At the center of the book lay Prinzhorn’s pièce de résistance, his all-important, lavishly illustrated profiles of the ten “schizophrenic masters” he had found in the collection, each of whom had been given a pseudonym to protect their families’ reputations. He began with Genzel (whom he called “Brendel”) and followed with Klett (“Klotz”), Meyer (“Moog”), August Natterer (Neter), Joseph Knopf (“Knüpfer”), Clemens von Oertzen (“Orth”), Hermann Behle (“Beil”), Wieser (“Welz”), and Schneller (“Sell”). His greatest artistic find, Bühler (“Pohl”), was saved for last, with Der Würgengel picked out as his crowning glory. Some of the pieces here were so clearly artistic, Prinzhorn wrote, that many an average “healthy” work was left far behind. Indeed, professional artists’ attempts to mimic the work of schizophrenics appeared ersatz when compared with genuine examples of “mad” configuration, which were the epitome of artistic authenticity. The patients with schizophrenia in his collection were “in contact, in a totally irrational way, with the most profound truths.” Unbound from the repressive customs of civilization, they had reproduced, unconsciously, pictures of transcendence as they perceived it.
* * *
—
For Prinzhorn to complete such a project in little more than two and a half years was astonishing. A courageous psychological explorer, he had wandered into the little-charted borderlands between art and madness and returned with a schizophrenic treasure trove that mirrored the spirit of the age. It was true that he had romanticized the idea of the autonomous schizophrenic and glossed over the fact that several of his artists were formally trained, but his book would still be hailed as the standard work of his field many decades later. He had rescued art from the diagnostic clutches of psychiatry and placed the previously despised output of the mentally ill on a pedestal, equal to or higher than that of some of the most vaunted artists in German history.
His ideas would infuriate cultural conservatives, as he must have known they would. He had provoked the psychiatric establishment by ordering it out of the cultural sphere altogether, and by batting away its favored concept of degeneracy. He had also demolished the value system of the academies—of realism, objectivity, and years of training in technique, color, perspective, and anatomy—and held up individual expression and raw configurative power as the key ingredients for art, just as the avant-garde did. There would be consequences, for art and for his artists, as the nationalists and reactionaries sought their revenge. In the coming Germany, only one individual’s expression would matter: that of Adolf Hitler. Painting, sculpture, and design would be placed at the service of his vision of a pure ethnic community, marching in unison to the National Socialist drum. There would be no room in these ranks for Prinzhorn’s schizophrenic acts of configuration, or for the people who produced them.
6.
ADVENTURES IN NO-MAN’S-LAND
In the depths of his difficult divorce, the achievement of Bildnerei der Geisteskranken provided some solace for Prinzhorn. The book “goes well,” he wrote to his friend Käthe Knobloch in August 1922. It had doubled in price, and a reprint would soon be ordered. Reviews were positive. For the art journal Kunstwart und Kulturwart, it was an incomparable textbook on the psychology of creation; in different times, when there was less stigma attached to mental illness, Der Würgengel should have adorned the magazine’s cover. Emil Ludwig in the Prager Presse called it “a new, groundbreaking study” that “reveals so much with tact and sensitivity.” Anyone who opened it would find “the breath gets heavier, the eye glazes, the heart rises in the throat…gentle souls beware!” Oskar Pfister, writing in Freud’s journal Imago, described it as “highly commendable.” It was not surprising that the book “conquered the interest not only of psychologists and psychiatrists, but also of art lovers, indeed the educated world.” Karl Jaspers noted that its “quite outstanding and numerous illustrations” made it the authoritative book on the subject.
That summer, Prinzhorn’s art gallery in book form became part of the German cultural landscape. The Paris-based writer Clara Malraux, holidaying with her husband, André, in Berlin, described the context in which it landed: The cinemas were screening the Expressionist horror film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The cabinet of Doctor Caligari), the galleries were hosting shows by Dix and Rembrandt, and in the bookstores she found volumes of Expressionist poetry, the early works of Freud, and Prinzhorn’s book on “the art of lunatics.” Needless to say, she bought a copy. The Dadaist dancer Sophie Taeuber wrote to her collaborator and future husband, Hans Arp, to tell him it had finally been published and that he absolutely had to obtain it. He did.
At the Bauhaus in Weimar, the book was “going the rounds” of the staff and students, according to Lothar Schreyer, the head of the Bauhaus stagecraft workshop. Schreyer remembered dropping in on Paul Klee in his studio at the school, a “wizard’s kitchen” that smelled strongly of coffee, tobacco, French varnish, lacquer, and alcohol. Klee, one of the leading young artists in Germany at this time, launched into a diatribe about “their lordships, the critics,” who dismissed his art as being like children’s scribbles or “the product of a diseased brain.” He was in mid-flow when a mood of gaiety took hold of him, and he reached up to pluck Bildnerei from a shelf. “You know this excellent piece of work by Prinzhorn, don’t you,” he said, flipping through it. “Let’s see for ourselves. This picture is a fine Klee. So is this, and this one too. Look at these religious paintings. There’s a depth and power of expression that I never achieve in religious subjects. Really sublime art. Direct spiritual vision.”
The new generation of artists was experiencing a “shift of consciousness,” Klee told Schreyer: Territories were opening up that lay beyond the range of normal human senses, and only children, madmen, and primitive people had access to this “in-between world.” Klee’s art, like that of the insane, was an attempt to make that place visible, he explained, and Prinzhorn’s book acted as a “confirmation” that this difficult task was valid.
In fact, Bildnerei was more than simply a confirmation for Klee; it was a sourcebook. The artist adapted numerous devices from it for use in his own work. Like Oskar Schlemmer, he felt a particular affinity with the paranoid schizophrenic law graduate Baron Hyazinth von Wieser. Prinzhorn reported that Wieser thought he was connected to the world by invisible, supernatural forces: He believed he could “change the position of the stars by an act of will” and would recklessly turn somersaults in order to overcome the effects of magnetic polarization on his body. In the garden of the Neufriedenheim asylum near Munich he had given trees the names of his relatives, or of sociological terms, and by viewing them from different standpoints had discovered surprising alignments that he considered new and real knowledge. Klee to an extent shared Wieser’s belief in humanity’s invisible connections with the universe and in “forces that defy terrestrial bonds.” If the artist knew how to let go, these could carry him “onward and upward, up to the celestial Orbits,” Klee stated, where he would “soar beyond the tempestuous, sentimental style to the kind of romanticism that merges with the universe.” This sense of cosmic connection was what separated Klee’s work from realism or photography: “The artist of today is more than an improved camera; he is more complex, richer and wider,” he wrote. “He is a creature within the whole, that is to say, a creature on a star among stars.”
Six drawings by Wieser appeared in Bildnerei der Geisteskranken. Klee appears to have taken direct inspiration from a work Prinzhorn captioned “Circle of Ideas of a Man,” which showed a bearded gentleman whose skull had a hatch in the top, out of which had popped a palace, a tournament, a lion, some women, and two antennae transmitting radio waves: Thoughts were literally springing from his head. A second drawing by Wieser, “Geometrical Portrait,” showed a figure in profile within a complex network of precisely ruled lines of varying thickness. From 1922 on, Klee produced numerous similar figures, including Abenteuer zwischen Kurl und Kamen
(An adventure between Kurl and Kamen, 1925) and Grenzen des Verstandes (Limits of the intellect, 1927). Various versions of Klee’s Der Seiltänzer (The tightrope walker, 1923) also incorporated forms that appear to derive from Wieser’s “Circle of Ideas.” Though Klee was able to function effectively in the everyday world and Wieser was not, both artists loved to develop highly abstract systems and present their ideas as diagrams.
But however much Klee, Kubin, Schlemmer, and Hölzel admired the Heidelberg art collection and borrowed from it, Prinzhorn’s greatest impact would not be felt in German-speaking Europe at all, but in France. In August 1922, Bildnerei arrived in Paris, the capital of world art, where it was to play a central role in one of the most spectacular and celebrated art movements of the century: Surrealism.
* * *
—
Insanity was already in vogue with the Paris avant-garde, thanks in large part to the Dadaist writer and poet André Breton. Breton had studied medicine before 1914 and spent much of his war service working with shell-shock victims in French military hospitals, where he was introduced to Freud’s techniques and occasionally used them on patients. At the Second Army’s neuropsychiatric center in Saint-Dizier, he became fascinated by a soldier who was convinced the entire conflict had been faked in order to drive him insane, and who therefore subjected himself to the most dangerous situations in order to expose the conspiracy. Breton saw the man’s denial of reality as a great achievement, since it gave him moral distance from the ongoing atrocities. Madness was not simply a psychological condition to be cured, the young medic decided, but a valid philosophical response to the apocalyptic results of rational thinking. “The art of those grouped today under the category of the mentally ill [is] a reservoir of moral health,” he would state.
After the war, Breton tried to emulate insanity in his writing, but ran into the problem every sane artist encountered: He was not actually mad. Instead, he realized he would have to devise techniques to introduce non-rational effects. His breakthrough came one evening in the spring of 1919. Obsessed at the time with Freud, he decided he would apply psychoanalysis to the process of composing a short story, hurriedly jotting down whatever came to his pen without engaging any critical faculties in the hope of producing the sort of rapid, uninhibited monologue he had extracted from patients in the war. The result, “Les Champs magnétiques” (The magnetic fields), was nonsensical and occasionally comic, but it seemed to Breton to have emerged from a direct dialogue with the unconscious. He named the process “automatic writing” and claimed that it cast light “upon the unrevealed and yet revealable portion of our being wherein all beauty, all love, all virtue…shine with great intensity.” He would spend the next five years honing his ideas before officially launching a new artistic movement, Surrealism (meaning “super-realism”), in the summer of 1924. It was while Breton was in the midst of these deliberations that Bildnerei arrived in Paris, in the suitcase of the philandering Dadaist Max Ernst.
Ernst had been just as fascinated with psychoanalysis and insanity as Breton. He had studied psychology, psychiatry, and Freud at the University of Bonn before the war. Several of his seminars took place in the city’s asylum—“a frightful place,” as he remembered it, though it did contain a small collection of patient art. While many of the students and doctors made fun of the works’ clumsiness and absurdities, Ernst was profoundly moved by what he saw, and even planned his own Prinzhorn-style book to bring the artworks to a wider audience. The war got in the way of that project, and instead he launched a radical and chaotic branch of Dada in his home city, Cologne, with his wife, the art historian Luise Strauss, and the painter and poet Johannes Baargeld. In one infamous Cologne Dada show, held in a pub courtyard in April 1920, visitors entered via the men’s toilets, where a young woman in communion robes read obscene poetry aloud. Afterward, they were invited to destroy one of Ernst’s sculptures with an axe the artist provided: This work is often identified as the first piece of conceptual art.
Ernst’s interest in psychiatry probably led him to visit the collection at Heidelberg around this time. In seeking to follow the transcendent path of insanity, however, he hit the same barrier as Breton: He was not, strictly speaking, insane. So he began to experiment with his own processes to penetrate this “no-man’s-land,” as he called it. The most successful of these was collage. By combining unrelated images from teaching aids, clothing catalogues, and science books, he discovered he could create absurd clashes that provoked a sudden and intense response in viewers and made them think of hallucinations.
Breton was delighted by Ernst’s collages, and in 1921 he staged a one-man show of the artist’s work in Paris, which caused a sensation. Ernst couldn’t attend himself since he was German and wasn’t allowed a passport. Instead, two members of Breton’s circle, the poet Paul Éluard and his Russian-born wife, Gala, came to visit him in Cologne. The two men struck up an immediate rapport over their war experience—“Max and I were at Verdun together,” Paul Éluard would say, “and used to shoot at each other”—while Max and Gala felt a powerful sexual attraction. Ernst was movie-star handsome, with bright blue eyes and the physique, it was said, of an international tennis player, while Éluard was an enthusiastic wife-swapper who kept a nude photo of Gala in his wallet to show to male acquaintances. In the summer of 1922, Ernst left his wife and young child in Cologne and traveled to Paris illegally on Éluard’s passport. On arrival in France he presented his new friends with a copy of Bildnerei der Geisteskranken as a token of thanks.
The gift enraptured Éluard. It was “the most beautiful book of images there is,” he wrote, “better than any painting.” Soon it was being shared among the group around Breton. It wasn’t the first or only publication on the art of the insane available in Paris: Paul Meunier’s L’Art chez les fous had been available since 1907, but it didn’t carry many illustrations and was not widely read. Prinzhorn’s book, on the other hand, came to occupy such a central position in Breton’s circle that it was routinely referred to as the “Surrealists’ bible.” “All the Surrealists had [Prinzhorn’s] book on the art of the mentally ill in their hands,” the painter André Masson remembered; it was the “revelation” which helped them to conquer the irrational and reject the values of classicism. Breton himself would write that Prinzhorn had given the artist-patients a “presentation worthy of their talents” for the first time. In doing so, he had “called for a direct comparison of their work with that created by other contemporary artists, a comparison which in many respects turns to the disadvantage of the latter.”
Bildnerei was particularly useful for visual artists struggling to adapt Breton’s technique of “automatic writing” to painting. This problem was summarized in the first volume of the group’s magazine, La révolution surréaliste, in 1924: “What was required by the Surrealist artist was a ‘wonder drug’ which would put him or her in a position to achieve similar results to madmen and mediums.” The “wonder drug” Masson developed appears to have derived from the process of an anonymous sixty-two-year-old female patient in Prinzhorn’s book, who found relief from her erotic conflicts by drawing motifs of fish and birds. She would fall “into a dreamlike condition,” whereupon her hand would “move automatically with the pencil across the paper. From time to time the pencil came tremblingly to rest.” Prinzhorn’s description of the sleepwalking hand, combined with the resulting rhythmic, streaky illustration reproduced in Bildnerei, provided a perfect blueprint for Masson’s own technique, which he called “automatic drawing.”
The Prinzhorn artist most favored by the Surrealists was August Natterer, an electrical engineer from Upper Swabia with a catastrophic sex life, whom Prinzhorn included among his “schizophrenic masters.” In 1906, as his business started to fail, Natterer had visited a prostitute and asked her to satisfy him in a particular, undisclosed manner, at which point he heard a voice telling him that if he went ahead he would be “lost.” They performed the act
anyway, and in that moment he felt a lightning strike, followed by the sensation that he was “falling into hell.” At noon on April 1 the following year, he was standing outside a barracks in Stuttgart when he noticed a spot in a cloud. As he watched, the spot slowly grew into a screen, sixty-five feet high, on which appeared a vision so vivid he would be able to recall it for the rest of his life:
On this board or screen or stage, pictures followed one another like lightning, maybe 10,000 in half an hour…[and] the Lord himself appeared, the witch who created the world—in between there were worldly scenes: war pictures, parts of the earth, monuments, battle scenes from the Wars of Liberation, palaces, marvelous palaces, in short the beauties of the whole world.
Six months later, Natterer was brought to the asylum at Rottenmünster, where he came to believe he was “Août I,” a direct descendant of Napoleon and the true successor to the French throne. His vision, he said, was God’s revelation of the Last Judgment, “for the completion of the redemption.”
The engineer was unusual in Prinzhorn’s collection in that he didn’t use the Expressionist technique of transferring his emotional crises to paper, but saw his drawing as a technical project in which he was trying to record aspects of his strange visions as accurately as possible: He appeared to treat his hallucinations as something outside his own psyche, and by depicting them he may have hoped to disassociate them from himself. This coincided with Breton’s idea of trying to report on the “other world” in a realistic, documentary fashion. In essence, the Surrealists would utilize Natterer’s creative way of coping with a personal collapse of meaning to answer the more general collapse of meaning caused by the First World War.
Ernst drew direct inspiration from several Prinzhorn artists, including Genzel and Gustav Sievers, but no one had more influence on him than Natterer. Obvious parallels can be seen between the patient’s Der Wunderhirte (The miracle shepherd) and Ernst’s 1931 collage Oedipus: Both show sitting, free-floating figures, along with an animal, and emphasize the legs and feet. Oedipus was so important to Ernst that his biographer Werner Spies described it as “programmatic” for his entire oeuvre. Natterer’s principles can also be found in a host of other Ernst creations, including his 1923 painting Der Sturz der Engel (The fall of the angel).
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness Page 7