was in Städtisches Museum in Halle
I’ve not read The Gallery of Miracles & Madness: Insanity, Art and Hitler’s First Mass-Murder Programme by Charlie English, 2021 because I was more interested in the fate of Germany’s degenerate artists than in mental patients in asylums. So here is Kathryn Hughes’ fine review.
In 1922 Heidelberg psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn’s book Artistry of the Mentally Ill fired up the art world. Since the C19th, doctors in asylums pored over the drawings, paintings and sculptures of their patients. Could doctors spot schizophrenia just by looking at how someone coloured in the sky? Could they discern neurosis in an patients who simply painted models with incomplete faces?
But using art diagnostically was not Prinzhorn’s issue. His interest in the patients’ art was aesthetic and philosophic eg when a delusional Hamburg metalworker Franz Bühler produced The Choking Angel, an intense version of God’s messenger with a shining crown and a torturer’s face, Prinzhorn seriously compared the work to Albrecht Dürer’s!
Bühler, Angel, 1909
The Guardian
This was certainly not art to soothe the soul, but of course soul-soothing was not what modern art was about. From the late C19th, Gustav Klimt, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele focused on describing the agony of modern selfhood. Feel the rising tide of madness in Munch’s horrified scream or Schiele’s warped bodies. And it was that madness, a heroic refusal to fall for the easy remedies of civilised society, that Prinzhorn’s asylum artists easily accessed. While sane artists scraped off layers of social conditioning and academic training before they could reach Freud’s hidden parts of themselves, asylum inmates had a shortcut to their unconscious. Rather than being patronised, these artists of the interior were to be revered and copied.
Paul Klee, teaching pictorial theory of form at Bauhaus, greeted the images in Prinzhorn’s book rapturously. In these oddly shattered shapes, with jagged outlines, perspective shifts and incompleteness, Klee saw an authentic response to all post-WW1 world crises. See his Prophetic Woman (1923), a primitive figure indebted to Lamb of God, a dense geometric pen-ink drawing by an insane banker.
This was certainly not art to soothe the soul, but of course soul-soothing was not what modern art was about. From the late C19th, Gustav Klimt, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele focused on describing the agony of modern selfhood. Feel the rising tide of madness in Munch’s horrified scream or Schiele’s warped bodies. And it was that madness, a heroic refusal to fall for the easy remedies of civilised society, that Prinzhorn’s asylum artists easily accessed. While sane artists scraped off layers of social conditioning and academic training before they could reach Freud’s hidden parts of themselves, asylum inmates had a shortcut to their unconscious. Rather than being patronised, these artists of the interior were to be revered and copied.
Paul Klee, teaching pictorial theory of form at Bauhaus, greeted the images in Prinzhorn’s book rapturously. In these oddly shattered shapes, with jagged outlines, perspective shifts and incompleteness, Klee saw an authentic response to all post-WW1 world crises. See his Prophetic Woman (1923), a primitive figure indebted to Lamb of God, a dense geometric pen-ink drawing by an insane banker.
Angel of Suffocation by Franz Karl Bühler, 1909 on book cover of:
Artistry of the Mentally Ill: Psychology and Psychopathology of Configuration
Hans Prinzhorn, Amazon
Among the Surrealists, Prinzhorn’s book also succeeded. Max Ernst drew inspiration from August Natterer, an Upper Swabia engineer who believed he was a direct Napoleonic descendant. Natterer’s intensely detailed, densely coloured works, which came to him in a vision, provided inspiration for Max Ernst’s 1931 Oedipus. Salvador Dalí borrowed from madmen but, to his credit, tried hard to go insane as a way of improving his own painting, never quite managing it.
Having failed 2 entrance exams to pre-WW1 Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, self-taught artist Adolf Hitler scraped a living by copying postcards of pleasant Munich views and selling them in bars. Until he ended up in a Bavarian prison, screaming at the admitting psychologist! A psychologist had assessed Hitler as a morbid psychopath, with hysteria and an inclination toward a mystical mindset. Hitler was imprisoned for his part in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, in which he led 2,000 Nazi stormtroopers in a failed attempt to end the Weimar Republic. His fortunes were about to change and within 10 years he was Chancellor of Germany, but his ideas about art did not change. In fact they hardened into a dogma that became a founding principle of the Third Reich’s German culture and pure Aryan race.
Having failed 2 entrance exams to pre-WW1 Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, self-taught artist Adolf Hitler scraped a living by copying postcards of pleasant Munich views and selling them in bars. Until he ended up in a Bavarian prison, screaming at the admitting psychologist! A psychologist had assessed Hitler as a morbid psychopath, with hysteria and an inclination toward a mystical mindset. Hitler was imprisoned for his part in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, in which he led 2,000 Nazi stormtroopers in a failed attempt to end the Weimar Republic. His fortunes were about to change and within 10 years he was Chancellor of Germany, but his ideas about art did not change. In fact they hardened into a dogma that became a founding principle of the Third Reich’s German culture and pure Aryan race.
Hitler’s outrage at modern art focused on abstract, distorted and angry works. This worsened in WW1’s devastating aftermath in Germany, exaggerated colours, expressive brush strokes and gory subjects only exacerbated Germany’s societal divisions, and economic and political crises. For Hitler, on the other hand, Healthy Art was an art that painted exactly what was in front of its nose, plus some extra swagger. People should look like Aryans, with firm limbs and rosy cheeks, and landscapes should resemble the tourist postcards he once churned out. So the Führer introduced legislation to ensure that painters followed his rules.
Any art that did not follow these rules was Degenerate, seen as a deliberate ploy by the Jewish-Bolsheviks to destroy Germany. To ensure this didn’t happen, Hitler ordered the confiscation of all troublesome art from German galleries and museums in 1937. This collected treasure, including a number of pieces by the Prinzhorn artists Klee, Marc Chagall and Otto Dix, was put on display in the Degenerate Art Exhibition that year. Later iterations of the immensely popular show contrasted modernist art with art made by the Heidelberg patients, in order to show the connection between biological and artistic degeneracy.
Otto Dix. Storm Troops Advancing under Gas, 1924.
Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf.
By this time the patients were extremely vulnerable. Most professional artists whose work featured in the Degenerate Art Exhibition had gone. Klee was in Switzerland, Chagall, Dalí and Ernst were in New York, while Oskar Schlemmer and Dix were in hiding. So there was no-one left to speak up for the asylum artists when, in autumn 1939, Hitler set out to exterminate them.
The rationale was eugenics. Psychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia were heritable, so it made sense to purge the unfortunates who “represented life unworthy of life”. Actually cost-cutting was possibly the more immediate driver: long-term psychiatric care cost money and, as Germany prepared for war with Britain, the money could be better spent on tanks. 30+ of Prinzhorn’s artists were among the 250,000 inmates put into gas chambers early in the war. The lucky ones got away with forced sterilisation.
The rationale was eugenics. Psychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia were heritable, so it made sense to purge the unfortunates who “represented life unworthy of life”. Actually cost-cutting was possibly the more immediate driver: long-term psychiatric care cost money and, as Germany prepared for war with Britain, the money could be better spent on tanks. 30+ of Prinzhorn’s artists were among the 250,000 inmates put into gas chambers early in the war. The lucky ones got away with forced sterilisation.
Great Exhibition of German Art catalogue cover, 1937.
ancient, classical, proud
Charlie English’s book was as beautiful as it was bleak. Thank you Kathryn Hughes
You said that after World War One, German Dr Hans Prinzhorn began collecting the paintings, drawings and sculpture of psychiatric patients.Their work inspired a generation of modernists eg Max Ernst, Paul Klee and Salvador Dali. But which came first - the psychiatrically disturbed patients or the modernist artists?
ReplyDeleteJoe
DeleteI am not sure that psychiatric patients in hospitals really did "inspire" the famous works of famous modernist artists. How could they have even got into locked up asylums to look at the art? The Prinzhorn book (1922) came out after the psychiatrist-author gathered up his patients' works and took them to a quiet office.
What the artists enjoyed was expressive freedom, an urge to play, an ornamental urge, an ordering tendency, enjoyment from imitation, and from
symbols. Not copying masterpieces.
Oh I love how this post dives into the wild intersections of art, madness, and history. Just like Munch’s The Scream that raw emotion just stays with you. Prinzhorn’s embrace of asylum art as art, not just a symptom, is something I really admire. Do you think today's art world still gives space to such unfiltered expression?
ReplyDeletewww.melodyjacob.com
Dr Prinzhorn’s embrace of asylum art as part of the therapy for psychotic patients was certainly something that clearly worked well and therefore was to be thoroughly admired. But he did it for _his own sake_, to become a more informed psychiatrist about mental illness and creativity, and _for his patients' sake_, for them to be able to express themselves.
DeleteBut I don't think Dr Prinzhorn disliked a lot of modern German art; he was not trying to change the modernists' style and themes by exposing them to his psychotic patients' art. Prinzhorn was famous for the history of thinking about mental illness and creativity!! The modernists were famous for "freeing up" their art.
Its fascinating that Hitler was diagnosed as a morbid Psychopath and that was before the war???
ReplyDeletemem
DeleteThe most recent analysis of Adolf Hitler’s personality was investigated posthumously to assess personality, clinical and neuropsychological disorders. Uni of Colorado found Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (from WW1), Psychotic Thinking and Schizophrenia. Hitler also scored highly on Paranoid and Antisocial Personality Disorders; Narcissistic Personality and Sadistic Personality Disorders. He was hospitalised in 1918 in Pomerania while serving in WWI on the Russian front, and again in the 1920s.
So our question should be not how early his mental disorders were noted, but how come the psychoses didn't slow down his political progress to the top?
This is a harrowing but vital account of how art, madness, and ideology collided; both elevating and ultimately condemning the voices of those whose inner worlds dared to defy the brutal norms of their time.
ReplyDeleteroentare
DeleteGustav Klimt, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele and then Paul Klee and Otto Dix etc happily greeted the shattered shapes, jagged outlines, perspective shifts and incompleteness.
Bauhaus Art School (opened 1919) saw a proper response to all post-WW1 world crises and made it an important part of academic art history. Although the Nazis brutally closed Bauhaus in 1933, the School's objective was to help the material world reflect the unity of all the arts, becoming famous for the design approach that it spread out of Germany.
The Wiener Library’s 2018 exhibition explored the exhibition held in 1938 at the New Burlington Galleries in London, "C20th German Art". It was the most prominent international response to the Nazi campaign against degenerate art, the largest display of C20th German art ever staged in Britain. The show featured 300+ examples of modern German art, by those artists who had faced persecution in Germany: it was an attempt to defend them and their work on a world stage.
ReplyDeleteThe exhibition featured a small number of the original artworks from the New Burlington Galleries’ exhibition, including works by Emil Nolde and Max Slevogt, presented with the stories of their lenders in 1938. The show also included items from The Wiener Library’s unique archival collections.
Wiener Library
DeleteI would have given my eye teeth to see the 1938 Exhibition and to read the mood of the huge crowds that gathered, but alas that wasn't possible.
Did the New Burlington Galleries’ exhibition publish a catalogue in 2018? Were there any exhibition reviews I might find?
There seemed to be justified anger in so many of the works and artists you refer to. Btw, I believe Melody Jacob is AI generated spam.
ReplyDeleteAndrew
DeletePerfect timing!!! At lunchtime today, we were discussing how to detect AI fakery, but noone there believed they would ever know who wrote the material. How can I find out if a blog post, or a comment on a blog post, has been faked?
The Nazis' view of art stressed pure, classical and Aryan aesthetics. Despite many modern German artists being admired by non-Nazis, the artists saw their paintings were being confiscated, and that they better get away to safer countries. Alas some were too slow getting away and were murdered.
In this case, drill down. She has a UK fashion business or something like that. No connection to your interests.
DeleteThe AI cleverly picks up what your post mentions, and makes a comment referencing what you have written about.
Andrew
DeleteI normally publish 20-40 responses to each of my blog posts, and am pleased to read them all, whether I agree with the comments or not. As long as they are polite.
But this week I received the 475th response to a post I wrote in 2013 called "7 Wonders of the World: Taj Mahal, Agra". This is not AI, I realise.... it is advertising rubbish, repeated over and over again. Despite loving India, I might cancel the original post :(
Interesting Hels. Schizophrenia and Art, I recall Physiatrists getting some of their patients to do art at certain times of their patients' psychosis. As one watching on it was always interesting to see such art.
ReplyDeleteMargaret,
DeleteFascinating topic, yes.
I have no doubt that mental illness can be expressed through creativity in art, literature, music or even sport. But if the psychosis is revealed via a severe disconnection from real life, the psychotic's thoughts may sound chaotic and delusional. A very original painting, for example, might be seen as a sign of mental illness OR an expression of creativity that viewers may not understand.
I find anything about Hitler and the second world war fascinating and yeah I can see how being mentally ill can affect a persons art
ReplyDeleteJo-Anne
Deleteand how being mentally ill can affect a person's political thinking and behaviour. Again I ask, if psychiatrists could see his brutal brain, why did they release him from the mental hospitals?
I paint myself and love the impressionist, expressionist, and also the German circle of Der Blaue Reiter, an artists’ organization founded in Munich by the Russian painter Wassily. I know that Hitler who took himself not only as a genius but also as the best painter of all times and of course hated the new wave. I think all people the mental sick or the "normal" ones just tried to express their inside feelings. I have made several exhibition and laughed my head off when heard people trying to find out what I thought and what I felt, because they wanted to show how intelligent they were, and I had just fun, and didn't think or feel anything.
ReplyDeleteIngrid
Deleteof course you loved the expressionists and the other German (and their fellow) modernists. Most people did back then, when Germany was recapturing its reputation as a cultural centre of the inter-war years. But I agree with you that artists painted what and how they needed to express themselves; they probably didn't give a hoot how other people read their artistic intentions. Psychotics even LESS so!