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In the 1970s and 80s, psychiatric hospitals were still hidden, feared and stigmatised places.
Charles Lutyens was an artist and art therapist who visited a number of these institutions in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire back then, meeting with — and helping to treat — the people within. He also painted much of what he saw.
From 8 June-31 August 2024, Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Bromley hosts a free exhibition — A World Apart: The Work of Charles Lutyens — in which the artist's talent for colourful, observational paintings that embody the fears, fragility and complexities of psychiatric patients, can be appreciated.
Colin Gale, Director of Bethlem Museum of the Mind, said: "Lutyens has poured empathy for his subjects into his art through careful rendering and visual metaphor and has drawn on, and depicted, his own feelings. As well as documenting aspects of daily life in institutions, Lutyens' work also comprises a poignant record of human emotion and experience."
Lutyens trained at Chelsea, Slade, St Martin's and Central Schools of Art in London, and created the creating Angels of the Heavenly Host — the UK's largest single-artist mosaic — which can be seen at St Paul's Church, Bow Common.
The Museum of the Mind, by the way, is worth a visit any time. Working in cahoots with the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Beckenham, it runs art workshops for patients, and has a fascinating art gallery/museum space, based within the 1930s administration building. It is also home to the infamous sculptures of 'Melancholy' and 'Raving Madness', which flanked the hospital entrance between 1676 and 1815, when it was at Moorfields in the City then St George's Fields in Kennington — a time when psychiatric needs were often dealt with poorly.
A World Apart: The Work of Charles Lutyens, Bethlem Museum of the Mind, 8 June-31 August 2024, free
