John h. macgregor.
the lacemaker
http://www.rawvision.com/current/currentissue.html
It is not unknown in the cultural history of mankind for works of art to be hailed as
masterpieces in one century, be forgotten in
another and, after the passage of time, be rediscovered and again celebrated, often for
very different reasons. This also happens to artists who can know cycles of dazzling fame
and total eclipse. An example is the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer of Delft (1632-75),
whose painting "The Lace Maker" sank (along with the rest of his works) into
relative obscurity, only to be unearthed in the nineteenth century, and hailed as one of
the key masterpieces of the Louvre Museum in the twentieth. Could a similar situation
arise in the all too brief history of Art Brut?
This essay presents a newly rediscovered Outsider masterpiece of the highest quality, a
small piece of lace now housed at the
National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington. I say "rediscover" because
this small lace piece enjoyed a moment of
fame, and was then forgotten. This paper also attempts to return to the light of day a
briefly celebrated and now forgotten
artist/patient who we shall call "The Lace Maker." We also seek to recover a
forgotten but important clinical contribution to the
early history of psychoanalysis and psychotic art.
Despite the loss of almost all of the artistic productions of patients from early American
psychiatric institutions, historically significant pieces do occasionally surface. In
general these objects and images have been preserved, not as true works of art, but as
evidence supportive of a clinical diagnosis or a psychiatric theory.
All too often the identity of the artist has been concealed behind a pseudonym. In this
case the invented name "Virginia Hall" was employed to protect the anonymity of
a female patient at St.Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington. Executed in the spring of 1917,
the piece of lace created on a hospital ward is unique in that it was the first example of
true Outsider Art in America to be studied in enormous detail, and from a psychoanalytic
point of view. While not understood to be in the fullest sense a work of art, the piece of
lace which this patient created was certainly seen as reflective of her deepest needs and
desires.
In 1917 psychoanalysis was really just arriving in America. St.Elizabeth's was one of its
earliest strongholds. The Director of the Hospital during the early part of the twentieth
century was Dr.William Alanson White (superintendent: 1903 -1937). Dr. White was one of
the pioneers of psychoanalysis in America. He was also one of the first psychiatrists in
America to systematically explore the use of psychoanalysis with psychotic patients. In
1913 he founded The Psychoanalytic Review, the first English language journal devoted to
psychoanalysis. It was in this journal in 1918
that the lace piece was published.
But, not by Dr. White! It was a woman physician who took the art of a female patient
seriously enough to investigate its meaning. The physician was Dr. Arrah B. Evarts, M.D.
one of the first female psychiatrists on the staff at St. Elizabeths. Her study of the
lace was entitled: "A Lace Creation Revealing an Incest Fantasy." (Amazingly,
for 1918, two full pages were devoted to illustrating the lace, back and front.) Dr.
Evarts' investigation was strongly influenced by psychoanalysis. This had both good and
bad implications. Only the innovative atmosphere provided by psychoanalysis can account
for her radical step in publishing an extended study of a work of art by a psychotic
patient, which involved the uncensored depiction of the genitals of both sexes, and the
open discussion of the incest fantasies of a woman. For the first time a physician paid
serious attention to a patient's explanation of the meaning of her work. Her rich and
detailed, if obscure, associations continue to intrigue us eighty years later.
Abstracted from Dr. Evarts' analysis, it is these bits and pieces of verbal elaboration
provided by the artist herself which can lead us into the web of lace, revealing the
extraordinary depth of meaning
embodied in this fragile structure.
Biography and Diagnosis:
The patient who I have come to call "The Lace Maker" was born in Virginia in
1863, the eighth child in a family of nine. Until
recently, I hadn't succeeded in discovering who she was. Since this piece of lace is her
sole claim to immortality it matters greatly that her real name be attached to it. Thanks
to the detective work of William R. Creech, an archivist at the National Archives in
Washington, we now know that her name was Adelaide V. Hall (Case number 19250). Sadly, her
case file, and the photograph it probably contained, has been destroyed. Only the entry in
the Hospital Admission Book survives. She is listed there as a dressmaker, single, and
indigent.
Her mother, of whom she retained no memories, died of tuberculosis while Adelaide was
still an infant. She could not
remember there ever being a mother in the house, and could recall no one called Mrs. Hall.
For some years an older sister took
charge of the family, functioning as a substitute mother to the youngest siblings. Other
sisters and brothers do not play a part in
Adelaide's account of her early life, except for one brother who she said shared the bed
with her father and herself.
It was Adelaide's father who was, and continued throughout her life to be, of central
importance in her internal world. He was an alcoholic, mean and violent when drunk. One of
her earliest memories concerns an incident when she wet the bed. Her father,"pulled
her out of bed, removed her clothing, and beat her with a strap until the blood
came." Adelaide continued to share his bed until the age of thirteen. Her eldest
sister had meanwhile married and left to establish her own home. Adelaide, still a child,
attempted to manage her father's household (or what was left of it), which was now located
in a renovated barn. At the age of thirteen she was removed from her father's influence,
and taken into her sister's home. She never saw her father again, though in later years
she contributed to his support.
The Lace Maker is said to have been intelligent. She received a good "common-school
education" and was then trained as a dress maker, a trade which she seems to have
enjoyed and been unusually good at. She was now able to support herself and to live on her
own. This independence may have been necessitated by the fact that Adelaide had fallen in
love with her brother-in-law who she later insisted was, "the first man she had ever
loved." She never married, but she became involved sexually with a series of men,
functioning as mistress to three or four of them. One of her lovers infected her with
syphilis. She was for a time addicted to morphine.
Adelaide Hall was thirty-eight at the time of her first stay at St. Elizabeth's Hospital.
This is not the appropriate place for a
detailed discussion of the psychological disturbance which led to her admission to this
famous psychiatric institution on two
occasions ñ in 1901 and again in 1910 -- after which she appears never to have left. The
diagnosis on admission was "Melancholia simple", the supposed cause
"worry." Recent attempts by two of my psychiatric colleagues to evaluate the
numerous symptoms described in the 1918 article have yielded a very tentative
diagnosis of Bipolar Illness; specifically, a depressive psychosis with occasional
hypomanic features (possibly complicated by
symptoms of untreated syphilis). Deeply depressed and delusional, Adelaide described
shadows of things flying past her. She "felt electricity" and thought
"someone was doing tricks on her." Hallucinated, she complained of hearing the
voice of her dead
brother calling to her. At times she became profoundly withdrawn and totally
uncommunicative; at other times she was wildly
excited, violent, and destructive. She also had periods of more or less complete lucidity.
There is a tragic aspect to this case. Although the account of Adelaide's life makes it
more than evident that she was sexually
abused by her father (and perhaps by a brother as well), Dr. Evarts refused to acknowledge
the fact of incest occurring.
Instead she followed psychoanalytic dogma and dismissed Adelaide's experience as fantasy,
"an incest fantasy." This despite
the fact that Adelaide spoke of her father as "Mr. Hall," "Old Jim Hall,
the man I used to live with who said he was my father," and "the first man I
ever slept with." As an aspect of her mental confusion, all the men she had known
tended to merge,
resembling "Mr. Hall." They, and various other men around the hospital,
"are all, always, and at all times, 'the old, old man down in Virginia.' "
She had no children. In the hospital she experienced fantasy pregnancies, making clothes
for the baby she expected. At one
point she made a doll and cared for it with intense pleasure. Then, in the spring of 1917,
she began work on her autobiography in lace.
The Lace Web:
Let's follow Adelaide's story in the lace web. This is an enormously complex work, despite
the fact that it is only the size
of a pocket handkerchief. There are sixteen separate figures embedded in the lace matrix.
There is nothing to suggest the piece
has a top or bottom. Rather, it is as if the smaller figures and the larger couples have
been caught, more or less randomly, in a web.
Work began with the figures in the upper left quadrant, nine tiny beings scarcely an inch
in height. They are all but lost in the wildly irregular lace. Yet, each was identified
and explained by Adelaide. On some level they are the nine children in the Hall family,
including Adelaide herself. They may also be her dream children. Some of her associations
to these figures are derived from stories and nursery rhymes she would have known as a
child.
Part of the wonder of this lace construction for us is the process of discovery involved
in locating each figure. It is close to the
exciting creative process Adelaide must have gone through as her fingers summoned them
into being. No figure is fully formed.
Several have arms and hands with long radiating fingers which stretch out to merge with
the lace cells. Others have multiple legs.
Even the sex is uncertain in some cases, with figures alternately interpreted as male and
female. This image was identified as
"Little Nannie Red Nose," and was said to illustrate a Mother Goose riddle: an
obvious indication of hidden meaning.
One of the unusual features of Adelaide's male figures is a distinctive error in the form
of the genitals. The testicles are
placed above and to either side of the pendant penis. This arrangement is strikingly
similar to the pattern she uses in shaping
eyes and nose in the face. The riddle of the children's rhyme is solved by the equation
red nose = penis. Later the figure, which
wears a dress but possesses a penis, was identified as "Little Boy Blue." A tiny
bit of needlework attached to the face was said by Adelaide to be a trumpet, or his horn.
The figures have more contemporary meanings as well. For example, Adelaide explained that
the clear and emphatically male
figure was Mr. Gibson one of her lovers (but that it also represented all the others). The
needlework is microscopic; with
the facial features distinct, the tiny genitals perfect and raised above the surface. The
huge right hand, shaped like a clump of
bananas, is significant, reflective of the traumatic sexual history of the little girl.
Mr. Gibsons' radiating triangular headdress derives perhaps from Adelaide's hallucinatory
experience rather than any perceptual oddities of his own.
Adelaide herself is present among the nine figures as, "The Woman Picking Up
Apples." Her lap is full of apples, their forms
echoing her prominent breasts. However, Dr. Evarts explained that, "Apples have a
constant strong sexual significance to her,
meaning the testicles." She refers to herself here as "The Woman,"
"This One Woman," "The Only Woman Who Ever
Was," and, "The First Woman." Not surprisingly a very realistic snake
travels across the lace, and over Mr. Gibson's arm, to
whisper in Adelaide's ear.
Jack and Jill:
Sadly, we can't pause to consider the meanings associated with each figure or to explain
how these beings fit into Adelaide's life. As the figures grow larger they now come in
pairs. They embody surprisingly overt sexual symbolism, about which Adelaide spoke openly.
Having gone up the hill Jack and Jill are involved in fetching water. The pail appears
above Jack's head. The rim of a broken button provided the pulley, with the rope passing
over it. Significantly, Jack and Jill both have a hand on the rope. The two figures are
set in a bower of roses. Bees circulate among the flowers -- because they sting they
possessed clear sexual meaning for Adelaide.
Technically the needle work is astonishing in its inventiveness. These figures are solid
anatomical forms, executed in extraordinary three dimensional detail, and yet firmly
embedded in the lace. The faces are tiny sculptural portraits. Jill is wearing a dress.
Made of lace it is fully transparent revealing more than it conceals, including the
perfectly rendered female genital. A real "femme fatale," Jill also sports an
elaborate hat, high heeled shoes, and garters tied below the knee (An unusual outfit for
fetching water). Jack the lad, more realistic, is naked except for matching garters. His
hands too are huge, his genitals masterfully defined. On his thigh a bee has settled.
Mr. and Mrs. Hub Smith:
Clearly a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Hub Smith stand arm in arm. We are provided with no
explanation of who they are.
Adelaide explained only that the bracelet on Mrs. Smith's left arm indicates that the
bands have been read, and the couple have been joined in marriage. As a married woman Mrs.
Smith modestly carries a fan arranged to cover her genital. The umbrella, above the
couple, was said by Adelaide to be a sign that they are together under God's creation.
Bees appear again, but this time her associations led in a different direction: "Oh
Death, where is thy sting, Oh Grave, where is thy victory?"
The various techniques employed in the making of the larger figural groups seem to have
evolved, with each pair somewhat
differently constructed. Mr. and Mrs. Hub Smith are sculpturally far more solid than Jack
and Jill. They are made from pieces of muslin, constructed like a rag doll stuffed with
scraps, with the outer surface covered with parallel darning stitches.