When I was a kid, one of my favourite pastimes (other than watching reruns of wrestling on tv) was poring over old psychology textbooks that my dad picked up at garage sales. I especially loved reading about all those crazy folk with “personality disorders”, and through these books I first became aware of the art of Louis Wain. Louis Wain was a British artist who liked to draw cats. He did a lot of cartoon work for various magazines of the time, and was Chairman of the ‘National Cat Club’ in 1898 and 1911. Louis Wain seemed like a pretty cool dude by my standards, but he developed schizophrenia in his late forties and as his mental state deteriorated, his cat art got weirder and weirder.
There seems to be a lot of speculation on Louis’ mental state (did he really just have Asperger’s syndrome?) and whether or not these images that are supposed to represent his “mental decay” are actually in chronological order, but these images have stuck with me for the better part of twenty years. What do you make of them?
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