Art and Disability: Are We Missing Something?

Interesting online talk from the National Gallery on how disability is reflected in art both in the pictures in the gallery and in the artists who created them.

The talk took the form of an essay by film maker and artists, Richard Butchins, who talked about how disability has been viewed over the centuries using examples from the gallery’s collection. He also talked about how art itself has deformed bodies such as El Greco’s elongated forms, Picasso and even the beauty we see in the Venus de Milo even though her arms are missing now.

He then went on to talk about artists who we might now be consider to be disabled, either physically or with some sort of mental condition, but who we don’t discuss in that context. He told us how the disabled community are reclaiming some of them. Some of these were obvious such as Van Gogh but I’d not realised before that Reynolds was deaf, Blake had cirrhosis of the liver and epilepsy and Cezanne was colour blind due to diabetes in later life and had a obsessive personality, painting the same images over and over again.