Research funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has led to the creation of the ‘Madness & Modernity: Mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna 1900’ exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London and has been featured on the Radio 4 arts programme Front Row.

The AHRC funded four-year research project 'Madness and Modernity: Art, architecture and mental illness in Vienna and the Habsburg Empire, 1890-1914', was undertaken by Dr Leslie Topp, Senior Lecturer in History of Architecture at Birkbeck, University of London and Dr Gemma Blackshaw,  Lecturer in Art History at the University of Plymouth.

The project focussed on Vienna at the turn of the 20th century when it was one of Europe's leading centres for modernism. This was a tumultuous period of transition in which the arts, literature, architecture and philosophy blossomed. A time when Sigmund Freud, among others, pioneered new ideas about the self and psychiatry.

The multidisciplinary exhibition presents the range of ways madness and art interacted in Vienna, from designs for utopian psychiatric spaces to the drawings of patients confined in them. It also explores the influence of psychiatry on early modernism and encourages us to reflect on how we deal with mental illness 100 years on.

It is already receiving very positive media coverage and was profiled on the Radio 4 programme Front Row on March 31st.  You can listen again at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00jbs25

BBC News has also covered the exhibition at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7976536.stm

You can also view images from the exhibition at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/front-row/galleries/madness-modernity/index.shtml?gp=1#gallery4366

Madness and Modernity is on at the Wellcome Collection, London, from 1 April to 28 June and entry is free.

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Media contact: Jake Gilmore, Communications Manager, 0117 9876773

 
Editors notes
 
Arts & Humanities Research Council: Each year the AHRC provides approximately £102 million from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from languages and law, archaeology and English literature to design and creative and performing arts. In any one year, the AHRC makes approximately 700 research awards and around 1,350 postgraduate awards. Awards are made after a rigorous peer review process, to ensure that only applications of the highest quality are funded. Arts and humanities researchers constitute nearly a quarter of all research-active staff in the higher education sector. The quality and range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK.