Charles Lutyens display reveals artist’s work in psychiatric hospitals

The work of an artist who revealed the hidden world of psychiatric hospitals in the later decades of the 20th Century is to be featured in an exhibition.

Charles Lutyens was both an artist and art therapist in the 1970s and 1980s, so had access to psychiatric hospitals at a time when they were feared and stigmatised by many.

His work led to him to create paintings studying the characters within them, who were often ignored or treated with disdain by the wider world.

The free exhibition will open at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, south-east London, on 8 June.

Born in 1933, Lutyens trained at various institutions and went on to create works like Angels of the Heavenly Host in St Paul’s Church in Bow Common, one of the UK’s largest single-artist mosaics.

However, it is the pieces he made during his time as an art therapist that are the focus of A World Apart: The Work of Charles Lutyens.

Practised formally since the middle of the 20th Century, art therapy is a form of psychotherapy that uses art media as its main mode of expression and communication.

As a therapist in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, Lutyens would create close observations of the characters he met, as well depicting as daily life within the institutions where he worked.

Colin Gale, the museum’s director, said that Lutyens had “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.”

The exhibition, based in the 1930s former administration building of Bethlem Royal Hospital, the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, will run until 31 August.