917. Once a porcelain painter, he became a prolific artist known for his detailed paintings of life inside.
  • Untitled (1909). Artist Josef Karl Rädler lived at the psychiatric hospital Mauer-Öhling from 11 August 1905 until his death, at the age of 74, on 13 November 1917. Once a porcelain painter, he became a prolific artist.
  • (Self-Portrait) Watercolour and opaque pigment. 1913.
  • Exercise (Mechanotherapy) chair (circa 1901 - 1905). Rossel, Schwarz and Company of Wiesbaden, Germany.
  • One of the propaganda posters advertising the sanatorium section of Lower Austrian Provincial Institution for the Cure and Care of the Mentally and Nervously Ill 'am Steinhof' (with watercolours by Erwin Pendl). Paying customers received reportedly luxury accommodation and treatments at sanatoria like this one in early 20th century Vienna. Non paying customers were housed in a different part of the hospital.
  • A selection of hundreds of works by the prolific artist Josef Karl Rädler. He lived at the psychiatric hospital Mauer-Öhling from 11 August 1905 until his death, at the age of 74, on 13 November 1917.