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Fortune's Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson. By . Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004, xxiii + 367 pp., $35.00.
The Discovery of the Art of the Insane. By . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, xix + 390 pp.
Artistry of the Mentally Ill. By (1921). Translated by Eric von Brockdorff. New York: Springer Verlag, 1972, xxi + 274 pp.
A Mental Patient as Artist: Adolf Wölfli. By (1922). Published as Madness and Art: The Life and Work of Adolf Wölfli. Translated and edited by Aaron H Esman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992, xvii + 131 pp.
Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. By . New York: International Universities Press, 1952, 385 pp.
The recent publication of Fortune's Favorite Child by Christopher Maurer raises again the old question of the relation between creativity, particularly in the visual arts, and mental illness-or, in the literature of an earlier era, “madness.” The issue, which goes back at least to the days of Plato and Aristotle, has enjoyed particular currency in recent years because of the rise in popular interest in so-called “outsider art” or, in the term fashioned by the French painter Jean Dubuffet, “Art Brut” (“raw art”). Although the scope of the designation “outsider” tends to be somewhat loose and broad, the term refers particularly to persons who are self-taught, outside the mainstream of what Dubuffet called “the art of the museums”; often eccentric and isolated, they are in many instances psychotic inhabitants of psychiatric institutions.