The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

by Charlie English

  By the time of his Heidelberg visit, Weygandt was at the forefront of a growing band of medical men who were alarmed at modern art’s preoccupation with pathology, and when he saw Prinzhorn’s work he was livid. He poured his scorn into an article for the Berlin weekly Die Woche, in which he decried the obsession of “extreme modern art” with insanity. The pictorial creations of the mentally ill could be “medically interesting,” he wrote, and were often useful to the psychiatrist for diagnostic purposes, but there was no such thing as “mad art.” The alleged artistic expressions of mental patients were merely the clumsy, technically awkward “congenital nonsense” produced by insane impulses. Reproducing works from his own collection of patient art alongside those of professionals, he subjected artists to a psychiatric “analysis,” comparing a landscape by Paul Klee with a “schizophrenic insane image” and conceptual work by Picasso with the “delusional ideas” of paranoid patients. He also described paintings by Cézanne, Kokoschka, Kandinsky, Schwitters, and Van Gogh in pathological terms. The amazing similarity between “mad art” and the “excrescences of modernism” did not mean that modern artists were mentally ill, Weygandt argued, but was symptomatic of an Entartung, or “degeneracy,” an “aberration from the path of normal thought and feeling” which, “in our sick and troubled times,” contributed substantially to lowering the dignity of mankind.

  In raising the specter of “degeneration,” Weygandt introduced one of the great canards of nineteenth-century thinking into the discussion around Prinzhorn’s material. The roots of modern degeneracy theory lay in the racial hierarchy developed by the French diplomat Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau in the 1850s. In his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the inequality of the human races), Gobineau organized humanity into a ladder of white, yellow, and black peoples. The whites occupied the top tier, with the mythical Aryans being the noblest and most gifted of all, but their “ruination,” as Gobineau put it, rested on the fact that they were less numerous than the lower races and were thereby forced to mix with them. This mixing caused the superior breeds to lose their purity and become “degenerate,” which he defined as follows:

  A nation is degenerate when the blood of its founders no longer flows in its veins, but has been gradually deteriorated by successive foreign admixtures; so that the nation, while retaining its original name, is no longer composed of the same elements.

  Gobineau’s idea had spawned a host of cultural theories, including those of his friend, the composer Richard Wagner, an established anti-Semite who bemoaned Jewish influence on culture in his essay “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (Jews in music). Gobineau had not referred to the Jews in his theory, but Wagner did. In his version, racial mixing was a one-way process: It worked only to the detriment of the higher race, and conferred no change on the lowest race at all. While the whites could degenerate utterly, it was “an amazing, incomparable phenomenon” that the Jew, the “plastic demon of the decay of humanity,” could enjoy “triumphant safety” even as he brought about the demise of his alleged racial superiors.

  Several writers besides Wagner took up Gobineau’s degeneration baton. One of these was the Jewish Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who borrowed the idea to inform his ruminations on creativity, Genio e follia (Genius and madness), in 1864. But it was Lombroso’s student Max Nordau, who was also Jewish, who did most to spread the idea at the turn of the century, through his influential 1892 book Entartung (Degeneration). Nordau, a physician who claimed to have based his arguments in medical science, warned that:

  Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists. These, however, manifest the same mental characteristics, and for the most part the same somatic features, as [those] who satisfy their unhealthy impulses with the knife of the assassin or the bomb of the dynamiter, instead of with pen and pencil.

  The whole direction of art and literature of the time showed “insane tendencies” such as moral insanity, imbecility, and dementia, Nordau warned. Artists who produced anything other than realism were clearly physically ill. The Impressionists were afflicted by a “trembling of the eyeball,” while those who, like Manet, painted “falsely-coloured pictures” were probably suffering from hysteria or neurasthenia. These degenerate “anti-social vermin” should be jailed or committed to lunatic asylums to prevent them from infecting the population.

  Several critics pointed out the problems with Nordau’s thesis. George Bernard Shaw wrote a lengthy riposte entitled “The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense About Artists Being Degenerate.” Oscar Wilde quipped that while he agreed with the author that all geniuses were mad, Nordau had neglected to mention that “all sane people are idiots.” Entartung sold well nevertheless, and the concept became part of the political dialogue in Germany, particularly for social conservatives such as Weygandt.

  The Hamburg psychiatrist’s intervention irritated and alarmed Prinzhorn. He addressed it obliquely in a circular letter in July 1921, which stated that the clinic was anxious to avoid any scandal but made it clear that he and Wilmanns would not be cowed. Given the attention the collection was receiving from artists and art lovers of all kinds, they were increasingly being urged to open up the collection to the general public, to allow the widest possible debate.

  The opinions of eminent artists and scholars, from different disciplines, support us in the idea that the collection is called to deliver a contribution to the psychology of artistic creation beyond the field of psychiatric reflection, and that in the end it can have a clarifying effect in the chaos of current art.

  This was the last circular letter Prinzhorn sent, as it turned out, and his longed-for museum of pathological art would never come to pass. Tension had been building between him and his colleagues at the clinic for some time, and at the height of the summer, Prinzhorn abruptly resigned.

  5.

  THE SCHIZOPHRENIC MASTERS

  Prinzhorn’s decision to quit was as pathological as it was planned. The research for his book was more or less complete, and he was ready to free himself of Wilmanns’s influence, but the swooping trajectory of his correspondence in the spring of 1921 suggests he had his own psychological problems in the form of depression, stress, and perhaps even latent war trauma. His long absences from Heidelberg, combined with his growing dislike for psychiatry, made the time he spent at the clinic increasingly unpleasant as the year progressed. He described himself as an “outsider” and suspected his colleagues of plotting against him—if he made the slightest professional misstep, it would provoke a “howl of joy,” he told a friend. In his letters, he accused Wilmanns of deliberately undermining him and excluding him from social events, and suspected the professor of “grubby tricks” in his failure to find money for a museum of pathological art. In March, Prinzhorn diagnosed himself as an “unstable psychopath with hysterical traits,” and felt he was losing his grip, “floating in the space between heaven and earth, inwardly bound for nowhere, at home nowhere, with no goal.”

  The task of writing up his conclusions added to his burden. In April he retreated to the small holiday home he and Erna kept in the Black Forest. Snow lay deep on the ground, and he was alone. He worked fifteen hours a day, until his head was “thick,” and became mentally “helpless” and “depressed.” He hoped to become a psychotherapist when the art project was complete, but had begun to question himself, and even the book now seemed “dubious.” The following month he was back in Heidelberg, “a bundle of feelings of insufficiency,” and believed Wilmanns was treating him in a disgraceful manner. On July 15, he resigned.

  Prinzhorn was thirty-five years old, a respected doctor of medicine and philosophy, a husband, and a father of two, but he celebrated like an undergraduate, hooking up with his friends the Schroeders and a mysterious blond woman he called “the ivory Swede” for a twelve-hour pleasure boat trip on the Neckar. The
y decked out the small vessel with so many plants and bouquets it looked like a “pile of flowers,” and they wore swimsuits, Prinzhorn borrowing Frau Schroeder’s. He described their attention-grabbing progress along the river in a letter to his friend Käthe Knobloch:

  [Schroeder was] a slender, sinewy young athlete in a black short swimsuit, [Frau Schroeder] in a white robe with a colorful headscarf, the boyish blond Swede in light wine-red raw silk pyjamas with poppy seeds in her hair, me in the Schroeder woman’s miniaturized bathing suit, with a cloth around the shoulders and, as a hat, a knotted handkerchief with cornflowers.

  Erna did not feature in this reminiscence. She may have been on one of her extended visits to her parents’ house in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Quite what her husband’s cavorting did to her fragile mental state is not recorded, but the marriage was in difficulty. The Prinzhorns had spent much of their relationship apart: While he was in the army, she had split her time between the Bellevue sanatorium, their home in Freiburg, and St. Gallen. Now, with the added demands of two young children, the atmosphere in the apartment on Neue Schloßstraße was strained. A significant chunk of the blame lay with Prinzhorn, who was indecisive, neurotic, and resisted attachment of any kind—indeed, these were the qualities that had drawn him to psychology in the first place. But the irony was not lost on him that they had fallen in love as he tried to help Erna through her mental illness, and now the tables were turning. He noted bitterly how “this person, in whose schizophrenia I have penetrated so deeply and actively that I am somehow complicit in its presence…turns majestically away from me.”

  More and more, Prinzhorn looked to escape Heidelberg. In 1921–1922 alone he went to Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Cologne, Hanover, Munich, Zurich, Bern, Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna, lecturing, training in psychotherapy, building up his freelance work, and finishing the book. He secured an introduction to Freud through Binswanger, the director of the Bellevue. Prinzhorn had “an artistic nature with a strong impulse toward independence and a great opposition to all authority,” Binswanger wrote, and had curated the Heidelberg collection “very well.” On October 12, 1921, Prinzhorn delivered a guest lecture at the Wednesday meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, with Freud in the chair. His themes—the special relationship between the work of mental patients and contemporary art; the idea that the capacity for artistic configuration is given to everyone—were the major lines of inquiry in the book he was close to finishing. Freud gave Prinzhorn a good review, telling Binswanger that he had “personally made a good impression,” though no lasting relationship was established.

  Prinzhorn felt a deeper connection to Carl Jung. In November, he began a three-month placement at the Burghölzli hospital in Zurich, where Jung worked as a clinical psychiatrist. The apprentice was impressed. “The profound wisdom and insights I have always felt in this man are really there,” he wrote to Knobloch. “We work hard together….That he offered me this, so to speak, au pair, or honoris causa, naturally pleases me.” Next time they met, he told his friend, he would identify her “type” in the Jungian manner.

  Prinzhorn’s travels through the postwar intellectual German world continued into April 1922 when he visited the Bauhaus art school in Weimar. Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus’s founder, was initially wary of the whole idea of psychiatric art. “I do not want to let Prinzhorn speak here,” he told his lover, Lily Hildebrandt. “Such border crossings are dangerous and confusing, and the minds here are already sufficiently overwhelmed.” But Prinzhorn won Gropius around. The images he showed were “really quite astonishing,” Gropius told Hildebrandt afterward, and Prinzhorn himself seemed “a fine person.”

  Throughout this period, Prinzhorn kept up a long and difficult correspondence with his publisher, Julius Springer, over the editing of the book. The text was too long, and he had to trim the number of schizophrenic artists profiled from a dozen to ten, dropping the Swiss watchmaker Hermann Mebes and the only woman, Else Blankenhorn. He decided to produce separate monographs on each at a later date, though these would never materialize. He made great demands of Springer: The book’s title had to be printed in a special “runic” font, the cover had to be black, and he wanted lavish quantities of high-quality images. At last, by the end of April, these issues were resolved, and on May 4, 1922, he held a copy in his hands for the first time.

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  Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the mentally ill) was a monumental achievement, an object of elegance and substance. If he had failed in his ambition to create a physical museum, the book itself was a virtual art gallery. It would be hailed as an “inaugural act” and an “emergence,” which gave patient works a worthy presentation for the first time. Weighing almost three pounds, with 361 luxurious pages, it contained 20 plates, many in color, and 167 black-and-white images, the highlights of the five thousand pieces of art by around 450 patients—mostly from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, but also from the Baltic states, Italy, and Japan—that Prinzhorn had gathered at Heidelberg. Springer was a scientific publisher, but this was an art book from its opening folio, which showed a full-color, near-life-sized reproduction of Der Würgengel, one of seven full-page images of Bühler’s works. Dozens of Genzel’s sculptures were also included, along with copious pieces by Meyer, Schneller, Lange, Wieser, Zinowiew, and many, many more.

  Prinzhorn’s unusual title addressed the core controversy of whether this material constituted art. The word Kunst (art) implied a value judgment and led to the dismissal of everything else as “non-art,” the doctor explained, so he had borrowed a word used by Fraenger, Bildnerei, which translates as “artistry,” but also “imagery” or “pictures,” to describe all objects produced by the creative process. Bildnerei was the result of the primordial human need for self-expression via configuration, and was therefore equally valid whether it was produced by a schizophrenic mind or a sane one. It could neither be “sick” nor “healthy.”

  Developing this theme, he turned his considerable skill as a writer against the psychiatric profession and its attempts to use art—the highest manifestation of the human spirit—as diagnostic material. He attacked Cesare Lombroso for reinforcing the idea that geniuses were more or less insane and sparking a wave of attempts to pathologize important cultural figures. Though he didn’t name him, Prinzhorn’s fury was clearly aimed at Weygandt, who had dismissed the material as “congenital nonsense,” and perhaps at Wilmanns, too, who had once hoped to use the Heidelberg collection as a medical tool. Any psychiatrist who attempted to dismiss a controversial work of art by casting the suspicion of mental illness on its author acted “carelessly and stupidly, no matter what his qualifications,” Prinzhorn argued. It would simply not do to “explain” artists’ works by pathographic investigations of their lives. Even “reputable psychiatrists” were making vulgar and sensational comparisons between professional art and the art of patients in the press, and these served only to “arm the philistines.” It was “superficial and wrong” to infer that the authors of two separate paintings shared the same underlying psychic conditions simply because their work bore an external resemblance:

  The conclusion that a painter is mentally ill because he paints like a given mental patient is no more intelligent or convincing than another…that [the artists] Pechstein and Heckel are Africans from the Camerouns because they produce wooden figurines like those by Africans from the Camerouns.

  A common error of psychiatry, in Prinzhorn’s view, was the lazy comparison of schizophrenic configuration with “degeneration,” or decadence. There were various problems with the term “degeneration,” which was not defined but implied that there was a “norm” from which the artist deviated. There was no norm, Prinzhorn insisted, and he would avoid such value judgments. In fact, since psychiatry had no standing in the cultural field, all its pronouncements in the field of art were irrelevant.

  Having dealt with his main enemy, Prinzhorn turne
d to analyzing the pictures using the knowledge of the philosophy of art that he had acquired from Lipps, Schmarsow, Freud, Fraenger, Jaspers, and Klages. The works in the collection were direct expressions of the psyches of their authors, all of whom had a fundamental drive to “build a bridge from the self to others”: These were compulsive, vital acts of communication. The configurative process itself was an honorable phenomenon, and only someone hostile to it on principle would make cheap fun of the result, however distorted or strange it appeared. The tragedy of contemporary art, he wrote, was that it had lost touch with this primeval purpose. Artists were taught that there was an objective reality, a “correct” photographic version of the world, when there was no such thing. The mental image of a particular scene was interpreted differently by every individual, and its expression could sit anywhere on a scale from the narrowest realism to the broadest abstraction. In fact, the chimera of correctness and completeness, particularly in representations of the human body, had done a great deal of harm to art. It was wrong to judge a work on its correspondence to reality, as such judgments could only be based on the dogma of the moment. Instead, the value of a work lay in its author’s ability to relate whatever moved them, so that the observer could empathically participate in the experience as closely as possible. Expressive power, rather than technical ability, was what made this possible. Children, “primitive” people, and the insane all demonstrated expressive talent in their art.