After visiting him at his home outside Zurich, Prinzhorn became a zealous follower of Klages, convinced that he was the natural heir to Goethe and Nietzsche and the antidote to the disarray in German philosophy. Prinzhorn would build Klages’s ideas into his interpretation of the art collection. More than that, Klages would become a father figure and lodestar for the younger man, one of the few fixed points in an often chaotic life.
Fraenger was a very different creature—a flamboyant character who liked to combine suede trousers and a burgundy frock coat with matching slippers. He had quit his academic job in the art history faculty at Heidelberg for a more free-form career, and in university circles he was seen as a Rasputin, a corrupter of youth, and a devil. In early 1919 he had founded a society of modern-minded associates called the Gemeinschaft (Community), which included Prinzhorn, the artist Oskar Kokoschka, and Carl Zuckmayer. The Gemeinschaft organized lively debates, banquets, long walks in the forest, musical performances, and outings to exhibitions, and Prinzhorn and Fraenger struck up an intense relationship over their shared interests in art and psychology. On long summer evenings, the group of friends would head out to one of the taverns in the hills behind the castle. A favorite venue was the Wolfsbrunnen, a secluded glade in the dense forest, with a tavern and a fishpond fed by a natural spring. Here, far from the disapproval of the town, they sang and performed, flirted and drank, late into the night.
Prinzhorn excelled on these occasions. Zuckmayer recalled him wearing the same wine-red frock coat as Fraenger and singing a medieval French fable in his beautiful voice. Another time he played the lead in Kokoschka’s Der brennende Dornbusch (The burning bush), opposite an attractive young female doctor. The play was a sequel to the artist’s Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, hope of womankind), which had come close to causing a massacre on its opening night in Vienna after the audience rioted and a group of soldiers entered the theater with swords drawn. This was exactly the sort of modernist provocation of which the Gemeinschaft approved: if Fraenger was their prophet, Zuckmayer pronounced, Kokoschka was their god. Many of Prinzhorn’s artistic reference points, from Breugel to Bosch to Der Blaue Reiter, could be traced to Fraenger. Fraenger invited Prinzhorn to talk to the Gemeinschaft about psychiatric art, borrowed works from the collection to present in his apartment, and helped spread word of it among his contacts in the art world.
Anyone who knew about modern art who saw Prinzhorn’s images in those days couldn’t fail to notice their astonishing resemblance to contemporary professional painting. This wasn’t a coincidence. A surprising number of avant-garde artists had been pursuing their own investigations of madness for years, a consequence of the tremendous changes that had given rise to modernism in the first place.
Alongside the technological revolution, the late nineteenth century had seen a revolution in Western thought, which had overthrown many of the old assumptions about religion, society, and humanity’s place in the world. Darwin’s theories had demolished the Garden of Eden, Nietzsche had announced the death of God, and Freud had uncovered vast unsuspected depths inside every man, woman, and child. In light of these ideas, the art that had been taught for so long in the academies, with its classical subject matter and its strict ideas of proportion and beauty, seemed irrelevant. The avant-garde instead began to dig for inspiration in sources they believed to be untainted by so-called civilization, such as the art of “primitive” people, of children, and of the insane.
There was no better template for the “mad artist” in the early years of the twentieth century than Vincent van Gogh. The “red-headed lunatic,” as he was known in the southern French town where he lived, had created radically stylized views of the world, including the asylum he entered in 1889. Instead of producing a mutually agreed, art-school account of reality, Van Gogh’s works appeared to have been distorted by the lens of his own inner turmoil. The emotional power of his painting was a revelation to a new generation of artists who called themselves Expressionists and was so vital to the Dresden group Die Brücke (The Bridge) that one member suggested they change their name to “Van Goghiana.” An idea of the excitement the Dutchman provoked can be read in the response of Paul Klee, who saw Van Gogh’s paintings for the first time in Munich in 1908. He was certainly a genius, Klee decided:
Pathetic to the point of being pathological, this endangered man can endanger one who does not see through him. Here a brain is consumed by the fire of a star. It frees itself in its work just before the catastrophe. Deepest tragedy takes place here, real tragedy, natural tragedy, exemplary tragedy. Permit me to be terrified!
Three years later, Klee wrote a review of a show by Der Blaue Reiter, the Munich-based Expressionist group he would soon join, noting that “Neither childish behaviour nor madness are insulting words here, as they commonly are. All this is to be taken very seriously, more seriously than all the public galleries, when it comes to reforming today’s art.”
Just as Klee and his colleagues had begun to investigate madness, the First World War broke out, bringing psychological trauma into almost every household in Europe. Twenty million were killed and the same number left mutilated. Every village had its roll call of dead, its blind and its limbless, its begging veterans and its matchbook sellers. Added to the veterans’ physical suffering was a less visible mental toll, manifested in a host of symptoms, from tics to mutism to unexplained paralysis and temporary blindness. Post-traumatic stress was not yet understood, but it affected soldiers, civilians, refugees, children, and parents alike. There was little sympathy for these psychological conditions, and many were left untreated or diagnosed as neurotics, “mental cases,” shell-shock victims, and cowards.
Artists were as devastated by the war as everyone else. Two of the leading lights of Der Blaue Reiter, Franz Marc and August Macke, were killed in the fighting. The Expressionist sculptor Käthe Kollwitz lost her eighteen-year-old son, Peter, in Belgium: she would pour her grief into her work for the rest of her life. “Made a drawing,” she wrote in 1916. “The mother letting her dead son slide into her arms…I feel obscurely…that Peter is somewhere in the work and I might find him.” Several of those who survived the combat suffered nervous breakdowns, as Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and George Grosz did. Others, such as Otto Dix, would spend years afterward reproducing the visions of insane, grinning soldiers and gas-mask-wearing aliens that had been seared into their minds at the front. Max Ernst was so traumatized by his war experience that he wrote simply: “On the first of August 1914 M[ax].E[rnst]. died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918.”
Even as the fighting continued, an artistic resistance had sprouted among a group of intellectuals taking refuge in Switzerland. In February 1916, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings launched the Cabaret Voltaire nightclub in a Zurich back alley. The young crowd who gathered in this tiny venue shared a belief in the power of art to save humanity and a disgust at the rationalism that had led to the carnage. “Repelled by the slaughterhouses of the world war, we turned to art,” wrote Hans Arp. “We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the furious madness of these times.” Ball, Hennings, Arp, and their friends chose a deliberately nonsensical name for their deliberately irrational movement: Dada.
By the war’s end, insanity was a central theme for art. On top of its pre-1914 significance as an authentic route to the Freudian interior and a weapon in the struggle against the bourgeoisie and the academy system, it was now also a badge of experience and suffering, and an emblem of resistance against the generation of warmongers who had been so careless with human life. The schizophrenic postwar age required a schizophrenic postwar art. Madness had never been in such vogue.
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Prinzhorn traveled widely in 1920, visiting patients, presenting his discoveries in lectures, and building an appetite for the book he intended to write. He carried with him a portfolio of patient art th
at left a profound impression wherever he went, and he noticed that the material deeply affected people of all ages, characters, and walks of life: It seemed to force them to confront fundamental questions about schizophrenia and the zeitgeist in an era that appeared to have lost touch with reality. Professional artists who saw the images fell into a handful of distinct groups. There were those who admired or dismissed the pictures without differentiating “healthy” from “sick” work, and those who renounced it all as “non-art” but were fascinated by it nevertheless. A third category were “shaken to their foundations” by the material, Prinzhorn wrote, and believed they had discovered “the original process of all configuration, pure inspiration, for which…after all, every artist thirsts.” Some individuals in this latter group were so overwhelmed that they found themselves forced to reconsider their entire oeuvre. This was precisely what happened on the evening of Saturday, June 19, when Prinzhorn presented his material to the artist Adolf Hölzel and his circle.
At the age of sixty-seven, Hölzel was an eminent figure in the modern art world, a founding member of both the Munich and Vienna Secessions, and a progressive and influential teacher who had recently retired from the Stuttgart academy. That evening, he and around thirty followers and ex-pupils gathered at a friend’s villa outside Stuttgart to hear Prinzhorn talk and to view highlights from the collection. Hölzel was “shaken to pieces” by what he saw, Prinzhorn observed. Over the following days, the artist repeatedly asked a friend to visit him to help examine drawings of his own that he thought were strikingly similar to those in the Heidelberg collection. Hölzel’s combinations of images and handwriting bore an especially close resemblance to the work of August Klett, a former traveling salesman from Swabia who believed himself to be Christ. But the patient who struck Hölzel most deeply was a woman known only as Frau von Zinowiew, an inmate at the Berlin Zehlendorf asylum. Zinowiew drew connected, kaleidoscopic shapes in crayon, adding realistic human heads that popped up strangely at prominent points. For years afterward, Hölzel would create very similar images. In general, he admired the unrestrained freedom he saw in the Heidelberg collection. “Undoubtedly, it is a truly artistic path that we find in the more outstanding lunatic drawings,” he wrote.
Prinzhorn’s slides had an even greater effect that evening on one of Hölzel’s former students, Oskar Schlemmer. Schlemmer at that time was at a crossroads in his artistic development, and the experience of seeing the works from Heidelberg sent him into a rapture. “For a whole day I imagined I was going to go mad,” he wrote to his fiancée, Helena Tutein, “and was even pleased at the thought, because then I would have everything I have been wanting; I would exist totally in a world of ideas, of introspection—what the mystics seek.” The material showed “surprising similarities to the moderns,” he noted, especially to Klee, who “has seen these things and is enthusiastic.” He was fascinated by the work of Baron Hyazinth von Wieser, a law graduate from Vienna who lived in a Munich asylum and believed his life was governed by magic and supernatural forces. The baron had invented an abstract system of “ologies”—including willology, ideology, sexology, and jokeology—in which human characteristics were translated into geometric shapes. He had drawn a sheet of delicate symbols representing several of these states, and had written across the top of this chart: “Dangerous to Look At!” Schlemmer couldn’t get this idea out of his head.
Of course, Schlemmer told Tutein, Prinzhorn’s material would be used as an indictment of modern art—“See, they paint just like the insane!”—and he had to admit it was “a dangerous game” modern artists were playing by exploring mental illness. Even so, he envied the patients, since he believed “the madman lives in the realm of ideas which the sane artist tries to reach; for the madman it is purer, because completely separate from external reality.” For months afterward, Schlemmer continued to be “much preoccupied” with the questions that arose from Prinzhorn’s talk. Future art historians would make an explicit connection between Wieser’s ideas and Schlemmer’s change in artistic direction that summer.
But the star witness for the collection’s artistic value in these early days was Alfred Kubin. Another veteran of the Schwabing scene and Der Blaue Reiter, and a long-term correspondent of Fraenger’s, Kubin was deeply neurotic. His life had been filled with traumas and breakdowns, and he mined the dark side of his personality in his art to the extent that his Munich friends had dubbed him the “High Priest of Horror.” In the autumn of 1920, while he was recuperating from a bout of overwork at a sanatorium in Alsbach, his doctor suggested they visit the art collection at Heidelberg together, and on September 24 the two men drove the short distance to the clinic. Prinzhorn was away, but Karl Wilmanns showed them the most important parts of the now substantial trove.
Kubin was ecstatic about the material. He found it “stupendous” and “overwhelming,” and he hurried to record his impressions with “a feeling of most uplifting joy.” Most of it could be held up alongside that of the best Expressionists, he decided, but was even more original. He and his doctor friend were enormously touched by the “miracles of the artist’s spirit” that had arisen from the patients’ subconscious depths, a place that lay “beyond all thoughtful deliberation.” He was so enamored that he wanted to keep some of the art for himself, and he offered to exchange five pieces from his own collection for four crayon drawings by Bühler and a watercolor by Klett—a remarkable tribute, since it put the work of stigmatized asylum inmates on an equal footing with that of professionals. As soon as he returned home to Upper Austria, he determined to write an article introducing the collection to a wider audience. His essay “The Art of the Mad,” published in the magazine Das Kunstblatt in 1922, represented a formidable public endorsement of patient art by a leading modern artist.
Kubin picked out eleven Prinzhorn artists whose work particularly impressed him. Following tradition, he didn’t publish their names, though they can all now be identified. Apart from the former architect Paul Goesch, whose work Kubin dismissed because of the artist’s “unpleasant” technical training, he understood the rest were self-taught. He found Klett “very stimulating,” while the compositions of the ex-naval officer Clemens von Oertzen showed “fragrant, almost refined tones.” Oskar Herzberg, a patient in Leipzig, had created “collisions of cosmic bodies” and a “fabulously grotesque Kaiser Wilhelm” that reminded him of Klee’s work, while a “mighty lord of the wooden stick”—Genzel—made grotesques similar to idols found in the South Sea islands. But it was Bühler who made the strongest impression. According to Kubin, he was an undoubtedly “brilliant talent” with an “extraordinary power of invention” who created unprecedented symphonies of color.
I remember especially Der Würgengel, a truly satanic composition, demonic horses, donkeys in their boldest foreshortenings, dimly bathed in a colorful mist. The glass tureen from which the head of an Adonai or Beelzebub looks at us horribly like the evil spirit of intoxication!
Kubin clutched his head, he wrote, at the thought that these works were supposed to have been done by a “madman,” since their primal inventiveness spoke of a “master of the first rank”; he could hardly believe it when Wilmanns described Bühler as just as “crazy” as the others, closed to the outside, incapable of any communication with his fellow humans. It would be a fabulous moment when these outstanding images could be measured against the best achievements of great artists. Sadly, the art trade had no interest in such objects, and the clinic itself had no money to exhibit them regularly, but sooner or later, Kubin felt sure, a benefactor would emerge who would help set up a permanent exhibition space in Heidelberg. “Then,” he wrote, “from this place, where the creative output of the insane was collected, spiritual freshness will flow.”
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Although most of the select group of artists, art historians, and medical practitioners who encountered the collection before 1922 were enthusiastic, even ecstatic,
not everyone liked what they saw. Prinzhorn observed that the culturally conservative were the least enthusiastic about the collection, and in May 1921 a visitor arrived from Hamburg who closely matched that description. With his irritable expression, goatee beard, and heavy-rimmed spectacles, Wilhelm Weygandt made such a perfect foil to the Heidelberg impresario of psychiatric art that he was later dubbed the “anti-Prinzhorn.” In addition to his role as director of the Friedrichsberg asylum, where Bühler was once held, Weygandt had recently taken on the duties of professor of psychiatry at the new University of Hamburg. Although a political liberal, he was deeply reactionary when it came to medical and cultural issues. At a meeting of psychiatrists and neurologists in 1910, he had been so outraged to hear Freud’s ideas about child sexuality that he had banged his fist on the table and yelled that it was a matter for the police. He had also put a great deal of effort into accumulating a gruesome collection of psychological artefacts, including almost three hundred skulls of psychiatric patients, a large quantity of grotesque case photographs of disabled people, and hundreds of examples of what he called “pathological art practice,” including drawings, paintings, sculptures, and embroidery. In 1922, he would try to procure works by Genzel for his collection, with the aim of “drawing very different conclusions” about the artist than Prinzhorn had done. The staff at Eickelborn did not provide them.
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness Page 5