This literature review (1999) looks at European research with (psychedelics) drugs on creativity between 1940-1970. A disinhibiting effect of psychedelics (allowing creative breakthroughs) is proposed.
Abstract
“Language barriers have largely prevented American scholars from learning about European studies concerning drugs and creativity. An art historian reports on several Swiss, English, French and German studies conducted from the 1940s to the 1970s, offering new data in a research area that has been banned since drugs like mescalin, psilocybin, and LSD became illegal. Different views of the operations of these drugs, revealed by such terms as “hallucinogens,” “psychotogenics,” and “psychedelics,” appear to have colored researchers’ aims to a large extent. The notions of drugs “dictating” or “liberating” the intoxicated artist are criticized by discussing the importance of set and setting. It is proposed that intentional drug use among artists expecting artistic breakthroughs while intoxicated, can be seen as a form of “gaucherie” or disinhibiting technique.”
Notes
Written from an art historian’s perspective.
Looks at reports by artists and research that was not published in English.
The author frames the use of (psychedelic) drugs as follows:
“Within the context of such disinhibiting practices, the use of drugs, I propose, belongs to a category for which the term gaucherie can be adopted. In art history, this term refers in particular to the practice of (right-handed) artists who try to work deliberately with their left hand. In more general terms, gaucherie means the intentional raising of technical barriers that force the artist to improvise and, hopefully, make him discover new and valuable methods of working.”
Summary
Language barriers have prevented American scholars from learning about European studies concerning drugs and creativity. The study offers new data on a research area that has been banned since drugs like mescalin, psilocybin, and LSD became illegal.
When studying creativity, scientific researchers have often turned to artists using drugs. However, the art world is not saturated with drug enthusiasts, and most information about artists using drugs comes from experimental research that aimed for straight answers to the second question only.
Since new drug laws in the late 1960s have made further research impossible, it is important to bring together all the information that researchers have been able to gather in the past. However, American and European scientists have remained ignorant of each other’s work.
As an art historian I do not feel competent to discuss the relationships between creativity and drug use, but I hope to offer an intriguing chapter.
The idea that one could be artistically active while under the influence of drugs was first posited by the French romantic author Théophile Gautier, and later confirmed by the psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau (de Tours).
In 1940, psychiatrists Walter Maclay and Erich Guttmann asked artists to illustrate their hallucinations while taking the drug mescaline. They observed some stylistic changes in the work produced in this manner, when compared with the artists’ normal work.
Although the logic seems impeccable, it is not so simple as Maclay and Guttmann suggested. The artist in question used wavy lines in his regular work for some time already, so intoxication might as well have given him an opportunity to do some further experiments with this new element.
Drugs like mescaline were thought to cause a “model-psychosis” and a change in style that would reflect the confused state of mind of the intoxicated. However, this hypothesis is easy to falsify.
In 1951, a physician and painter from Basle, Switzerland, took mescalin and LSD and drew the portrait of a supervisor every hour during intoxication as realistically as possible. This way he hoped to obtain an “objective” visual protocol.
At 9.15 Mátéfi took 100 gamma LSD, at 10.40 he felt euphoric, at 11.00 his drawing became more expansive, and colors started glowing.
I see and experience so much, everything mixes, things don’t have much substance, and I cannot really keep my mind on my work. If I were normal, I might make some great drawings.
László Mátéfi makes nine portraits from a series of fourteen, before, during and after an LSD-session, 1951, charcoal on paper (except 1f: tempera on cardboard), dimensions and location unknown.
Mátéfi is reminded of the purpose of the experiment and feels the need to bring everything into the same picture.
Mátéfi’s drawings show a tendency to give every movement a balancing counterpart, a mirrorlike repetition of outlines, and a slowing down of the wavy lines.
Mátéfi diagnosed the LSD state as “hebephrenous” and the mescalin state as “catatonic”, based on the style of the drawings that were made at the height of intoxication.
From the late 1950s onwards, the psychiatric perspective on drugs was gradually abandoned in favor of a different view, based on the idea that LSD burns off the patina of social and psychological programming, thereby uncovering one’s true nature.
Drug use was more attractive to artists than the former picture of its operation. Drugs seemed to promise a chance to realise an ideal still held near to their hearts.
Although the psychedelic model of the operation of drugs is more sensitive to the experience of many users than the demoniac model, it also has some obvious drawbacks.
The first project took place in Paris from 1959 to 1962 and involved 35 drug sessions with 29 artists. The artists were asked to start working immediately after taking the drug so that every change in approach and style might be observed directly. In a typical case, after twenty to thirty minutes, the subject would experience a “perplexity” and complain about a slack pace and changes in his perception of form and color.
When an artist is willing to accept his new working conditions, a change in style occurs almost invariably. This change is not caused by disturbances in the sensorial or motor apparatus.
One artist intoxicated by psilocybin, for example, tried to regain his control over three-dimensional space by reverting to the elementary techniques that he had learned in drawing class long before, but failed miserably.
According to Volmat and Robert (1961), the characteristics of “psilocybinic” art such as an elongated brush stroke, repetition, and parallel lines do not result from trembling hands or some other motor disturbance, but from a compelling rhythm that replaces the normal experience of time.
Although the drug was held responsible for some formal aspects of the work made during intoxication, Volmat and many of his subjects apparently subscribed to the psychedelic model, which included elements of both dictation and liberation.
From 1968 to 1970, Richard Hartmann invited fifty artists to take LSD at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, and observe their work. He found that artists who usually worked in a more automatic, motoric manner experienced more radical changes in working method.
When working under drug influence, the artist’s working-method will soon become associative or automatic. He will stop paying attention to the overall picture and become obsessed with detail.
Hartmann observed 80% of the subjects doing “magical painting,” where they experienced themselves as a lucid spectator, seeing their hand driven by some kind of external force. When all reflection was lost, they would speak of “mimetical painting.”
A man looked at a pencil and started drawing aimlessly. He plunged into a dreamy state and continuously drew for two hours, seemingly completely disoriented, but with an eternal Buddha-smile.
Hartmann stressed the suppression of the reflective faculties and the rewinding of phylo- and ontogenetic developments, and noted that drug use leads to a loss of critical reflection.
The artists in Hartmann’s experiments were not all that enthusiastic either. Some resisted the drug’s effects so effectively that their work hardly differed from their normal work.
The results from the studies discussed above are complicated by the fact that researchers did not always take into sufficient account three factors.
Hartmann gave too high dosages, and Rainer said that lower dosages had better results. However, Volmat and Robert gave 10 milligrams on average, and Hartmann usually gave 100 gamma of LSD.
Hartmann’s experiment in the white room of a psychiatric institute was unfit for its purpose, according to psychiatrist Hanscarl Leuner, because it exposed the subjects to a hostile environment, bright lights and hot lamps, and anxieties about performing before the camera.
The “set” a subject brings to an experiment is also crucial for its success or failure. Volmat and Robert found their volunteers among friends and in artistic circles, while Hartmann tried to assure his subjects that they should feel exempt from all artistic responsability.
Hartmann’s subjects were all established artists who were anxious about having their style drastically changed by a drug. In fact, many participants had started the experiment with the intention to show themselves immune.
In sum, we can say that both French and German participants in the psychedelic studies subscribed to the psychedelic model, but the last feared exposure to some kind of truth serum or lie detector. This fear probably related to their position in the art world.
All those present at the evaluation of Hartmann’s study agreed that drugs do not contain anything creative in themselves, and cannot bring out anything that “isn’t already there”. Beyond this, however, all argumentation ran into the problem of defining the concept of creativity first.
Drugs can serve art in two ways: first, they can provide raw material for art, and second, art can be created post festum, under normal circumstances, when critical distance is regained.
The second way in which drugs might serve art is during intoxication. However, the use of drugs to further creativity is promising, provided that set and setting are most favourable and that the artist has sufficient previous experience with intoxication not to lose control.
Leuner seemed to forget that “losing control” might also be profitable for the artist. Volmat and Robert considered the “perplexing” effect of a (first) drug experience the sine qua non of a “liberating” artistic experience.
Peter Gorsen argued that artists use drugs because a stimulating drug, intoxication in its most general sense, seems pre-eminently suited to exercise the function of accelerating a change in style that already lies waiting to announce itself.
Hartmann’s study ended the debate about the value of drugs in art in Europe. The Swiss art historian Michel Thévoz suggested that artists use drugs to take away the pragmatic attitude necessary for social life, and this is why they do not use drugs all the time.
The suggestion that artists summon their muses through practices such as fasting, long solitary walks, long exposure to the sun, an intense nightlife, irregular sleeping, and voluntary isolation opens a door to a new study into creativity.
The use of drugs is a disinhibiting practice, similar to working left-handed or in darkness, with elongated brushes, at great speeds, with unfamiliar materials, media, techniques, etc., although the risks involved seem somewhat larger than with other techniques.