In the Land of Imagination The C.G. Jung Collection 27.3. – 8.7.2018 Opening: Monday, 26th March 2018 World Premiere The presentation of C.G. Jung’s (1875–1961) Red Book caused a sensation at the 2013 Venice Biennale. In it the famous Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology recorded his dreams and visions in pictures and text. Five years later, the C.G. Jung Collection is now being presented to the public for the first time. It includes some 4500 artworks by his patients from between 1917 and 1955. Jung asked his patients to paint and draw pictures from their imagination, just as he did himself. Series of images emerged in the “active imagination” as part of the therapeutic process. The C.G. Jung collection is unique and unlike any other psychiatrist’s collection of its time. It differs from historical art collections of psychiatric institutions both in the conditions in which the artworks were created and in the impetus for the art. Jung’s patients came to him as private patients in his practice in Küsnacht on Lake Zurich, which he opened in 1909. They ventured along with him into the land of imagination and translated it into pictures. On the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the C.G. Jung Institute, which coincides with the thirtieth anniversary of the Museum im Lagerhaus in 2018, the picture archive has been opened and the collection is being made accessible to the public and specialists for the first time in a comprehensive show with 164 works at the Museum im Lagerhaus. Like the Red Book, it will amaze viewers once again and is likely to draw a similar degree of attention. 1 The C.G. Jung Collection and the Exhibition The C.G. Jung Collection comprises some 4500 works—predominately painting, but also drawings and embroidery, created between 1917 and 1955. The creators of the works have remained anonymous, and their works are sorted according to 105 case numbers. In the final years of his life, Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) left the collection to the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, which he founded in 1948. The pictures are stored, overseen, and organized there by Jungian analysts—initially by Jolande Jacobi, a notable associate of Jung who herself worked intensively with pictures, followed by Rudolf Michel, Michel Edwards, Cecilia Roost, Paul Brutsche, Vicente de Moura, and the current curator of the picture archive, Ruth Ammann. The C.G. Jung Collection truly is unique and unlike any other psychiatrist’s collection of its time. The pictures come from private patients who came to the practice that Jung opened in Küsnacht on Lake Zurich in 1909. As a result, the conditions in which the artworks were created and the materials used in them differ from those that come from psychiatric institutions and clinics. But the impetus for the artworks is also different. The works by Jung’s patients were not created as independent art out of personal motivation. Triggered by Jung’s prompt to visually depict inner images and figures in the “active imagination,” they are the expression of a deeper exploration of the self. The patients told Jung their visions and dreams and brought him their pictures. These were discussed with Jung and analyzed by him. Thus, they are part of the therapeutic process. The works show similarities to Jung’s own pictures in his famous Red Book, which he worked on for sixteen years, from 1914 to 1930. Jung’s interest in his inner images and visions meant an intense engagement with the collective unconscious, which ultimately led to a change in his analytical work. He encouraged patients to take part in similar self-experiments and showed them how to bring about inner images, trigger visions while awake, and engage in inner dialogues and draw their visions. He prompted them to try to “get into the picture themselves—to become one of its figures.” Jung stated: “They need to be in them more. That is, they must be their own conscious and critical self in them—impose their own judgments and criticisms on them.” (Das Rote Buch (The Red Book): Liber Novus, 2009) He was particularly interested in recognizing archetypes. To him the mandala was one of the best examples of the universality of an archetype. In the mandala, the self is realized in the inner balance, centered through drawings of circles—“the entire personality, the connection between the unconscious and consciousness.” (Verena Kast) In the exhibition, a whole room is dedicated to the mandala and related symbols. The closely hung pictures surround the viewers, seeming to circle around them, and make them the focus. Other striking subjects can be found both in Jung’s Red Book and in the work of his patients: the snake, the sun, light, water as a bubbling water of life (but also as a tidal wave), or a ship on the water (case 010), the tree of life, passageways, the world-egg, and numerous depictions of people. Visionary, cosmic representations are juxtaposed with pictures of animals and landscapes, grotesques, as well as surreal and fantastic scenes. The exhibition attempts to group the works across different cases in order to illustrate the parallels in content across different depictions, following the themes “Searching for Inner Images,” “The Uncanny,” “Mandalas,” “Sexuality and the Body,” “Confusion and Destruction,” and “The Human and the Inhuman.” Personal conflicts and fears produce individual demons. These “subjective mythologies” often center on women. Sexuality and the body as well as sexual and physical identity are significant and another central theme of the exhibition. This reveals the contradictions between the therapist and analyst Jung and his patients: the latter articulate concrete wounds in their pictures, while Jung transcends them into archetypal ideas. There are also pictures and documents that show us what Jung’s patients experienced in therapy. They give insights into the development of analytical treatment and the symbols of this process (Vincente L. de Moura). 2 The C.G. Jung Collection presents historical references as well as aesthetic influences by C.G. Jung and artistic influences from Jugendstil, Symbolism, and Surrealism. Some dark monster-like figures are reminiscent of the works of Odilon Redon or Alfred Kubin (case 034), while the series from cases 009 and 042 in particular reflect modernism in their reduction and abstraction. There were connections between Dada in Zurich and Jung’s Psychology Club, which was also founded in 1916. Jungian analysts were friends with Dadaists, and Jung talked about patients who “did not draw mandalas, but danced [in the nearby Cabaret Voltaire].” (Doris Lier) The quality of the works varies according to the talent of the patients, who usually attempted to lend visual expression to their active imaginations as non-professional artists. Thus, the high quality of the works can be surprising. The imaginative activity, drawing pictures, the understanding of pictures as symbols, as well as the therapeutic effect of working with pictures and the dissolution of divisions in the psyche through symbolic creation form the core of Jung’s theory and therapy. “To me, imagination as an imaginative activity is simply the direct expression of mental life, mental energy that is given to consciousness in the form of images or content ...” (Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works), vol. 6, Definitionen (Definitions), 2011). C.G. Jung’s Red Book was first publicly exhibited in New York in 2009 and published as a facsimile that same year. At the Venice Biennale in 2013, its presentation in the exhibition Il Palazzo Enciclopedico by curator Massimiliano Gioni caused a sensation. Five years later, in 2018, the picture archive of the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich is now being opened up. The occasion is the seventieth anniversary of the C.G. Jung Institute, which coincides with the thirtieth anniversary of the Museum im Lagerhaus. The first exhibition of 164 works from the C.G. Jung Collection at the Museum im Lagerhaus in St. Gallen is a joint anniversary project. For the first time, the collection is now accessible to the public and will be documented with an accompanying publication, which is also an exhibition catalog. If to Jung the Red Book was the “raw material for a life’s work,” his collection can be understood as its complement and continuation. The Book of Pictures: Exhibition Catalog and Picture Analysis (only in German) Ruth Ammann, Verena Kast, Ingrid Riedel (ed.) Das Buch der Bilder: Schätze aus dem Archiv des C.G. Jung-Instituts Zürich Patmos Verlag, Ostfildern 2018, 250 pages, 250 pictures ISBN 978-3-8436-1017-9 CHF 48/EUR 30 With texts by: Ruth Ammann, Vicente L. de Moura, Monika Jagfeld, Verena Kast, Doris Lier, Ingrid Riedel, Philip Ursprung www.patmos.de/das-buch-der-bilder-p-8841.html kindly supported by Kanton St. Gallen Kulturförderung Stadt St. Gallen Kulturförderung Appenzell Ausserrhoden Swisslos 3 Press images The press images can be downloaded on our webseite: http://www.museumimlagerhaus.ch/en/service/presse/ Please ask us for the login: [email protected] Anonymous, Untitled, 22.09.1934, gouache on paper, 27x20 cm © C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich/Küsnacht, Picture Archive, 002 ABAM Anonymous, Untitled, 17.03.1927, watercolor on paper, 20,5x20,5 cm © C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich/Küsnacht, Picture Archive, 008 AHAF 4 Anonymous, Untitled, 1917, gouache on paper, 44x30,5 cm © C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich/Küsnacht, Picture Archive, 009 AIAT Anonymous, "The Tree of Life", 25.12.1936, colored pencil, ink, gold color on paper (sketchbook), 42x30 cm © C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich/Küsnacht, Picture Archive, 010 AJAF Anonymous, "Blütenbaum", around 1925, embroidery on silk, 55x35 cm © C.G.