‘(Un)healthy Minds’ and Visual and Tactile Arts, c.1900–1950

Abstract

During the first half of the twentieth century, there were vast changes in psychological models of the mind, new psychotherapies and physiological forms of treatment, advances in medical imaging and diagnostic technologies that probed the inner body, and a host of new allied health professions. The visual arts, including painting, drawing, craft, prints, sculpture, architecture, graphic design and photography, in Western Europe and the USA were intermeshed with methods of healing, and the concepts of the body and mind on which they were predicated, in manifold ways. Modernist architects and designers were commissioned to produce sanatoria and psychiatric institutions in line with shifting ideas about therapeutic environments. Interwar preoccupations with physical fitness and mental hygiene, which posited the holistic ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body, were portrayed in and cultivated by visual representations of athletic bodies and sport. Art was increasingly conceptualised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as expressing