Edward Adamson
Edward Adamson was a British artist, "the father of Art Therapy in Britain", and the creator of the Adamson Collection.
Early years: Sale, Tunbridge Wells, WW2 (1911–1945)
Edward Adamson was born in 1911 at Sale, near Manchester, in Cheshire. He had two brothers. Later his family moved to Tunbridge Wells in Kent. They were well off, successful in manufacturing. This gave Adamson some financial independence to achieve all he did during his life. He received a degree in Fine Art from Bromley School of Art in London.Subsequently, he trained and qualified as a chiropodist, at his parents' behest as they wanted him to have 'a proper profession', concerned about his livelihood as an artist. He probably only saw a few patients – though his brass plate is in the Edward Adamson Archive at the Wellcome Library: 'E.J.Adamson. M.B.A.Ch. Chiropodist'.
Then Adamson returned to a career in art, working as a graphic artist at a Fleet Street advertising agency for the rest of the 1930s, while doing his own drawings and paintings, which he exhibited in both London and Paris. During World War II, he was a conscientious objector, serving as a medical orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps, the Army happy to have him as a qualified chiropodist. He became interested in helping long-term hospital patients pass the time.
''Netherne and Hollywood Road''
Art and research at Netherne (1946-1951)
After the War, he volunteered to work with Adrian Hill, an artist who had coined the term "Art Therapy" in 1942 while a patient in tuberculosis sanatoria, teaching drawing and painting to his fellow patients, and, later, to hospitalised soldiers. At the time Adamson met him, Hill was working with the Red Cross Picture Library to loan and lecture on reproductions of paintings to patients in British hospitals to enhance their recovery. Adamson was in the group who first brought this programme to a long-stay mental hospital - Netherne Hospital, Surrey – in 1946.During his early visits to Netherne, Adamson was given several drawings by a man on a locked ward - known as Radcliffe since new research in 2024 - made with the only materials he had, char from burnt matches and toilet paper. These objects were the first collected by Adamson, and the start of the Adamson Collection.
The Medical Superintendent, the psychiatrist Eric Cunningham Dax, was impressed by Adamson's rapport at his lectures with the people who were compelled to live at Netherne. Dax asked him to facilitate a new research art studio at Netherne, to investigate the role of art in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorder - a project maybe of its time. This project was the post-war continuation of the 1930s research at the Maudsley Hospital on art and psychosis by the psychiatrists Eric Guttmann, Walter Maclay and Francis Reitman – the latter was Head of Clinical Research at Netherne from 1945.
The research art sessions were run single-handedly by Adamson from 1946 to 1950, and, according to Robertson, 689 people painted with Adamson in this period. Robertson does not report how many works were created in this period, only referring to
"The number of paintings per patient showed extreme variation. It seemed that the most standard comparison could be attained by confining attention to the first 10 pictures of the 215 patients who had painted at least that number".
It may be reasonable to infer that at least 3000 paintings were created. In early 2013, several small ceramics, with '1948' written on their base, were found in storage. It had not been known Adamson was encouraging people to work with clay at this time.
The people painted in "experimental and reproducible conditions": everyone had identical easels, with the same materials available, and even the same size sheets of paper. Adamson was to provide only minimal technical advice. Initially Adamson worked inside the hospital in a committee room with up to forty patients at once, conducting at first two sessions, and, later, four per week. Another early location was a shower room, chosen by the nursing staff to be easy to clean afterwards. By 1948, when he was employed full-time, a studio was built in the hospital grounds for Adamson's own use. This building was a converted army hut, 48 feet by 16 feet, and able to accommodate twenty people 'with comfort'. From 1948, Adamson also saw, for two hours each morning, a group of women, on a ward of the main hospital, most of whom had the diagnosis of schizophrenia, and who had all lived in Netherne for many years.
In 1950, Dax lectured on and showed paintings from the early Netherne sessions at the influential "International Exhibition of Psychopathological Art", held at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris during the First World Congress of Psychiatry. Dax describes the Sainte-Anne show at as "probably the second most important event in the history of psychiatric art, the first being the collection of pictures by Prinzhorn from Heidelberg and his 1922 publication "The Prinzhorn Collection" One critic wrote, 'The parallels between the works of patients and the art of 20th Century painters - expressionists, surrealists, and certain pure abstract painters - is established without a doubt'.
Reitman drew heavily on the findings from these art sessions, and used works which are now in the Adamson Collection, for his 1950 book, "Psychotic Art": though Adamson is mentioned in the acknowledgments, Reitman writes little on Adamson's contribution. Dax published his full account of the results in 1953 in "Experimental Studies in Psychiatric Art": Adamson only warranting a single mention by name:
Dax left Netherne in 1951 to move to Australia in 1952, taking "a few pictures and tapestries ''from Netherne shown at the 1950 exhibition , and these formed the basis of the collection''", p3. The Dax Collection is housed at the Dax Centre at the University of Melbourne, which holds 'over 15,000 creative works on paper, paintings, ceramics, and textiles created by people who have experienced mental illness or psychological trauma' - and is now under the director Charmaine Smith.
Art and healing at Netherne (1951–1981)
Adamson continued working at Netherne until his retirement in 1981, enabling and encouraging hundreds of people to express themselves through art. Out of the 1946-1950 quasi-scientific 'experiments', Adamson established an open art studio, allowing people to come and paint freely: a radical act when those detained in the 'asylums' were living in bleak conditions, profoundly excluded from society, with minimum dignity, autonomy or even personal possessions. By 1970 he had 5 studios in the grounds at Netherne, with a gallery for the Adamson Collection, which at that time contained an estimated 60,000 works: he kept all the paintings, drawings, ceramics and sculptures created in the studios.Adamson was more widely involved across the hospital, from having the courage of having endless corridor walls painted primrose yellow to designing costumes for the annual pantomime, a key feature of asylum life in Britain at the time.
Among the artists he encouraged at Netherne were the painter William Kurelek, the sculptor Rolanda Polonsky, for both of whom he secured studios in disused rooms in the hospital; and the illustrator and engraver George Buday, for whom Adamson took over a summerhouse in the grounds of Netherne for his printing press. Kurelek came to Netherne from the Maudsley in November 1953 to work with Edward Adamson for 14 months. He gave the Adamson Collection three major paintings created while he was at Netherne: "Where Am I? Who Am I? Why Am I?", "I Spit On Life", and "The Ball of Twine and Other Nonsense". About the last, completed shortly before he left hospital, Kurelek said,
Polonsky had been an artist before she was compelled to live in Netherne, probably 1948 to 1982, but when Adamson first met her, she was scrubbing the hospital floors. For Polonsky to practise her sculpture, Adamson had to persuade the hospital authorities to lift the restrictions on 'potential offensive weapons in the hands of mental patients' so she could have a hammer and chisel. In 1971 the Arts Council of Great Britain released a short film, "Rolanda Polonsky, Sculptor". Polonsky is filmed at Netherne, where she had already been living for 24 years, 'talking about her work, and the meanings that it has for her. Her art is deeply religious and personal, and she uses Christian themes in a refreshing and idiosyncratic way'. The film features, among other works, her masterpiece Stations of the Cross, which are in the Collection but are still the original plaster casts, funding never found to cast them in bronze.
Adamson met his long-term partner and collaborator, the teacher and writer John Timlin, in 1953 at Timlin's production of Kenneth Woollard's play "Morning Departure". Timlin was working with 'emotionally disturbed' children in East London, and subsequently contacted Adamson about a series of drawings of apples by a boy, Tommy, who he was working with. Adamson visited the school, and met the children and looked at their paintings. Adamson and Timlin then worked together until Adamson's death. They wrote and lectured on art and mental health, and exhibited the Adamson Collection across the world, including Europe, Japan, Canada and the United States.
By the mid-1970s, Adamson moved into the Studios, Hollywood Road, London. A pair of artists studios, Adamson lived in one and saw patients in the other - particularly after his retirement from Netherne in 1981 - until 1996. Hollywood Road remained at the centre of the Adamson Collection and Adamson Collection Trust until John Timlin died at there on the morning of 11 September 2020. In 2012 Wellcome Collection relocated documents, photographs, notebooks and other material to become the Edward Adamson Archive at Wellcome .