The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties by Fred Turner

Author:Fred Turner [Turner, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 6.1.

A poster for the War Veterans’ Art Center at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. At the end of World War II, many saw art as a way to reindividuate men who had experienced deindividuation in the military. From Victor D’Amico, “Art for War Veterans,” 4. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art, licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

For D’Amico and the leaders of the Museum of Modern Art, the art classroom modeled a larger political world. Both the individual mind of the student and the social relations of the classroom suffered from tensions—intrapsychic in the first case and interpersonal in the second. Veterans lived with memories of the obedience required of men who had become accustomed to uniforms and orders and, at the same time, memories of how their acceptance of the military’s total authority had led many to experience the madness of combat. Authoritarian teaching threatened to amplify their suffering and release it into the larger American body politic. By contrast, egalitarian methods might prevent such infection. “The war has created new and greater tensions which will cause their share of mental and emotional maladjustments,” wrote D’Amico in 1943. “If the therapeutic value of art is employed in a plan for re-education [of veterans], America may be spared a phenomenal rise in mental illness and emotional disturbance.”11

By 1943 the Museum of Modern Art had in fact become a national center for rethinking the use of art in the healing of wounded and traumatized soldiers. In late 1942, James Thrall Soby, the director of the museum’s Armed Forces Program, began reaching out to psychiatrists, psychologists, and rehabilitation specialists to see how the arts were being used in hospitals. At this time, art therapy did not exist as the discipline it is today. Rather, the arts were used largely by occupational therapists to aid the injured in passing the time and recovering lost motor skills. Therapists encouraged soldiers to work with craft kits and to copy established models when they painted or sculpted. Free expression played little role in this work. In the wake of the Freudian revolution of the 1920s and 1930s, however, psychiatrists had turned their patients toward the arts and particularly toward painting and drawing. These doctors believed that when done with the proper degree of independence, such work revealed the inner state of its maker and so could aid in diagnosis. At the same time, they thought it could speed the amateur artist on the way to health by releasing the internal psychological pressure of traumatic memories and so reducing the intrapsychic tensions they caused.

In 1943, Soby organized an exhibition in which the views of the psychiatrists and the occupational therapists collided. Entitled The Arts in Therapy and designed by Herbert Bayer, the exhibition featured two distinct areas. In the first, the museum displayed the work of the winners of a nationwide competition to develop projects designed to provide new and more creative modes of occupational therapy. These projects ranged from

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