Sanatorium 1930

Walter Kurt Wiemken made this ink drawing, called Sanatorium, sometime before his early death in 1940. Wiemken was a Swiss artist working in a period of great unrest in Europe. The sanatorium, or sanitarium, was a kind of health institution popular at the time, where patients would go to recover from long-term illnesses like tuberculosis. In this scene, the patients seem listless and alienated. The architecture is distorted and the atmosphere is stifling. Is Wiemken using the image of the sanatorium as a metaphor for the psychological state of Europe between the wars? Perhaps he critiques the institutions that were meant to care for people, suggesting that they had instead become places of confinement. To understand Wiemken's work, we can look at the history of medicine, the cultural meanings of illness, and the social impact of war. The interpretation of art is always contingent on its historical context.