Was the great British painter J.M.W. Turner autistic? More importantly, should we care? The question of Turner’s psychology is floated in an upcoming BBC documentary, Turner: the Secret Sketchbooks, which brings in artists, a psychotherapist and various celebrities to opine on what his work means for them. Naturally, the discussion has already turned to mental health and possible diagnoses.

TV presenter Chris Packham is one of the new art historians, himself autistic and a campaigner for the National Autistic Society. Packham declares: “I see affinities [in Turner’s work] in terms of my own autistic thinking and approach to various things.” He notes that “Turner was clearly a man who, today, we would say had focused interest,” and finds similarity with his “attention to detail and his meticulous vision”.

Packham is careful to say that we don’t actually know anything about Turner’s “neurodivergence”, pointing out that “with all of the people we suspect of having had neurodivergent traits, from Alan Turing to Isaac Newton, it’s impossible to provide retrospective diagnoses, so we can only offer conjecture.”

But that doesn’t stop the conjecture. We love projecting today’s cultural preoccupation with mental health back onto historical figures. Our culture is defined by an increasingly mechanistic view of people’s psychology and character traits. Conditions such as autism and ADHD have become ways of making sense of idiosyncratic personalities so that, for example, anyone who demonstrates obsessive focus may be “on the spectrum”.

The debate over the rise of these conditions is intractable. Is it a negative cultural shift towards seeing ever more aspects of human psychology as a “condition”, or has society always been made up of neurodivergent people, and we’re only just now becoming enlightened enough to acknowledge it? An estimated 700,000 people in the UK are autistic, while the number waiting for an autism diagnosis has exploded since the pandemic and online culture is rife with self-diagnosis.

One problem is that when this is applied to the lives of artists and the nature of their work, emphasizing mental states makes art criticism into a diagnostic test, as if looking at a painting were nothing more than a window onto an painter’s inner, authentic self. That is only a small part of why we engage with art.

Of course, modernist art criticism has a great deal to answer for here. For a long time, the theories of psychoanalysis held sway in the art world. Sigmund Freud discovered a hidden form of a vulture in Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne from the beginning of the 16th century. Leonardo supposedly recollected that the bird visited him as a baby, and Freud deduced from that that the artist was homosexual.

As for Turner, the British critic Adrian Stokes — himself a follower of Freud’s disciple Melanie Klein — had a guess at what was going on. In Turner’s late “all-over” and “embracing” paintings of light, sun and water, the artist was apparently “rehearsing the chief relationship of the psyche to its objects, particularly an enveloping relationship associated with the breast”.

Today psychoanalysis has lost much of the authority it claimed in the last century, but the tendency for psychologizing hasn’t gone away. What has declined, as the culture of mental health has expanded, is the idea that not conforming to a norm is a problem, or indeed that there should be a norm to conform to in the first place.

“Neurodivergent” has given way, in the terminology, to the more non-judgmental “neurodiverse”. In contemporary art, this has led to a renewed celebration of “outsider” and self-taught “visionary” figures of yesteryear, such as the British artist Madge Gill. She suffered mental breakdowns and became the creator of repetitive and obsessive drawings of female figures submerged in storms of geometrics and cross-hatching.

But while a more hospitable attitude towards people’s varying psychologies might be a desirable thing socially, it doesn’t do much for understanding the art of the past or the present. In the compulsion to make artists more relatable to today’s identity politics — and the culture of “neurodiversity” has become one of those identities — we reduce artists to bundles of symptoms.

Yet artists like Turner inspire not because we know the psychological motivations behind their great works, but because their paintings offer a totally unique and new way of seeing the world. Great art can be appreciated by everyone — “neurodiverse” or not.