A Visual History of Depression: Melancholia Delights Paris

All Paris loves art. Above all, Parisians passionately love colossal exhibitions. In any kind of weather, long lines patiently await admission to one or another of the grands musées. The recent season's most irresistible show, at the Grand Palais, was “Mélancolie, genie et folie en Occident,” roughly, “Melancholy, Genius, and Madness in the West”—an exhibition of immense fascination for psychoanalysis. Scheduled to visit Berlin later this year, the exhibition is truly breathtaking in scope, tracing the history of depression in a stunning array of works of art in multiple media from antiquity to the turn of the 21st century. It can require many hours, even days, to absorb. Jean Clair, former director of the Musée Picasso, an exceptional scholar and a man of genius himself (although I cannot speak to his melancholy), has organized this magnificent offering to the public, which he has accompanied by a catalogue rich in illuminating essays, both informative and interpretive, many by his own hand. Only in French to date, this catalogue constitutes an education in itself in the history of occidental ideas and images. For any psychoanalyst working with depression, it offers long-ranging and provocative perspectives on contemporary clinical concepts.

While the complex theoretical underpinnings of the exhibition cannot be reviewed here, suffice it to say that the notion of “melancholy” has been broadly construed so as to encompass as many incarnations as possible in the visual arts. Thus, organized according to eight categories in chronological order (freely interpolated, however, by associated works from other periods), the art is displayed under rubrics beginning, for example, with “Ancient Melancholy,” where we become reacquainted with Hippocrates and with the Greek notion of humors, of khole melas, or black bile, as the origin of melancholy. We are shown tender mourning steles, classical statues (of Ajax, for example) in marble and bronze, and figured Attic vases, among which I want to single out one: an exquisite red-figure fifth-century rendering of Penelope and Telemachos.

The poignancy of this particular work derives in part from something Freud said about the difference between mourning and melancholia, namely, that, whereas the mourner knows for whom she weeps and why, the melancholic cannot tell.

Here, our subject is taken from the opening scenes of the Odyssey, where mother and son despair of their hero's return. Her head bowed and draped, Penelope sits before her loom, cheek resting on hand, her gaze turned inward in what will become the classic pose of melancholy throughout the ages in Western art until our own time—the gestus melancholicus (think of Dürer's Melencolia I and of Van Gogh's celebrated portrait of Dr. Gachet). Her loom, worked on by day but undone by night to foil the suitors who beset her, parades its partially woven fabric to our view, and Telemachos, stately and filial, stands before her holding a staff that bisects the loom, thus constructing a frame of verticals and horizontals, a stable container for the moment.

But what is this moment between mother and son? We know from Homer that Telemachos has been warned by Athena not to tell Penelope of his impending departure; so, she cannot already be mourning his loss. Or can she? What is the purport of their meeting? Here, turning to Freud's Mourning and Melancholia, we may glean some understanding of the emotional resonance of the image. Beyond its finely incised lines, its graceful arms and hands and vulnerably bared feet, its softly falling drapery, that resonance derives precisely from our and from Penelope's own not knowing. It derives from an inchoate sense of losses past and a prescience of losses yet, perhaps, to come. Herein, psychoanalysis teaches us, lies its melancholy and its claim upon us through the ages.

Beyond antiquity, the exhibition stalks its theme throughout the Christian Middle Ages, where we find, among others, diabolical and hermetical forms of melancholy, including lurid apparitions from the temptations of St. Anthony. Then, under “Children of Saturn,” we enter the Renaissance. Here, we come into the presence of Dürer's unforgettable 1514 engraving, “Melencolia I,” about which scholars of erudition have pondered. Its power, however, defies interpretive closure.

A tormented female figure of Melancholy, wreathed and winged, sits in the canonical pose, cheek in hand, in a kind of paralysis. Surrounded by discarded instruments of mathematics, geometry, measurement, construction, all in disarray, she broods—as Panofsky and others have interpreted—on her awareness that all human tools of art and science must ultimately fail in face of that which is infinite. Yet, notwithstanding all that has been previously written about her, I will presume here to add a complementary psychoanalytic reading based on the dark intensity of her expression, the bulky muscularity of her body so reminiscent of the sibyls of Michelangelo created at nearly the same historical moment, and by the potential danger in those foregrounded instruments about her—the sharp nails, the pointed calipers, and that jagged-bladed knife.

Aggression, Freud tells us, is deeply implicated in melancholia, so that, when we perceive this element, the image becomes richly fascinating for us psychoanalytically. We begin to notice how much abortive violence lurks in its saturnine aspects. And here this aggression is no longer directed outward at the world. Left off, it has arrested, as we can see, the very project of human engagement with life itself. Thus, a mesmerizing paradox arises: For, if, to seek knowledge actively in human terms can lead to melancholy, Dürer's image says equally that to refrain from using tools on account of our consciousness of their ultimate failure leads likewise to this state. From melancholy there is no escape.

Freud reminds us too that there is, with melancholy or depression, a masochistic pleasure, and this aspect is depicted in another work in the exhibition, an 1890 canvas by Odilon Redon entitled “Yeux clos” (“Closed Eyes”). Here, an androgynous head in pastel tones against a slate blue ground appears to float vaguely in a liquid of pink and white. Lips pursed, the figure looks within, and we can imagine he is daydreaming, having a fantasy, as if he has departed from ordinary reality to some meditative space where he feels calm. And yet the image exudes a strange dislocation, an eeriness and sense of the uncanny. Perhaps to transgress notions of space and time is to sacrifice one's body; perhaps to contemplate this state, despite its evocation of aesthetic pleasure, is to remind us of the impenetrable mystery and otherness of human minds, including our own, and that we are forever strangers, even to ourselves.

There is one more image I must allude to before concluding, and that is Van Gogh's unnerving 1890 portrait of Dr. Gachet. Viewed under the gaze of the renowned French scholar Jean Starobinski, it trembles with psychoanalytic reverberations. Van Gogh, we learn, saw himself mirrored in Dr. Gachet, both on account of their physical resemblance—the red hair and the physiognomies—but also because of what he perceived as the doctor's nervousness and depression. Admittedly a recent widower, Gachet had, however, when he was in training at the Salpetrière, written his thesis on the subject of melancholy, and this theme continued to obsess him. Introducing elements from Van Gogh's letters to his brother, Theo, and from the pose of the subject of the painting, which recapitulates the gestus classicus I have previously described, Starobinski, in his catalogue essay, gives a persuasive reading of this portrait as that not only of a depressed physician but as that of the artist himself, an interpretation that must register as deeply troubling for, as the scholar asks in conclusion to his essay (my translation): “This doctor, seized by anxiety, is witness to the anxiety of the painter: What will happen to you if the one who is supposed to be taking care of you is himself in need of help?” And Van Gogh, as we know, shot himself that same year.

Finally, I believe it is fair to say that, beyond the dazzling aesthetics of the show, no one encountering it can possibly emerge into the streets of the city with simplistic notions of the uniquely human experience of melancholy or depression.

I dedicate this article to Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, a fellow explorer in the annals of art and psychoanalysis, without whose kindness to a temporarily disabled colleague these pages would not have come to light, and to TAP editor, Michael Slevin, for his gracious ongoing support of the interchanges between psychoanalysis and the humanistic discipline.