One of the great painters of the past 50 years, the German Sigmar Polke, referred to these two artists. But in both cases the hallucinatory vision emerged from an activity, and it produced works. The former laid claim to supernatural inspiration that was taken for delirium the latter succumbed to delirium. Two British artists have, in different ways, embodied the eccentric posture of visionary and hallucinatory fantasy: William Blake (1757–1827) and Richard Dadd (1817–1886). But it is also necessary to overcome this alternative to identify what it is that constitutes a poetic of the imagination materialised in forms, in objects that are both specific and historic. The chief developments in this history have to do either with specific experiences, sometimes marked by madness and time in the asylum, or with established trends and movements: Romanticism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Surrealism, psychedelia. In fact, this ambiguity is a constituent part of artistic hallucination. It is ambiguous, because it involves both perfectly established artists such as Picasso and the manifestations, which were for a long time kept marginal, of an art that Jean Dubuffet called ‘brut’ (or ‘anti-culturel’). The history of artistic hallucination thus intersects with the discovery of the art of the insane, but is not reducible to it, insofar as it also concerns those who have never been subjected to psychiatric diagnosis. The transmission of cultural models and the apprenticeship in the ‘trade’ produce norms that artists contradict – and renew – by mobilising more or less eccentric resources of imagination and delirium. These two processes are constantly intermingled. It is renewed through the life of forms, but also comes from the mechanisms of delirium nourished by artists’ biographies. The imagination feeds on examples, it doesn’t emerge from the void. It also covers a vast field of experiences between terror and ecstasy. The history of artistic hallucination corresponds to the age of the sciences and techniques of the psyche (psychiatry, experimental psychology and psychoanalysis). This gap defines the breadth of the art of the imagination from the nineteenth century onwards and, more particularly, the ambivalent, tormented and ecstatic character of forms of the art termed “visionary” in the tradition begun by William Blake. In its artistic form, it is a total absorption, a beneficial alienation it is joy, plenitude and ecstasy. Because space is doubled, perception is disparate: one perceives both what is and what is not. In its pathological manifestations, hallucination has the nature of an alienating strangeness. ![]() For Flaubert, the expression refers to the hold over the author’s mental activity when he is entirely absorbed in his work, when he sees his characters, when he hears them, when everything that he imagines, objects, landscape, setting, has assumed greater presence for him than his actual surroundings. ![]() The specific notion of artistic hallucination was put forward in 1866 by another author, Gustave Flaubert, responding to an enquiry from his friend Hippolyte Taine concerning the sources of the literary imagination. The hallucinatory vision was the ‘elsewhere’ of realism. ![]() Thomas Carlyle ( Sartor Resartus, 1831) spoke of ‘natural supernaturalism’. This amounted to the naturalisation of the irrational. Thus, a psychological (or, more precisely, psychophysiological) explanation was given to experiences traditionally attributed to the supernatural, and of which artists had provided countless more or less fantastical representations. Anthony, or Christ himself, who had been subjected to temptation by the devil. The term hallucination was applied retrospectively to the visions of the mystics in their state of ecstasy, such as those of the characters in the Christian story, in particular the hermit saints such as St.
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