This beautifully illustrated book, published in connection with the Wellcome Collection's exhibition, London, 1 April–28 June 2009, brings new material to a familiar conversation about madness, modernity, and the visual arts in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Well-known works by painters Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, and Gustav Klimt become more complicated when compared to less familiar photographs of psychiatric patients taken by Jean Martin Charcot at La Salpêtrière hospital in Paris and to clinical anatomical wax models from Vienna. Chapter one, “Scrutinized Bodies and Lunatic Utopias,” by Leslie Topp and Gemma Blackshaw, introduces the overarching theme of the exhibition. Further contributions by Nicola Imrie, Luke Heighton, Sabine Wieber, and Geoffrey C. Howes present a rich and varied cultural discourse about health, illness, truth, and deception.

Imrie's chapter on the physician Karl Henning's 1897 portrait busts in wax of two brothers with microcephaly, a neurological-developmental disorder affecting the growth of the brain, and Wieber's examination of sculptor Richard Luksch's large faience figures, designed to adorn the exterior of Josef Hoffmann's Purkersdorf Sanitorium, 1904–1905, are particularly intriguing. In both cases, these objects provide new points of entry into the closely intertwined worlds of visual art and medical science in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. They also fulfill the Wellcome Collection's mission to illuminate that relationship. Topp's extensive research on the Viennese sanatorium is central to the book. Her chapters with Imrie on the architecture of Hoffmann's Purkersdorf Sanitorium and the Steinhof psychiatric hospital, with the famous church designed by Otto Wagner in 1907, introduce the ideas of her lengthier study, Architecture and Truth in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Cambridge, 2004) to a wider audience.

Blackshaw and Topp augment and expand our understanding of Vienna by emphasizing the bodily expressions and depictions of mental illness by Charcot and others, which were as influential on modern artists, they demonstrate, as Sigmund Freud's interpretation of the symbolic and verbal languages of dreams and speech might have been. Charcot's photographs of twisted unnatural bodies, the physical presence of wax models and sensuous ceramic figurines, and the architectural space of the sanatorium, the authors assert, are the backdrop against which Viennese modernism developed. To be sure, Freud was also concerned with the physical body, but although the book does feature a photograph of Freud's infamous couch, its images of the medical equipment for mechanic- and hydrotherapeutic treatments contained within the elegant modernist spa are most riveting.

Madness and Modernity contributes to a long held fascination with the perceived connection between mental illness and creativity, which took hold of romantic, symbolist, and expressionist artists and writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The unrestrained expressions of the mentally ill seemed to offer an alternative to the civilized space of modernity, which modern artists including Kokoschka and Schiele sought to escape, looking to the world of children, wild beasts, and all sorts of primitive others. Blackshaw and Topp's argument, however, is not that of modernist critic Julius Meier-Graefe, who celebrated the “mad genius” of Vincent van Gogh, but rather that modern artists in Vienna were affected by the clinical environment of psychiatric and neurological sciences, by the medical imaging of the unhealthy body, which they emulated, and by the physical spaces that they helped build for its treatment.

The insightful, thought-provoking essays in this book have just enough connection between them to cohere, while still allowing the reader to range through a variety of material, from the activities of writer Peter Altenberg to the overlooked career of painter Max Oppenheimer. Each chapter is, however, just a tantalizing introduction to a body of material that one wishes could be much longer and richer. A book such as this, resulting from a diverse exhibition and incorporating numerous authors, always runs the risk of eclecticism; but in this case. the eclectic nature of the collection is useful in that it will surely stimulate further inquiry. This book is especially welcome as the market for art history publications continues to contract, and we are grateful to Lund Humphries/Ashgate, and to those who supported the project, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, for its production.