When it’s called for, Katschnig maintains a respectful distance. I ask her to introduce me to the doleful, unsociable Reisenbauer, whose drawings I have a particular fondness for. Their single motif is obsessively repetitive but delicately nuanced rows of objects, including umbrellas, chairs, pears, and cars. If you look closely, you see minute variations from one object to the next — the curved handles on a series of umbrellas vary in length, say, or each is drawn only in penciled outline except for one, which is colored lemon-yellow. There’s something both rigid and fluid — a push-pull — about Reisenbauer’s work that’s oddly soothing without being inert, as if the artist requires a sense of order for his own sanity but at the last minute is moved to insert a bit of whimsy, a flight from anxious exactitude. Warning me that the artist isn’t inclined to welcome visitors, Katschnig stands with me in the entrance to the bathroom where Reisenbauer is shaving. She coaxes him to emerge — he has the recessive look of a bank clerk, albeit one with haunted eyes — and conveys my appreciation of his work, only for him to mumble a hello with a downward gaze, then go back to shaving.

Although Katschnig and Feilacher play down the psychopathology of the artists, the house has the feel of a psychiatric unit — if a well-endowed and aesthetically conceived one — and many of the residents appear visibly disturbed. Their illnesses strike me as varied, running the gamut of psychoses — schizophrenia, acute paranoia, manic depression — as well as encompassing developmental retardation. Katschnig and Feilacher firmly refuse to discuss specific diagnoses, insisting that they never publicize the “story of the psychological illness” to protect the artists’ privacy and also on the slightly disingenuous grounds that it should be of no interest.

To my mind, it’s not entirely appropriate to skip over the matter of personal history completely, since Art Brut first gained public notice largely because of the biographical narrative of the artists: Adolf Wölfli, for instance, considered one of the most talented, was a Swiss farm laborer who began to molest young girls and was prone to hallucinations and violent fits of anger; institutionalized in an asylum near Berlin, he created a prolific output of pastels and collage. Martin Ramirez was a self-taught Mexican-born artist whose mental illness confined him to an institution in northern California for the last 15 years of his life. And Madge Gill, an English housewife and medium, believed that her drawings were guided by unseen spiritual forces.

I find it quite surprising that there’s no conventional therapy at Gugging, just the artists’ interactions with one another and with their art. Katschnig and Feilacher are intent on treating the residents of the house, which Feilacher characterizes as “a reserve for introverted masters,” as artists pure and simple, without regard to the details of how they came to be here. I’m ambivalent about this approach. I have little doubt that Jean Dubuffet, the founder of Art Brut, would have approved of treating the residents as artists rather than patients: “There is no art of the insane,” he once wrote, “any more than there is an art of dyspeptics or an art of people with knee complaints.” Still, there’s a slight assembly-line attitude toward the artists, an unspoken pressure for them to produce creative work that can be displayed and eventually bought by institutions and individuals — possibly at some cost to their well-being. The artists leave their daily output in a tray in the house office; the day I’m there, Katschnig picks up several postcard-size scrawls done by the one resident who has failed to come through, commenting that he “just doesn’t try.” And it’s not clear to me that ignoring the difficult and in some cases tortured circumstances that have impelled the work is doing the artists a service.

It’s worth noting that the House of Artists wasn’t always thus: It was originally called the Center for Art and Psychotherapy. It was started in 1981 by Leo Navratil, a psychiatrist who oversaw the Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic, which employed two doctors for 1,000 patients. In his practice and in his writings, Navratil advocated drawing as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool as well as a window into the nature of mental illness. He selected 18 residents for their artistic potential and provided them with a smaller and more nurturing setting to pursue their gifts. Unlike Feilacher and Katschnig, Navratil believed that it was “symptomatic of our patients’ art that their creativity stems from the psychiatric disorder they are being treated for. That’s what feeds the originality of their works, their forms and inventions. Psychosis plays an import role in their art.”