A talented architect/painter and a flight into the unreal
By Souren Melikian
International Herald Tribune
FRIDAY, MAY 26, 2006
NEW YORK A historian and a psychiatrist should team up to investigate
the circumstances that gave rise to the strain of folly that burst out
on the English art scene around 1800. A crazy trio then sprang up.
William Blake and the Swiss-born Henri Fuseli achieved fame. Blake was a
poet and Fuseli an exotic foreigner. But Joseph Gandy, an architect,
sank into oblivion the minute he died in an asylum in 1843. The first
retrospective ever devoted to his work, "Joseph Gandy: Visionary
Artist," on view at the Richard Feigen Gallery until July 22, and Brian
Lukacher's book just published by Thames & Hudson, "Joseph Gandy: An
Architectural Visionary in Georgian England," put the mad architect back
in the limelight.
However, neither Feigen's art exhibition nor Lukacher's dense text
succeed in shedding light on the reasons that drove Gandy to draw and
paint his extravagant remake of the ancient world.
....
From extreme obsession to sheer madness, there was but a short step.
The artist was placed by his family in a private asylum, Plympton House,
outside Plymouth. In its report, a commission visiting the asylum, in
October 1843, two months before Gandy's death, noted: "The whole of
these cells were as dark and damp as an underground cellar, and were in
such a foul and disgusting state that it was scarcely possible to endure
the offensive smell. We sent for a candle and a lantern to enable us to
examine them."
cont'd....
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/26/features/melik27.php