Were oils or watercolors wanted? asked Prinzhorn, before inquiring about the artists’ inspiration. Had Genzel seen any “so-called Negro sculptures”? Had Meyer, who had lived in the cathedral cities of Cologne and Münster, seen stained-glass windows, which his work resembled? Even if he had, his independent achievement was astonishing. Again, the Heidelberg men asked Hermkes to encourage productivity, adding that they were “more than willing to give a small gift of money.” Hermkes suggested that chewing tobacco for Genzel, and a letter of acknowledgment for Meyer, would “probably stimulate the productivity of both men.”
Around three-quarters of Prinzhorn’s artist-patients were diagnosed with schizophrenia. The rest shared a range of conditions from “manic-depressive” to “paralytic,” “imbecile,” and “epileptic.” Though more than half the patients living in German asylums were female, fewer than 20 percent of the works Prinzhorn received were by women, a reflection both of their status in society and of a narrow definition of art, which excluded many traditionally female handicrafts. An exception to this trend was Agnes Richter’s jacket. Richter, a Dresden seamstress, had been committed in 1893 after being arrested for disturbing the peace. In the asylum at Hubertusberg, she began work on an institutional garment made of gray linen, re-stitching the arms on backward, and embroidering it all over with expressions of her plight. “I am not big,” read one; others spelled out “my jacket,” “I am,” “I have,” “I miss today,” and “you do not have to.” Her asylum laundry number, 583, appeared again and again. The writing was mainly stitched to the inside, where it would have lain next to her body—an attempt to reinforce her sense of self, perhaps, in a place where that was easily lost. The jacket was Richter’s only item in the collection.
Katharina Detzel, too, was represented by very few works. Detzel was a powerful character in the asylum at Klingenmünster: Institutionalized after sabotaging a railway line in an act of political protest in 1907, she resisted the doctors’ punitive “treatments,” and frequently tried to escape. She wrote a book and a play, and began to create tiny figures from chewed bread before graduating to more substantial materials. Her most striking piece was a life-sized mannequin with male genitalia, which she called “man.” When she was angry, she would beat “man” with her fists; when she was happy, she would dance with him.
Clear themes began to emerge from the work. One concerned the near-supernatural power of machines. Jakob Mohr, a farmer with schizophrenia, drew a diabolical device that emitted invisible “influencing” waves, which he thought were producing his strange visions and sensations. Gustav Sievers, a weaver, designed a “flying weaving loom,” which he said would transform life on earth for three thousand years; he even applied for a patent. Sievers also spent time exploring the erotic potential of bicycles, depicting large-bosomed ladies pedaling to and fro: In institutions where men and women were not allowed to meet, sexual fantasies provided another rich vein. Joseph Schneller, a paranoid former draftsman for the Bavarian railways, depicted various pornographic “chicaneries,” as he described them, and produced a magnum opus titled Sadistisches Lebenswerk (Sadistic life’s work), which included vast, detailed plans of establishments in which sex was to take place and the specialist equipment that was required.
Other artists exhibited royal delusions. Else Blankenhorn, the daughter of a wealthy Karlsruhe family, had lived for many years in the Bellevue sanatorium, where she developed an elaborate fantasy life in which she was Else von Hohenzollern, the spiritual wife of Kaiser Wilhelm II. This imagined role required her to help deceased couples in need of redemption, an expensive business which she paid for by painting high-denomination banknotes. She also produced large quantities of beautiful, brightly colored oil paintings, influenced by Van Gogh and Edvard Munch, which often show a young woman floating, untethered, in an Expressionist landscape.
At a time when the church still governed most people’s lives, religious subjects were strongly represented in the collection. Carl Lange, a salesman, believed he had seen a divine face in a piece of meat while traveling in America in 1883. After plotting to assassinate the president of Mexico, he had been taken to the Bloomingdale asylum in New York before being deported and placed in the institution at Schwetz. There, he noticed overlapping heads, figures, and religious symbols that appeared in the sweat-stained insoles of his shoes. He drew more than a hundred such “miracles” in finely detailed pencil sketches, each of which was contained within the outline of a footprint. Josef Forster, a patient at the Karthaus-Prüll institution in Regensburg, believed he could actually become a god by only eating his own bodily excretions. When he achieved the holy state, he would be weightless and able to run through the air at great speed. He envisioned this moment in a magical, thickly painted portrait of a flying man, held to the earth only by the weights he suspended from each hand. In the corner of this work he wrote:
This is to show
That if one’s body no longer has any mass,
One must weigh oneself down.
And you can go
With great speed
Through the air
By summer, Prinzhorn realized it had been a mistake to promise to return the works. In an updated circular letter in June 1919, he wrote that it would be “extremely unfortunate” if this unique collection were to be dispersed and returned to asylum archives, where only a small number of people would have access. Instead, he wanted to keep it together as a “museum of pathological art.” The most interesting pieces would be hung in an exhibition room, while others would be archived and made available for future research.
That autumn, when artwork by around 130 patients had reached the clinic, Prinzhorn published his first article on the subject, in a German psychiatric journal. “The Artistic Work of the Mentally Ill” contained no details about the collection. Instead, it was an overview of the existing literature on the subject, including L’Art chez les fous (The art of the mad) by the French psychiatrist Paul Meunier and Genio e follia (Genius and madness) by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who argued that great artistic ability was akin to insanity. Prinzhorn also summarized shorter treatises by Freud, Kraepelin, and Jaspers. What shone through his analysis was a growing distaste for the diagnostic approach, when few people seemed to have examined the material’s relationship to “normal” art. How was it possible that an “insane” person could create works of undeniable artistic quality? A theory of configuration was required, he concluded, to explain the psychic processes behind artistic creation. Only then could “mad” and “sane” art be directly compared and light be shed on the problem of art’s relationship to insanity. This was the task that lay ahead. He would present his findings in a substantial volume which would showcase the abundant material that was piling up at the clinic.
For Prinzhorn, examining the immense variety of works within his collection was a transcendent experience. He realized he had uncovered an untapped source of schizophrenic creativity that matched or even surpassed professional art in its expressive power. Medical records could give him only a basic understanding of these strange creations, however, and he asked doctors to include the artists’ own explanations of certain pieces, recorded verbatim. Then even that wasn’t enough. To understand this art properly, he needed to interview the artists themselves. He began to travel around Germany, meeting and speaking with patients whose work he found particularly engaging.
There was one individual in his cohort of newly discovered talent who seemed to surpass all the rest for sheer ability. One day in 1920, Prinzhorn set out to pay him a visit.
3.
A MEETING AT EMMENDINGEN
The asylum at Emmendingen stood in the broad valley of the river Elz, a stretch of rich agricultural land framed by the foothills of the Black Forest, in the southwesternmost corner of Germany. The best way to reach it, then as now, was on the railway line that ran along the Rhine, from Mannheim to Basel via Heid
elberg, Karlsruhe, and Offenburg. Beyond the carriage windows, vineyards and picturesque villages ticked by as the engine hauled south across the floodplain. Ten miles before Freiburg, the track turned east toward the station at Emmendingen, a town of four thousand souls. At the time of Prinzhorn’s arrival, the asylum had its own rail stop, a mile farther down the line. It was a pleasant walk from here, along an avenue flanked with trees, to the bridge across a mountain stream that led to the asylum gates.
In Germany’s two-speed psychiatric system, Emmendingen’s inmates were in the slow lane. The rural Heil- und Pflegeanstalten (sanatoria and nursing homes), as they were known, were dumping grounds for those who failed to respond to treatment at the university clinics. But anyone expecting to find a Bedlam or a Colditz here would have been pleasantly surprised. Emmendingen was in effect a giant agricultural colony, constructed with a key therapeutic principle in mind: the restorative power of nature. Spread over 160 acres of land, it was mostly given over to fields, orchards, and vegetable gardens, where the patients were encouraged to work. At its heart lay a fifty-acre residential zone, set out like a city park, and in this warmest, most humid part of Germany, tropical vegetation sprouted at every side. In spring, clattering storks would nest on the roof of the refectory, and on summer evenings, the chorus of frogs outside the administration block grew so loud the duty manager had to shut the window to hear himself think.
As at Heidelberg, the campus was segregated by gender, and designed with a geometric balance that aimed to nurture harmony in the residents. From the gatehouses at the bridge, a central axis led north, bisecting the concert hall and the chapel. Women were kept to the east of this invisible line, men to the west. “Agitated” and dangerous patients were locked in the secure buildings of the large central block, which contained the surveillance wards, bath facilities, and isolation cells, as well as day rooms, sculleries, and toilets. Separate, closed areas on either side of the campus were designated for epileptics. The rest of the inmates, those in the “calm” or “semi-calm” categories, were housed a few dozen at a time in the two-story pavilions that dotted the park. The most trusted patients could walk directly from their verandas out into the gardens, then into the surrounding fields. Bühler, whose surviving medical records show no sign of violent behavior, would likely have lived in one of these “calm” or “semi-calm” houses on the male, western side of the campus.
Prinzhorn found the metalsmith to be a small man with a large head. Bühler was in his mid-fifties by this time, though his hair and beard were still black, and his eyes in particular were luminous—“darkly glowing,” the doctor recorded. He had a friendly smile and moved about quietly, though Prinzhorn found his actions “highly mannered.” The main difficulty was that no one understood much of what he said. The doctor had hoped that the excitement of seeing someone from the outside would rouse him from his confused state, but it soon became clear that this would not happen. Bühler looked at his visitor with “lively, mousy eyes” and evident distrust. With precise hand gestures, he prevented any attempt to start a conversation. Still, he was aware of the purpose of the meeting. He had a package wrapped in newspaper and bound with string, which he turned over and over in his hands.
Asked if he would open it, Bühler mumbled something about “unready things” and cast shy, sidelong glances. He tried to divert Prinzhorn’s attention by jumping to his feet and running to the window to signal to a friend, and when an asylum physician entered, he shouted a warning and withdrew to a corner, where he mumbled and made conjuring motions. After the physician had gone, Bühler checked the door carefully, listening for a long time in all directions, before returning to the bundle and shrugging. At one point, he loosened the string and took out a sheet of paper before suddenly reaching to his head in recognition and repacking it. He searched in his vest pockets for the butt of a cigarette, which he sniffed lovingly and lit, then stood up and began to walk back and forth, smoking, gesturing for Prinzhorn to be quiet. After a third of the butt was gone, he carefully put it out, rewrapped it, and returned to the table with a friendly smile.
Prinzhorn felt he was being teased. It was only after a “prolonged struggle with these whims,” he reported, that he finally persuaded Bühler to show a few of his treasured drawings from the package. As the visitor looked through the works, Bühler became coherent for the first time. “Yes, that’s quite good,” he said, and “There should be more red in it.”
Unlike most artists in the collection, Bühler was pedantic enough to have dated his drawings, either directly or in the writing he often included on the reverse side. This meant they acted as a record of the patient’s ability over more than two decades. Though Prinzhorn judged Bühler’s illness to have progressed substantially in the twenty-two years since he had entered the asylum system and believed him now to be in “the final schizophrenic stage,” his skills as an artist had not deteriorated. In fact, they seemed to have greatly improved.
The early, observational sketches of his “medical police officer” period at Illenau showed little evidence of the extraordinary psychic events occurring within him. At this point he was still able to write “comprehensible sentences containing his desires, communications, and general speculations,” and charming, evocative poetry:
Fairies, brushing
Avoid, bend in the dance
See turn enjoy envy
Go stand ride stride around all
Escaped from waving heights
Departing sufferings come here
Consecrated earthly bodies guess
Tricky clever smart women’s tears
Dancing round humming howl
Trembling grasses pining odors
Climb embracing the pairing urges
Up within us a breath of love.
By 1903, however, his writing had become less coherent, overtaken by the urge to systematize. Everything was pressed into some scheme or category, such as:
I.Dissolution of state M.
II.Stopping s Dem.
III.Victim h soz.
N IV.Index externally send away P.
III.well unified story
II.enjoyment moves geogr.
I.satis. need language
God I.Clam World Citizen +
Bühler’s art had begun to change around this time, too. Many of the works were still realistic, but others depicted strange “new organisms,” as Prinzhorn described them. Some of these resembled mythical animals—a creature that was half tapir and half dolphin; a plump monster that combined a dog, a boar, and a man, which seemed to threaten the viewer. In one sketch he added a body to a head-and-shoulders portrait that hung on a wall, and which magically sprang to life. Prinzhorn believed Bühler had drawn these scenes from the “fantastic intermediate realm” of his hallucinations and observed that his style had become increasingly natural and expressive as his illness progressed.
In more recent years, Bühler had approached what Prinzhorn considered the pinnacle of his achievement. He had begun to turn his gaze inward, producing a number of searing self-portraits. One of these, drawn in colored pencil with loose but pregnant strokes, had such burning tension that, in Prinzhorn’s eyes, it bore comparison to the works of Van Gogh. “For once,” he decided, “we are allowed to speak unqualified of art in the fullest sense of the word, of the pictorial confession of an artist who has long used speech only for confused games.” But Bühler had attained his greatest heights with a different subject altogether. Der Würgengel (The choking angel) showed one of God’s messengers with a shining crown of light, a sword, and a blank, torturer’s face, standing with its foot on the throat of a man who was attempting to wriggle free. At the right-hand side of the painting, the victim kicked up his legs, which were twisted and seen from the back. For Prinzhorn, all the “valuable intensifying impulses” of the schizophrenic mind reached their peak in this image. The
artist had composed the confusion of limbs expertly, giving a clear overview without losing the feeling of colossal tension. The work showed such “sovereign mastery” that it would compare favorably with the work of the most famous German masters of all: “It is certainly not blasphemous to speak of Grünewald and Dürer in relation to this work. All the features we found characteristic in analyzing [Bühler’s art] are mirrored in this, his masterpiece.”
There was no question in Prinzhorn’s mind that Bühler was seriously ill, yet his late output led the art historian to a revolutionary conclusion. No one with any knowledge of culture could look at these works and continue to explain schizophrenic change merely as a deterioration. Instead, viewers must cast aside their prejudices about the image’s creator and judge the work only on what they saw in front of them. Psychiatric art, Bühler proved, was just as much an aesthetic occurrence, and just as valid, as any other form of configuration.
4.
DANGEROUS TO LOOK AT!
The avant-garde was alive to Prinzhorn’s collection even as he accumulated it. It helped that he was an energetic letter-writer and self-promoter, with a growing range of contacts in Weimar Germany, from the painter Emil Nolde to the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Gerhart Hauptmann. Some of these people were friends he had made during his prolonged student days. Others he had met through his wives, particularly Eva, whose father was well connected in Berlin. Two of his most valuable supporters at this time were the philosopher Ludwig Klages and the art historian Wilhelm Fraenger.
Klages was fourteen years older than Prinzhorn. Handsome and peevish, he had once been a fixture of the Munich scene, a member of the “Cosmic Circle,” and a lover of the Bohemian queen of the Schwabing, Fanny zu Reventlow. His philosophy, dubbed “biocentrism,” was built on Nietzsche’s ideas about humanity’s place in nature. Humans, like all animals, were inescapably connected to the natural world and could experience a harmonious inner life by living at one with their environment. But civilization had caged the “wild,” animal part of humankind, Klages proposed, making people neurotic and unhappy. Furthermore, all attempts to rediscover the spiritual beauty of humanity-in-nature were destined to fail, blocked by our species’s development of self-awareness, command of language, and ability to think in the abstract. The human condition, therefore, was a perpetual conflict between the unconscious animal drive to regain equilibrium with nature and the self-conscious desire to assert uniquely human traits.
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness Page 4