Breakdown or Breakthrough? A History of European Research into Drugs and Creativity

This is a historical and interpretive review of European experimental work rather than a single empirical study. The author surveys a range of studies and clinical protocols from the mid-twentieth century, drawing on published reports, researchers’ protocols and examples of artwork produced in experimental sessions. The material drawn together includes early clinical-artist collaborations (for example, psychiatrists asking artists to sketch mescaline visions), single-subject protocols, and two relatively large projects carried out in Paris (1959–1962) and Munich (1968–1970). Key studies synthesised in the review are described with their procedures as reported in the source texts. Walter Maclay and Erich Guttmann (1940s) invited artists to take mescaline and sketch hallucinations; a 1951 protocol by László Mátéfi recorded repeated self-reported observations and timed portrait drawings after taking 100 gamma LSD (the extracted text uses the unit "gamma"). The Paris project by neuropsychiatrist Robert Volmat and René Robert supervised 35 psilocybin sessions involving 29 artists, instructing participants to start working immediately after ingestion so changes in style and process could be observed directly. In Munich, psychologist and gallery owner Richard Hartmann invited about fifty artists to take LSD at the Max Planck Institute and be observed and filmed while working; Hartmann emphasised psychological changes manifested in working method and produced a typology of altered working modes. Measures across studies were largely observational and qualitative: researchers examined changes in formal features of drawings and paintings, timed-protocols, participant self-reports, video records and post-session evaluations. The review notes heterogeneity in dosage (Volmat and Robert reported ~10 milligrams psilocybin on average; Hartmann typically used 100 gamma LSD) and in setting (studio visits versus psychiatric white-room and filming), and highlights that anonymity of many participant artists and the legal curtailment of later research limit what can be inferred from the archive.

The reviewed studies report heterogeneous but recurrent effects of hallucinogens on artistic production and process. Maclay and Guttmann observed stylistic changes such as a prevalence of "wavy lines" in mescaline sketches, but later scrutiny suggested such elements could already exist in an artist’s ordinary style and so might represent a permissive occasion for experimentation rather than direct causation. Mátéfi's 1951 LSD self-protocol provides a fine-grained temporal account: after ingestion he reported feeling normal for some time, then increasing euphoria and loss of fine motor control, emergence of glowing colours and "wavy lines," difficulty maintaining perspective, a sense that the hand was being "dragged along" by a dynamic system, and an alternating urge to control and to "let go." He concluded that LSD produced an "urge towards expansion," whereas mescaline sessions were described as producing a contracting or "encapsulation" of strokes. Volmat and Robert's Paris psilocybin project found that, except for two cases, participants’ work changed in style during intoxication. Typical reports included an initial "perplexity" after 20–30 minutes, loss of established techniques and compositional control, altered perception of space and time, intensified colour perception sometimes leading to a paler palette, and a compelled rhythm in strokes. These changes were interpreted as arising from altered spatio-temporal experience rather than motor dysfunction. When artists accepted the altered working conditions they often experienced these changes positively, reporting feelings such as "I feel liberated" or "I always wanted to paint like this, but never dared." Some artists attempted afterwards to reproduce this mode "as if under drugs," producing a lasting intermediate phase in their work. Hartmann’s Munich series produced a contrasting account. He classified three levels of altered working-method: (1) associative painting from point to point driven by disorientation; (2) "magical painting," reported in about 80% of subjects, in which artists felt their hand driven by an external force; and (3) rare cases of "mimetical painting," in which work proceeded in an automatic, trance-like manner. Hartmann construed these phenomena as regressions in reflection and phylo-ontogenetic rewinding, of dubious artistic value. Many of his participants reacted negatively: some could not work because traumatic memories resurfaced, some became unmotivated, and only three reported any lasting positive influence. At least 25% described their intoxicated work as unreal, inane or kitsch. Across studies the investigators converged on three situational moderators of outcome. Dosage mattered: commentators suggested Hartmann’s LSD dosages were high relative to Volmat’s psilocybin regimen and that lower doses sometimes yielded better creative outcomes. The setting was important: Volmat and Robert worked in artists’ studios and maintained a low-intervention approach, whereas Hartmann used a white room and television filming, conditions criticised as hostile and performance-inducing. Finally, "set"—participants’ expectations and selection—shaped responses: Volmat’s cohort was recruited within artistic circles and among acquaintances, producing an optimistic atmosphere, while Hartmann’s established artists were anxious about threats to their stylistic identity. Debates among contemporaries framed drugs as either supplying "raw material" and accelerating incubation/illumination phases (with impairment to the verification phase), or as an accelerant of style change already awaiting expression. All parties agreed, however, that drugs do not themselves contain creativity and cannot produce what is not already latent in the artist.

Anonymous interprets the historical record as a complex picture in which drugs can both facilitate and impede artistic work, depending heavily on dose, setting, expectations and the artist’s prior experience. The paper contrasts two metaphors that dominated mid-twentieth-century discourse: the older "psychotogenic" or "demoniac" model, which treated intoxicants as forces that dictate style, and the later "psychedelic" model, which cast drugs as liberating access to a "true self." The author shows that empirical material supports elements of both views while undermining simplistic, universal claims that drugs either uniformly dictate or uniformly liberate creativity. A key interpretive move is to situate intentional drug use among artists within a broader class of disinhibiting practices that the author labels "gaucherie." This term is used to group deliberate techniques—working left-handed, blindfolded, at great speed, or with unfamiliar materials—that impose technical barriers to force improvisation. Within that frame, drug use is one among several methods artists have used to disrupt habit and provoke stylistic change, but it occupies a special position because of its intensity, duration and side-effects, which often make it poorly compatible with the iterative, evaluative demands of visual-art production. Thévoz’s proposal that artists cultivate endogenous, non-pharmacological ways to induce altered states is presented as an explanation for why drugs did not become ubiquitous among artists. The paper acknowledges the limits of the historical evidence: studies were methodologically heterogeneous, participant anonymity and legal prohibitions constrain interpretation, and comparative data are fragmentary. The author concludes that while drugs may provide "raw material" or precipitate moments of insight, they tend to impair critical verification and are no guarantee of artistic breakthroughs. Artists have tended to prefer more manageable disinhibiting techniques, and the mid-century optimism about psychedelics’ capacity to regenerate art now appears overstated in hindsight. The recovered European studies nevertheless enrich understanding of the conditions under which psychoactive substances intersect with creative practice and highlight the decisive roles of set, setting and prior experience.