art and science

One of the most underrated museums in London is the Wellcome Collection. It is not on the tourist track and its location near King's Cross doesn't lend itself to deafening foot traffic. It doesn't have Tate or National in its name, and its presence goes mostly unnoticed. Once aware of it, though, you're bound to return.

The Wellcome Trust, the UK's largest charity and strongest supporter of biomedical research not only runs the Collection but also pays my salary every month. It is for this prosaic reason that I was curious about the organization, and when London Open House came around in 2007, I checked out their newly-built glass-and-steel headquarters. Besides an amazing sculpture of a hundred thousand glass balls suspended eight meters from the ceiling of the building's atrium, nothing attracted my attention. At some point I wandered, almost by accident, into the adjacent building.

I found myself in the Wellcome Trust's old headquarters that had been converted, in parallel with the opening of the new building, into a public exhibition space. The venerable Wellcome Library, which chronicles the history of medicine, had remained there and is also open to the public, but I have never been inside. The Wellcome Collection itself hosts two permanent exhibitions, Medicine Man and Medicine Now and a varying selection of temporary exhibitions, showing art from a scientific perspective or science through the eyes of an artist or art addressing scientific questions.

Currently, two temporary exhibitions explore the connection between mental illness and artistic expression. The first one focuses on Vienna in the early 1900s where Sigmund Freud had just developed his practice of psychoanalysis. He became quite a sensation, the display of mild mental conditions became fashionable among the higher classes, and serious efforts were made to house and treat those with serious mental illness. Sanatoria were constructed and scientific treatises publishes to popular success.

The first exhibition shows how artists, patrons and, lastly, patients expressed themselves against this backdrop. Most impressive to me were half a dozen self-portraits by Egon Schiele. His unique style of twisted features and contorted physiques is usually taken to kick-start the emerging expressionism. But how did it arise? The exhibition argued that Schiele projected then-prevalent notions of insanity onto himself and amalgamated them into his style. To me the drawings assumed an extremely powerful nature in that light, besides being stunning pieces of art.

A second exhibition charted the journey of performance artists Bobby Baker through depression, paranoia, psychosis, basically the whole spectrum of mental illness. After a frightening incident of self-harm, she admitted herself to a mental health day center and started a watercolor diary to chronicle her experience, which she intended to be shorts. Weeks turn into months and into years. In the end, she painted several hundred diary entries in spiral-bound drawing pads. 158 of them are on display in the show, in chronological order.

There is a cartoon-like, graphic quality about them, with bright colors and shapes outlined in pencil. What makes them extremely emotive is their sheer number and the dates written underneath each one. This woman battled demons for years. In the early drawings, there's a lot of aggressive red blood, then there's a phase with cascades of tears, sky-blue and optimistic-looking despite the obvious anguish. A lot of paint is spent analyzing the numerous health-care professionals that look after her. Amazingly, Baker managed to keep her art going and be successful, and to keep her family together throughout the years of struggle.

Or maybe it was her family that kept her together – that wasn't clear from the exhibition, which was so intensely personal that it was hard to judge objectively what was really going on. Everything was in the artist's head. And maybe the conclusion that must be drawn after this visit is that we as scientists still don't know what mental illness really is, how it can be treated adequately, how patients can be helped most effectively. Despite the latest brain-scanning and neuroimaging technologies, we still can't look into people's minds and see what they see. Time to go back to the lab.