The Rita Simon collection of art therapy

Introduction

What is in the Rita Simon Collection?

About 500 paintings (mostly in gouache or watercolour on paper) and clay pieces by adults and children suffering mental and physical illness. The collection derives from R M Simon's 55 years of work as an art therapist in private practice, hospitals and day centres of the National Health Service and Social Services. The works in the collection were made between 1942 and 1984. The collection includes sequences of paintings showing spontaneous changes in style during art therapy.

How is the collection arranged?

In two sections:

1. Classified into eight groups, each group being marked by one of the eight distinct art styles identified by R M Simon.

2. Sequences of works by the same person. The artists include normal, untrained adults and children of various ages and backgrounds, such as preschool and mainstream primary school children, professionals and others without formal art training. The variations in style show the many ways in which habitual styles can be modified.

Who would be most interested in the Rita Simon Collection?

Practitioners, students, researchers and anyone with an interest in the fields of history, art, aesthetics, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, art therapy, psychology, neurology, psychotherapy, medicine, nursing or psychopathology.

What were the areas of psychological need served by the works of art therapy?

Mental and physical illnesses and handicaps in adults and children suffering exceptional stress through deafness, blindness, autistic states, clinical depression, schizophrenia, senile dementias and brain damage.

Why were the works preserved?

As evidence of the general validity of R M Simon's concept of the symbolic meaning of art styles and as a tool for research. Some of them have been published in her two textbooks: The symbolism of style, London 1991 and Symbolic images in art as therapy, London 1997, both published by Routledge, together with other published papers. Researchers are requested to consult these two books first. Although the works are available for study, for reasons of confidentiality personal details of patients cannot be included beyond those given in the case histories provided in works already published.

Background Information

Rita Mary Simon: a brief professional history

R M Simon pioneered art therapy in psychiatric after-care in Britain in 1942 and introduced it into a number of hospitals in London and the Home Counties. Formative influences include six years' training in art, a Freudian analysis, and further experience in Adlerian and Jungian psychotherapies. Before the National Health Service (NHS) was set up in 1948, she was employed directly by the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis, by medical consultants, and by psychiatrists and medical superintendents of psychiatric and similar institutions. After the introduction of the NHS she worked in a psychiatric hospital, a hospital for the severely physically handicapped, residential homes for old people and for children in care, sanatoria, and a diagnostic school for autistic children, in England and in Northern Ireland. From 1952, she lived in Northern Ireland and practised art therapy there in a psychiatric hospital. On return to Britain, she introduced art therapy at the Astell Day Hospital, Cheshire, and after 1970 to the Health and Social Services in Northern Ireland and the Belfast Education Board. From 1975 to 1983 she provided regular short residential courses in art therapy through the Queen's University of Belfast and through evening classes in a College of Further Education.

The considerable variety of work in these contracts and in the Social Services Domiciliary Service provided valuable experiences of social aspects of mental and physical disability in the community, as did small groups such as a mother/child 'play at home' group and a child art group in a disturbed and violent suburb of Belfast. Between 1975 and 1995 Simon published two books and 18 papers.

Sources of the collection

Groups of patients in Simon's studio, starting in London in 1942; adults and children in private practice; a small group of long-stay adults in a psychiatric hospital with chronic schizophrenic illness; adults in day hospitals, a health centre, general and special long-stay hospitals and sanatoria, geriatric wards and residential homes for children and the elderly; domiciliary work referred by the Northern Ireland Social Services; autistic children at a special school; normal adults and children who attended undirected community art groups similar in approach to those of patients.

Some other works came from short residential introductory workshops organized through the Department of Further Education, The Queen's University Belfast; University College Dublin; The Mater Hospital Child Guidance Department, Dublin; the Northern Ireland Social Services Board; and elsewhere.

The Symbolism Of Styles

Rita Simon has kindly provided the following reflections on the collection and on the principles which formed it.

The styles

The Collection provides extensive examples of eight art styles, which consist of, firstly, four distinct basic styles (ARCHAIC LINEAR, ARCHAIC MASSIVE, TRADITIONAL LINEAR and TRADITIONAL MASSIVE) and, secondly, four mixed or transitional styles in each of which two of the basic elements are contained together. The eight styles are represented by the following circle diagram.

The development of styles in child art

All the art styles develop during childhood. The first to appear is the sensuous pleasure in gesture and making marks that we recognise in the huge scale and simple geometric shapes of ARCHAIC LINEAR art. Later this becomes enriched by the emotional effects of volume and florid colouring, typical of the ARCHAIC MASSIVE style. As children mature and respond to the appearance of external reality, hand and eye intuitively include some naturalistic effects, such as space and light, which diffuse the emotional intensity of simple shapes and heavy colours: the image is seen more objectively and the style is described as TRADITIONAL MASSIVE. In this style, relative importance is typically shown through the use of differential sizes. Finally, the maturing child takes interest in the factual aspects of their lives and represents these as best they can in the TRADITIONAL LINEAR style.

Both of the ARCHAIC styles, together with the intuitive perceptions that shape TRADITIONAL MASSIVE art, are essentially formed by a prevailing mood that may be sensuous, emotive, or intuitive. But the fourth, TRADITIONAL LINEAR, springs from the intention to illustrate ideas: each object will be clearly outlined to distinguish it from any other, and the effect is formal and conventional, concerned with function rather than appearances.

The psychological significance of the art styles

The four basic styles, and the transitions from one to another, reflect all the ways in which reality is represented in art, but in addition, they also reflect the different ways in which reality is grasped and understood, either as an inner, subjective reality or as an external perceived and factual reality. Although all eight styles are particularly clear in pictorial art, their features inform all creative arts.

Round about 1967, consistent evidence provided by patients' art styles regularly indicated to me a relation between each style and a corresponding attitude to life. Although an habitual style can be the hallmark of a successful artist, in a troubled patient a fixed attachment to one style has a significant effect upon mental health. As the styles correspond with those developing in childhood, they indicate the stage at which a patient's psychic life has been disturbed or arrested. In therapy, any change in a patient's habitual style provides the therapist with helpful information, uncontaminated by the patient's or therapist's wishes, fears, or projections and counter projections.

How have the art styles been used as tools for research?

1. In revealing the different ways in which children and adults perceive meaning.

2. In researching psychophysical variations of function between the cerebral hemispheres in children during their first few years, as published by Tinnin

3. As evidence of variations in mood during health and illness.

4. In developing a research study (Simon 1976) into the effect of specific subjects upon the art styles of school-children aged 9-11.

5. In a study of the effects of free creativity upon depressed and bereaved adults and children through spontaneous changes in their art styles during therapy.

6. As a means of releasing and integrating the effects of infantile trauma through psycho-physical actions with art materials.

The role of art therapy

My concept of the therapeutic value of art has developed over a number of years of work as an art therapist with disturbed adults and children. I see creative initiative as the main vehicle for mental health.

The profession of art therapy has, and should have, many different ways of helping suffering, inarticulate or antisocial individuals. My contribution to art therapy is a way of understanding individual needs.

An adult or child senses the importance of his creative activity but cannot tell how it helps him. Any intuitive or 'wild' interpretation will be contaminated by the viewer's projections upon the artwork and its creator.

Unless I can identify the style of a free painting, doodle or copy, I cannot properly appreciate the unconscious value of the work for its creator. The style alone informs me of the patient's attitude to life and the way in which he visualises his psychic need.

The creation of a symbolic image makes visible the patient's dissociated sensuous, emotional, intuitive or conceptual states of mind. When such a mental state becomes visible during therapy, it extends consciousness and enriches mental life.

From the beginning, few expected me to teach patients to paint, for the stress of severe pain or life-threatening illness blocks the capacity to enjoy learning a skill. Adults and children under the acute stress of mental or physical suffering, death or bereavement cannot respond objectively. Their over-riding need is to be understood.

At first, my working conditions were extremely varied. For example, in some hospitals I had guaranteed privacy in a separate art room, but elsewhere I had only the use of a large communal table in a noisy day-room, or a chair beside a patient's bed. Some medical consultants requested written reports, others preferred informal discussions. The original aim of art therapy was to improve patients' quality of life and relieve the pathological effects of anxiety (the view of Lord Horder and Sir Geoffrey Marshall, 1941/1951). During the 1960s I had some difficulty in preserving the distinction of art as therapy from psychiatric interest in its diagnostic potential, or as a form of psychological assessment.

Interpretations of art work during therapy

The creative process has the last word, and cannot be translated. The content of paintings and drawings, poems and stories can be interpreted in numerous ways but the creative process remains largely unconscious. Words in their literal meanings destroy the capacity for creative, visual thinking. The play between process and product, between conscious and unconscious responses to pen and paper, or paint, or clay, is no less effective for being intuitive, even thoughtless, for a poem or a picture speaks for itself through the way it is made; image and meaning are identical; lines, shapes and colours have a poetic cadence that realizes the unknown when art and psychotherapy meet.

References

R M Simon. The symbolism of style. London: Routledge 1995.
R M Simon Symbolic images in art as therapy. London: Routledge 1997.
L Tinnin, 'Biological processes in nonverbal communication and their role in the making and interpretation of art', American journal of art therapy, 1990, vol. 29, pp 9-13.