LSD and Creativity
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs January 1, 1989 Oscar Janiger, Marlene Dobkin De Rios 29 citations
In a unique experiment from the late 1950s, artists drew and painted a Kachina doll before and one hour after ingesting LSD. An art history professor evaluated the works and found consistent style shifts: artists whose usual style was representational or abstract moved toward more expressionistic or nonobjective approaches. Other changes included larger size, involution, movement, altered figure/ground boundaries, more intense color and light, oversimplification, symbolic depiction, and fragmentation. Many artists judged their LSD-influenced works as more interesting and aesthetically superior, believing they were creating new meanings for an emergent world.