Breton and the Surrealists would push their cult of insanity to absurd heights, romanticizing mental illness far beyond the often grim reality. In the first Manifesto of Surrealism, published in October 1924, Breton wrote: “Their profound indifference to the way in which we judge them, and even to the various punishments meted out to them, allows us to supose that they derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination, that they enjoy their madness.” Éluard would pronounce that it was those outside the asylum who were imprisoned and that liberty could only be found inside, while Antonin Artaud’s 1925 “Letter to the Medical Directors of Lunatic Asylums” compared asylums to slave colonies and identified psychiatrists as a public enemy. Artaud protested against “any interference in the free development of delirium,” proclaiming that a patient’s concept of reality was “absolutely legitimate,” as were all the acts resulting from it.
No Surrealist would achieve more fame and notoriety than the Catalan painter Salvador Dalí. Ten years after the Éluards had won over Ernst, they dropped in on Dalí, who was similarly captivated by Gala. This time, however, Gala would leave her husband for the artist, becoming his wife and muse. It was said that Dalí spent most of the 1920s trying by every means possible to go insane, and when he failed, he developed his own insanity-emulation processes, including the “paranoiac-critical method.” Using this technique, he sought to bypass the brain’s systems for ordering the world by invoking a state of delusional paranoia, projecting his own interpretations onto objects around him, much as a child might spot a face or an animal in an oddly shaped cloud. The result was a series of visual double meanings that replicated insanity perfectly, Dalí claimed. “The only difference between myself and a madman,” he declared, is that “I am not mad.”
At least two Prinzhorn artists are known to have influenced Dalí. The first was Carl Lange, the former salesman who saw miraculous figures in the sweat-stained insoles of his shoes; products of Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method such as L’homme invisible (1929–1932) closely resemble the visual double meanings identified by Lange in his Holy Sweat Miracle on the Insole, dating from around 1900. The second was the sadomasochistic former Bavarian railways employee Joseph Schneller. In his essay “The Tragic Myth of Millet’s The Angelus: ‘Paranoiac-Critical’ Interpretation,” Dalí refers twice to an erotic image by Schneller, showing two women in fetish boots in a prison or reform school setting. Dalí contrasts them with the pious figures in Millet’s painting, who pray with their heads bowed, and concludes that the real subject of The Angelus is the couple’s repressed sexual desire.
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Claims of one artist’s influence on another are not always easy to verify. Art historians do not agree, for instance, on the existence of a connection between a series of heads by Picasso, including Tête de femme (1926), and the work of the Prinzhorn patient Heinrich Anton Müller, though the images bear a strong superficial resemblance. But there were numerous other artists working in the 1920s who paid direct tribute to the collection in their writing or in interviews and acknowledged its tremendous influence on their work.
One of these was Jean Dubuffet, who was a young art school graduate in Paris when he first saw Bildnerei der Geisteskranken in the 1920s. Like so many others, the images liberated him and moved him to reexamine his artistic identity. “Prinzhorn’s book struck me very strongly,” he remembered. “I realized that all was permitted, all was possible.” He was not the only artist he knew to be similarly affected: Prinzhorn’s lecture tours had led to an upsurge in public interest in the art of the insane, Dubuffet explained, which “strongly influenced the minds of many contemporary professional artists and their style.” After the war, he would make a pilgrimage to Heidelberg to see the collection in person, and join with Breton in creating a new movement based on psychiatric work, which he dubbed Art Brut (raw art). Prinzhorn’s impact on modern art was simply “enormous,” Dubuffet said.
Richard Lindner, the German American painter sometimes described as the “father of Pop Art,” discovered Prinzhorn’s work in 1925. Years later, he would pay tribute to the influence the collection had on him, calling his encounter with it “the most important artistic experience of my life.” Joseph Schneller was one of several Prinzhorn artists whose work Lindner reinterpreted. The Surrealist Hans Bellmer, who devised a series of hybrid female bodies he dubbed “cephalopods” after Prinzhorn, regarded Bildnerei as “incomparable” and “one of the most important spiritual events of this entire century.” Late in the decade Prinzhorn’s influence would even reach Japan, where Koga Harue was developing a “pure art” based on Breton’s principles. One of the first works of Japanese Surrealism was Harue’s painting Endless Flight (1930), which, he told a friend, had been inspired by a “German madman”: August Natterer.
Perhaps the greatest written tribute to the Prinzhorn collection in the 1920s came from the founder of Dada, Hugo Ball. In 1926, Ball proclaimed that Bildnerei marked nothing less than “the turning point of two epochs.” He found particular comfort in the revelation that intellectual catastrophes such as the one that had befallen Bühler promoted rather than disturbed the configurative process. If the world situation were ever to deteriorate to the point where artists were committed to sanatoriums, he wrote, “the last torch of humanity, art, would not be extinguished.”
What neither he nor anyone else knew then was how seriously this theory was about to be tested.
7.
PLEASANT LITTLE PICTURES
The clack-clack of Hitler’s Remington typewriter could be heard from his cell in Landsberg prison as early as 5:00 a.m. in the summer of 1924. This was a highly unusual state of affairs. The National Socialist leader was a notoriously late riser, yet the excitement of writing his political memoirs lured him to the small typing table every day at dawn. He would spend hours there, composing, dictating, and discussing, and when he wasn’t writing he liked to read. He described the time he spent in jail as his “university paid for by the state.”
Hitler had entered the prison a suicidal failure. In November 1923, he and two thousand Nazi storm troopers had tried to seize control of Munich, the first step in a plan to topple the Weimar Republic. But the Beer Hall Putsch, as the coup attempt would be called, had been a disaster: Sixteen Nazis and four state police officers were killed, and Hitler was caught and charged with high treason. On arrival at Landsberg he was convinced he would be shot, raging at the prison psychologist, Alois Maria Ott, “If I had a revolver, I’d use it!,” flecks of spittle showing at his lips. Ott assessed the new inmate as “a morbid psychopath…prone to hysteria…with an inclination toward a magical-mystical mindset.” But during the subsequent trial, which gave Hitler a high public profile, his confidence returned. Later, surrounded in jail by forty sycophantic co-conspirators, with piles of expensive gifts sent by admirers, and with even guards whispering “Heil Hitler!” in his ear, he became convinced that he was the messiah for the German people, their Führer.
It was essential to support this destiny in the story he pecked out on the Remington, which he intended to call Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit (Four and a half years [of struggle] against lies, stupidity, and cowardice) but which would be published under the snappier title Mein Kampf. He began the book with his birth on April 20, 1889, at Braunau am Inn on the Austria-Bavaria border, a fortuitous spot for the man who intended to unite the Germans, and followed with an account of his vocation. He had been barely eleven years old when his domineering father, Alois, decided to force him into a life of pen-pushing drudgery in the customs service. Even as a young boy, the very thought of sitting caged in an office, wasting his life and liberty filling out forms, made Adolf sick to his stomach. Quietly, he developed a different plan: He would become an artist. One day, he blurted this out, almost by accident, and for a moment the old man was struck speechless:
“Painter? Arti
st?”
He doubted my sanity, or perhaps he thought he had heard wrong or misunderstood me. But when he was clear on the subject, and particularly after he felt the seriousness of my intention, he opposed it with all the determination of his nature…
“Artist, No, never as long as I live!”
For the next two years, the predestined child collided with the imperious father. Alois was violent and alcoholic, the son implied, and relentless in enforcing his will: Adolf was forbidden from nourishing the slightest hope of an artistic career. The boy responded by refusing to study at all. After years of bitter struggle, the standoff came to an end on January 3, 1903, when Alois collapsed and died over his usual morning glass of wine. Adolf was now free to pursue his artistic dream.
Exactly how this confrontation played out in reality is impossible to say. Hitler twisted aspects of his biography for propaganda purposes, and was always secretive about his family background, with some reason: Alois was illegitimate, his surname was the deeply rustic Schicklgruber until he changed it, and Adolf’s mother, Klara, was Alois’s cousin as well as his third wife. But the parable of the Führer-child does deliver an important symbolic message for Hitler: that he knew from an early age he was an artist, and that in pursuit of this ambition he had taken on the most powerful forces and won. By promoting this side of his biography, Hitler was tapping into a fundamental concept of Romantic philosophy, which he had read about in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kant: that of the artist-genius. The individual endowed with a “talent for art” was a “favorite of nature,” as Kant explained it, a dynamic spirit who existed outside the rules that bound humanity. The brilliant political leaders in German history were exclusively drawn from this fraternity. Only such an individual could be endowed with the eternal qualities of Idee und Gestalt—the creative vision of the seer and the ruthless execution of the politician. Again and again, Hitler would present himself to the German people as the artist-Führer, the “artist-in-chief.” Like his idol, Richard Wagner, he believed it was his destiny initially to be misunderstood and then to be recognized as the redeemer, the one who could lift up broken German hearts and despairing German souls.
He would continue to portray himself as an artist long after he had stopped painting for a living. Diplomats, generals, and visitors would recall moments when Hitler would break off vital discussions about the war to hold forth about art, or to claim improbably that he would rather give up politics to wander Italy as an unknown painter. Many of his personality traits—his indifference to bureaucratic routine, his insistence on higher truth, and his preference for intuition over reason—have been linked to his idea of artistic behavior. Even Thomas Mann could not help but recognize the artist in him: “Must I not, however much it hurts, regard the man as an artist-phenomenon?” he wrote from exile in 1938. And after two decades of postwar reflection in Spandau prison, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, concluded that the Nazi leader was always and with his whole heart an artist. Art lay at the heart of Hitler’s personality and at the center of his ideas about politics and race. Art, Hitler came to believe, was an eternal value that could be passed on through the Volkskörper, the body of the pure race, over the generations. The German people would be genetically healthy when they produced “good” art, while “bad” art was a symptom of their malaise.
Never in modern history would the leader of a powerful country shape the nation’s cultural life so closely around his own predilections. Yet, even as he wore his artist’s mantle, Hitler was a static figure, unable or unwilling to change the positions he had formed growing up in provincial Austria. As Speer put it, he remained arrested in the time of his youth, in the world of 1880 to 1910, which stamped its imprint on his artistic taste and on his political and ideological conceptions for the rest of his life.
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He was a remote child, socially inept, bossy, inclined to outbursts of extreme temper, and such a poor student in math and physics at the Realschule in Linz that he was forced to repeat a year, then moved to a less academic institution twenty miles away. It was true that he showed an enthusiasm for drawing, however, an activity at which Klara encouraged him after Alois’s death. In 1905, at age sixteen, he developed a convenient long-term illness, which meant he never had to return to education. He used his time to read, learn the piano, and fill reams of paper with his sketches.
Linz, the provincial capital of Upper Austria, was home to a vibrant theater at that time, and Adolf would spend many evenings in the cheap standing-room section known as the Promenade, watching Schiller plays and listening to the music of Mozart and Liszt. It was Wagner, though, who became his obsession. “My youthful enthusiasm for the master of Bayreuth knew no bounds,” he wrote. “Again and again I was drawn to his works.” He was “captivated at once” by Lohengrin, and went to see Die Götterdämmerung thirteen times. His only real childhood friend was another Wagner aficionado whom he met at the theater, August “Gustl” Kubizek.
Kubizek was an upholsterer’s son, nine months older than Adolf and just as awkward. His main role in their friendship was as the audience for Hitler’s lectures on every subject under the Linz sun, from the rate of excise duty levied at the Danube bridge to the shortcomings of the city museum. Kubizek responded to his friend with a mix of fear and awe, and put Adolf’s volcanic personality and work-shy tendencies down to an artistic temperament: “He belonged to that particular species of people of which I had dreamed myself in my more expansive moments,” Kubizek remembered, “an artist, who despised the mere bread-and-butter job and devoted himself to writing poetry, to drawing, painting and to going to the theatre.”
The first time Kubizek visited Hitler at home, he found his bedroom littered with sketches, drawings, and blueprints, “like an architect’s office.” He always carried various types of paper, on which he would sketch or note his grand plans. Although rigid in his thinking, Hitler had a “mania” for reinventing the world around him, imagining vast and detailed visual schemes. But even as a teenager, Kubizek could tell there was something absent from his friend’s paintings. They lacked artistic revelation and emotion. “The rapid catching of an atmosphere, of a certain mood, which is so typical of a water color and which, with its delicate touch, imparts to it freshness and liveliness—this was missing completely in Adolf’s work,” Kubizek recalled. Though Hitler worked with “painstaking precision,” his ambition was only ever to paint “pleasant little pictures.”
In 1906, Hitler sketched a vision of their shared future, designing a grand villa where they would live when he was a great artist and Gustl a famous musician. Soon, a new occupant was assigned to the fantasy house: a young blond woman, identified by Kubizek only as “Stefanie,” whom Hitler much admired during their evening strolls on the Landstraße. He was too shy to exchange a single word with her, yet the daydream of their shared future drove Hitler on. Before asking for her hand in marriage, he decided, he should first take a step toward his chosen career by attending art school in Vienna. It would be “child’s play” for someone with his talent to win a place. He wrote Stefanie an anonymous letter—she didn’t have a clue who it was from, and in any case was about to marry a captain from the Hessian command—then took the road east, toward Vienna and his luminous, imagined future.
The capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was an epiphany for Hitler. He had visited Vienna briefly before, wandering the city from morning until after dark. He had stood for hours in front of the giant Opera and Parliament buildings, while the wide boulevard of the Ringstraße seemed to him “like an enchantment out of the Thousand-and-One-Nights.” This time he intended to stay, to stitch himself into the glorious cultural fabric of the metropolis.
He arrived in the autumn of 1907, when the modernist Vienna Secession and Wiener Werkstätte were close to their peaks, when Gustav Klimt was in his “golden phase,” building toward his sensuous masterpiece Der Kus
s (The kiss), and when Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka were setting out on their own famous careers. Hitler avoided all of this. He chose to apply to a bastion of artistic conservatism, the Academy of Fine Arts, a pompous, old-fashioned, irrelevant institution according to Kokoschka, whose all-male student body still wore velvet robes and berets, the better “to be considered artists.” He sat for an admissions test at the academy in early September and was allowed to proceed to the drawing assessments, which were held over two days at the start of October. The examiners required eight compositions on such well-worn themes as “Expulsion from Paradise,” “Hunting,” “Spring,” and “Death,” and he waited for his result with “confident self-assurance,” convinced he would be successful. The verdict when it came was unequivocal. “Drawing exam unsatisfactory,” the professors recorded, before hinting at the reason: He had sketched “few heads.”
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Of the 113 candidates who showed up, only 28 were accepted, and as Kubizek had noticed, Hitler’s work was lacking in a fundamental way. He was particularly poor at people: The figures in his paintings stand about like self-conscious extras, uncertain of their roles. For Hitler, though, the rejection was “a bolt from the blue.” He asked the rector for an explanation and was told his exams “incontrovertibly showed [his] unfitness for painting.” Admission to the school was “out of the question,” though he did have some ability in the field of architecture, and perhaps he should try that instead. Having flunked math and physics, Hitler knew he didn’t have the qualifications to attend the architecture school. The fulfillment of his artistic dreams now looked impossible. He left the academy downcast, “for the first time in my young life at odds with myself.”
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness Page 8