In the Land of Imagination The C.G. Jung Collection · The C.G. Jung Collection 27.3. – 8.7.2018...

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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.

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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).

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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 Swisslos

Stadt St. Gallen Kulturförderung Appenzell Ausserrhoden

http://www.patmos.de/das-buch-der-bilder-p-8841.html

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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


AHAF

http://www.museumimlagerhaus.ch/en/service/presse/mailto:[email protected]

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Anonymous, Untitled, 1917, gouache on paper, 44x30,5 cm


AIAT

Anonymous, "The Tree of Life", 25.12.1936, colored pencil, ink,

gold color on paper (sketchbook), 42x30 cm


AJAF

Anonymous, "Blütenbaum", around 1925, embroidery on silk,

55x35 cm


ASAF

Anonymous, "Aphrodite, turn apart by the horse-snakes, black and

white", undated, charcoal on paper, 66x51 cm


BHAI

Anonymous, Untitled, text verso, 1928, gouache on paper,

28,5x22,5 cm


BMAX

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Anonymous, Untitled, text verso, 16.06.1929, gouache on paper,

29x23 cm


BMEK

Anonym, "Alarm!!", 1943, gouache auf Halbkarton, 24,7x17,4 cm

© C.G. Jung Institut, Zürich/Küsnacht, Bildarchiv, 041 BOAR

Anonymous, "Alarm!!", 1943, gouache on cardboard, 24,7x17,4

cm


BOAR

Anonymous, "Painting to represent my Dumm-Geist", undated,

gouache on paper, 13x15,5 cm


BXAB

Anonymous, "Oh, Land, Land, Land..." (letter to C.G. Jung), 15

Mai 1936, gouache, ink on paper, 45,5x31,5 cm


DUAN

Anonymous, Untitled, undated, crayon on paper, 22,5x24,5 cm


EACB

Anonymous, Untitled, undated, gouache on paper, 15x9,5 cm,


EBMK

In the Land of Imagination The C.G. Jung Collection · The C.G. Jung Collection 27.3. – 8.7.2018...

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