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拍品专文
This work belongs to a major phase in Maddox's oeuvre inspired by the investigations into insanity carried out in the nineteenth century by Jean-Martin Charcot at the Parisian Salpêtriére hospital. Charcot was responsible for novel ideas about mental illness and its treatment, particularly in the sphere of hysteria, which, at the time, baffled medical thinking. Sigmund Freud, who had studied under Charcot between 1885 and 1886, was particularly struck by his mentor's investigations into what he termed 'the most enigmatic of all nervous diseases'. Maddox was similarly mesmerised by Charcot's ideas and the photographs of his experiments, regarding them as 'poetic statements'. Robert Melville was in no doubt not only that Maddox had been deeply motivated by what he knew of Charcot, but also that his paintings were direct references to the activities within the Salpêtriére. Maddox was to admit as much: 'I became obsessed with the Hospital of the Salpêtriére, that grand asylum of human misery, where [...] the experiments and observations of hysteria carried out by Charcot revealed a means of expression akin to what the surrealists later called convulsive beauty' (an interview with Conroy Maddox by R. Short, see Exhibition catalogue, Surrealism Unlimited, London, Camden Arts Centre, 1978). Maddox saw hysteria as a key to surrealism's quest for 'the interior and subjective world'. In the ironically titled The Stillness of the Day Maddox depicts one of the corridors of the Salpêtriére, where hysteria has taken over. Far from 'stillness' we see mayhem and agitation. In the absence of restraint and supervision, young female patients, still wearing their nightclothes or simply covering themselves with bedsheets, break out of the confinement of their clinical wards and roam freely. The perspective leads to a gaping doorway offering total freedom. But liberation may be an illusion, a mental image that has nothing to do with reality. Indeed, a mirror leaning against a doorway reflects nothing, indicating that the scene is not real in the physical sense. Rather, the reality depicted is no more than 'the interior and subjective world', as Maddox put it. This is a world full of fears and contradictions: the tempting liberation at one end of the corridor contrasts with the menace of giant insects at the other. Maddox saw hysteria as poetic theatricality and presents his subjects as performers of inner dramas of the unconscious. Maddox urges the spectator to share the hallucinations of his inmates or, at least, to see the world through their eyes. More than any other facet of his work, the Salpêtriére theme reveals Maddox's inclination towards the disturbance of the spectator's state of mind.
Maddox was a prolific artist, who was fully active as a Surrealist from 1935 to 2003. He employed a technique of deliberate mis-dating of some of his works, making them earlier or later than their date of production. His intention was to cock a snook at the art world intelligencia who had postulated that Surrealism had ended in the late 1940s. The present work like Passage de l'opéra (1940/1970) in the Tate Collection incorporates a hoax dating which would have been made at the outset of Maddox's work.
We are very grateful to Silvano Levy for providing the above catalogue entry and entries to lots 57, 58 and 59.
Maddox was a prolific artist, who was fully active as a Surrealist from 1935 to 2003. He employed a technique of deliberate mis-dating of some of his works, making them earlier or later than their date of production. His intention was to cock a snook at the art world intelligencia who had postulated that Surrealism had ended in the late 1940s. The present work like Passage de l'opéra (1940/1970) in the Tate Collection incorporates a hoax dating which would have been made at the outset of Maddox's work.
We are very grateful to Silvano Levy for providing the above catalogue entry and entries to lots 57, 58 and 59.