Portraits of a one-track mind

Who is he? Nobody knows. His name and occupation are lost. He might have been a poet, a painter or an intellectual. There is a rapt attentiveness in his wordless suffering. The hair is vigorous, the parting like a clearing in a forest; the eyebrows high and elegant. This man with no name was painted by Théodore Géricault some time after The Raft of the Medusa in 1819. That is almost all we know, except for one other thing. Look at this haunting image and you will see that the title is wrong. This is not a Portrait of a Kleptomaniac.

Of the painting’s strange history, more is known – or at least claimed. One of a famous series – Portraits of the Insane, as the 10 works are known in English, Les Monomanes in French – it was painted for the Parisian psychiatrist Étienne-Jean Georget. When Georget died in 1828 – in his early thrities, like Géricault himself – the paintings were divided between two younger colleagues. Five went to Dr Maréchal, although nothing has been seen or heard of them ever since. Dr Lachèze owned the other five.

Lachèze ended up in Baden-Baden, in south-west Germany, which is where, improbably, an art dealer named Louis Viardot came across them in the doctor’s attic. In the winter of 1863, Viardot writes to a friend that he has discovered “five types of monomania perfectly characterised” by Géricault. Viardot (or was it Lachèze?) lays down each type by title, which is how we end up with characterisations of each sitter as afflicted by, for instance, kleptomania, manic envy or delusions of grandeur.

Nothing about these titles relates to what you see in the portraits. Géricault is not attempting to interpret the inner condition of his sitters so much as depict their outward appearance with extraordinary feeling. Nor, despite incessant scholarly assertions, is he simply painting illustrations that can be converted into etchings for some medical textbook. This magnificently affecting painting of a man whose name Géricault himself surely knew, and to whom he sits so close on that long-ago day, was perhaps made towards the end of the artist’s breakdown, brought on by the official denunciations of his The Raft of the Medusa.

The painter’s state of mind was dangerously precarious. Letters between his friends around this time show Géricault believed that boatmen on the river near Fontainebleau were coming to take him away. It has been most persuasively suggested that these friends consequently sent him to Georget’s private clinic in Paris, where this portrait was painted. The sitters in Les Monomanes might have been Géricault’s fellow patients.

Monomania – the title of Fiona Tan’s enthralling exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam – is a singular tale. The word literally means “possessed by one thing”. It emerges as a diagnosis in France after the revolution, with the uplifting promise that those who were formerly thought of as entirely and irrevocably insane could actually be treated for (perhaps even cured of) the one and only condition with which they were afflicted. Nineteenth-century photographs of patients at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris and the West Riding asylum in Wakefield show us the various monomanias in this exhibition.

Women in mob caps sit (sometimes stand) before the camera, hands neatly clasped or holding a bible. Men appear, impassive and bearded in greatcoats. They look at the photographer with no discernible expression; very occasionally, a patient looks away. One of these poor souls is apparently the epitome of the condition, as the word “monomanie” is written in spidery copperplate below her. Patient and diagnosis are inseparably united and every photograph becomes visual proof for the medical record.

Or does it? Ever since I first saw his painting long ago, Géricault’s portrait has stayed with me in all its strange beauty. The title I can never remember. And I am not alone, for this same obsession, so to speak, has inspired film-making writer-artist Tan to create a huge exhibition around this one portrait, presented on a lone wall in the opening gallery. She has rifled the whole of the Rijksmuseum collection for the dizzying selection of more than 100 exhibits that follow.

Japanese Noh masks fix their sightless eyes upon you; medical busts of the insane appear sunken and emaciated after long incarceration. There are images of “crazed” women by Edvard Munch and a whole gallery of Goya’s devastating Los Disparates, nightmares released like flapping bats on to his etching plates.

A quartet of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s famous “character” heads are positioned so they appear to be looking suspiciously all around them, yet seeing nobody in their frantic disorder. And Tan introduces works of her own, including a long three-screen film about a psychiatrist, alone in her study with books toppling and time’s sand silting up her typewriter, hearing voices that might be in her head, or recollected from asylum records.

A gallery of photographs of pickpockets arrested at the 1889 Paris world fair, projected life-sized and accompanied by specially written monologues, gives voice to the dispossessed, caught twice over by police and mugshot. Five years, laments a Scotsman who only went, he says, to witness the new miracle of electricity. The judge did not believe him. “Is my face that untrustworthy?”

What can and cannot be seen in a face is the crux of the show, as of Tan’s superbly written catalogue. But it is also a vital question for artists: how to depict what may be invisible. Prints of emotional expressions were available from the 18th century onwards, cataloguing human feelings, from sadness to horror. Only 20 are available in Jean Audran’s ludicrous etchings, though Messerschmidt ran all the way to 64 with his heads. One of Tan’s most startling discoveries in the museum collection is a photographic sequence in which a German actor gurns, mugs, writhes and strikes melodramatic poses that were, in 1866, intended to illustrate captions below, but mean absolutely nothing to modern eyes.

The more you look at the asylum photographs, with their spidery captions, the greater the dissonance between image and word. You search these faces in vain for signs of vanity or hysteria or addiction to gambling. Indeed, we now know that some of these patients were suffering from syphilis, dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Tan’s drawing of Victor Hugo’s supposedly “idiot” brother, based on a photograph, shows him unable to speak and cradling a paralysed hand. Surely he has suffered a stroke.

Nineteenth-century doctors could not discover the visual evidence of their monomania theories in brain dissections or CAT scans. They had only these photographs of inmates looking as piteous as the Paris pickpockets. But still the impulse remains. Who has not searched the face of a friend for a clue to their unspoken anguish or inner life? It is at least one reason why doctors need to see their patients in person.

It is not the least of Tan’s achievements with this show that she has proved what art history has not. You only have to see all these medical photographs to realise that the titles of Géricault’s Les Monomanes are lifted directly from diagnostic captions. Monomania was popular psychology by the time Viardot reached Baden-Baden in 1863, though it would be out of vogue by the century’s end. His titles are a marketing ploy.

What are picture titles but a form of diagnostic caption in themselves, though, too often governing what we see? It takes effort to decouple image from word. The man Géricault painted that day, recognising the suffering in his face, and in eyes that see something to afflict or bewilder way out there, is accused of compulsive theft simply because of that title. The curators of a 1971 Géricault retrospective went even further, finding the man criminal more than insane. All of Géricault’s radical empathy was lost on them. I cannot believe we were looking at the same picture.

Fiona Tan: Monomania is at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam until 14 September

Photographs by Rijksmuseum/Kelly Schenk/Fiona Tam