188 • Introduction to Art Therapy
began to talk about their responses to the paintings in language that was more extensive and
more coherent than they were usually capable of using.^5
Although the explanation for this phenomenon will no doubt someday be found in brain
imaging studies as increasingly sophisticated technology becomes available, something
quite amazing happened when these presumably regressed elders looked at art. As with
Mala Betensky, the power of the arts to calm and to stimulate the older mind is not limited
to producing but also to receiving. According to a 2005 article in the New York Times, short
focused tours for Alzheimer’s patients were being offered at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and others.
The Hebrew Home and Hospital for the Aged in Riverdale, New York, has long known
about the value of seeing as well as creating, and has had a curator of art, which is exhibited
on its walls, as well as an art therapist. On the DVD (8 .11), you can see an excerpt from a
television program about that two-faceted involvement in the visual arts.
Parenthetically, you may remember that art therapy always involves both doing and
reflecting, perhaps intuitively tapping into the value of both expression and perception for
the human psyche.
One more story ... Margaret Naumburg, the grandmother of art therapy, and a brilliant
woman like Mala Betensky, ultimately lived a very long life. Toward the end, she too began
to lose her mental faculties. It was a blessing, however, that she did not seem to be aware of
the decline. In my last visits to her, in connection with interviewing her for a film on art
therapy pioneers, she asked me to look over a manuscript she had been working on. When
I read it, I realized that it was actually a fairly jumbled version of her first book. Not only
was she unaware, but what was also impressive to me is that part of what she was doing
instinctively to cope with being confused, and by then in her nineties, was to create, as best
she could.
That drive to express and externalize the self, whether in words or sounds or images, is
so strong in human beings that it seems quite primal as well as quite powerful. As I was
rewriting this book, a gentleman in his nineties, whose art I had long admired, died. Jimmy
Lee Sudduth was a farmer who created art from natural materials, using mud and water to
make paint and leaves and berries to add color (DVD 8.12). Although he became quite well
known as an “outsider” or self-taught artist during the 1980s when that kind of art began to
be popular, he created not in order to sell or to exhibit, but rather because it was a compel-
ling urge (A).
Like Howard Finster (B), another self-taught artist who was profiled in a book and film
entitled Passionate Visions (Yelen, 1995), Jimmy Lee Sudduth found painting to be a power-
fully engrossing and deeply fulfilling activity. It is probably not accidental that many such
folk artists are in their later years. Some of the recent research cited by Gene Cohen (2001,
2007) suggests that the very fact of a dementia in old age frees the capacity to create. Willem
de Kooning, for example, became even more productive as an artist when he developed
Alzheimer’s disease.
In fact, I can think of no better words than Jimmy Lee’s with which to close this chapter:
“When I first started I was three years old. If I couldn’t paint I’d just be lost! I don’t believe
I’d live long. I believe I’d just die. If I couldn’t paint nothing—I just got to be where I can
paint something! I paint something all the time.”