The Gallery of Miracles and Madness
Page 25
In the 1960s, around the same time Rave-Schwank was making her own discovery in Heidelberg, Dubuffet’s investigations inspired the tyro curator of the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, Harald Szeemann, to create a show of “insane art.” Szeemann was thirty years old in 1963 when he climbed into his Volkswagen Beetle and sped down the Rhine to Heidelberg. He borrowed more than two hundred drawings and twenty sculptures and carried them back to Switzerland, where he put them in a groundbreaking exhibition, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken—Art Brut—Insania Pingens, which constituted the Heidelberg collection’s first public outing since Entartete Kunst. Szeemann’s show was an international hit: It sparked another blossoming of interest in psychiatric art and led to new loan requests from the Prinzhorn collection. The revival even encouraged Springer to republish Prinzhorn’s book, which would soon also appear in English and French editions.
In the 1970s, as collectors became more conscious of the many types of creative expression that existed beyond the artistic mainstream, the British critic Roger Cardinal coined a new name for this kind of material: “Outsider Art.” A “revolution in awareness” had taken place, Cardinal proclaimed, in which galleries sought to address this immense field of overlooked activity, including work categorized as psychiatric art, folk art, graffiti, and art by prison inmates. From 1989, Outsider Art would have its own international magazine, Raw Vision, and from 1993 New York would host an annual Outsider Art Fair. Reporting from the twenty-seventh edition of the fair in 2019, the Art Newspaper asserted that commercial interest had made this material a “hot commodity.”
Prinzhorn was not the first person to take the art of psychiatric patients seriously, but he was the first to present its enormous diversity to a wide audience, to give patients “a presentation worthy of their talents,” as Breton once remarked. The doctor’s achievement was one of inclusion. He had taken work by the most marginalized group in German society and held it up for public regard—as high as that of the great artists of the past. The effect was to inspire new journeys of inner exploration, to expand the circle of permitted art-makers beyond the trained elite, and to broaden the definition of art in recognition that there were more kinds of creative expression than anyone had previously imagined.
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Having begun the process of restoring the collection, Rave-Schwank left Heidelberg in 1972 to pursue her medical career, and the university hospital appointed its first professional curator, Inge Jádi. In 1980–1981, Jádi organized a large Prinzhorn touring show, which would travel around West Germany. In preparing for this exhibition she made a controversial decision: Instead of anonymizing the artist-patients—presenting the works with Prinzhorn’s pseudonyms and case numbers—she would use their real identities. Jádi decided that the artists’ stories should be told.
So began a long-running effort to uncover the real names and biographies of the artists in Prinzhorn’s collection. This was often a difficult task, partly because, in the case of Aktion T4 victims, patients’ medical records had been sent with them on the transports and were still missing, partly because of a general reluctance in Germany to investigate the crimes of National Socialist psychiatry. While many of the ringleaders of the “euthanasia” action had either killed themselves (as Schneider, Bouhler, Conti, and Linden had done) or been tried and executed (Brandt and Brack), other, lower-profile perpetrators had served short sentences or were simply allowed to remain in their posts, for fear that the fledgling West German state would collapse under the strain of the new global conflict, the Cold War.
In the 1990s, medical historians made a breakthrough. Toward the end of the Second World War, T4’s headquarters had been forced to move, first from Berlin to Hartheim, then to the Pfafferode asylum in Thuringia. At the same time, they had begun to destroy patient records to try to cover their tracks. But there was simply too much, and when the Red Army captured Thuringia in 1945 a mountain of material remained. These files eventually reached the East German state security service, the Stasi, and in the early 1990s, after German reunification, the federal government opened them up to the public. Historians who visited the Stasi archive in Berlin found three whole rooms filled with the medical records of people killed in the psychiatric Holocaust, thirty thousand files in all, each of which told the story of years spent in an institution followed by murder in the “euthanasia” action. Suddenly, there was almost too much information: As the medical historian Maike Rotzoll recalled, “You can’t examine all that in one life.” To narrow down their research area, they chose to look for names they already knew. One of the categories of victims they selected was the Prinzhorn artists.
The first sweep of the Stasi files, combined with research into the killing centers, revealed the fate of nineteen Prinzhorn artists who had been murdered in the “euthanasia” actions. This number grew over the next decade as more sources were discovered, particularly from the less well documented period of “decentralized euthanasia,” when the perpetrators’ intent was harder to establish. In 2020, the tally of Prinzhorn’s artists thought to have been killed by the National Socialists stands at thirty, with ten known to have been forcibly sterilized. These numbers may increase.
In 2001, as Jádi passed on the role of curator to the art historian Thomas Röske, the collection finally achieved something Prinzhorn had longed for but never realized: its own dedicated museum in Heidelberg, a few hundred yards from the old psychiatric clinic. Among its first exhibitions was Todesursache: Euthanasie (Cause of death: euthanasia), a showcase of the works and biographies of Prinzhorn artists killed by Hitler’s regime.
EPILOGUE
In researching this book I traveled to two very different places, on different sides of the Atlantic, to see two very different kinds of art. Both types of work were created by self-taught artists, both of whom had been diagnosed as mentally ill. Together, they represented the opposing sides of the apocalyptic conflict that was fought over art and heredity in mid-century Germany.
The first journey took me to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, a short drive across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. After several months of email exchanges, filling in questionnaires, and sending copies of IDs, I was invited to this giant military facility to speak with the chief art curator of the U.S. Army, Sarah Forgey, and see some works from the collection she oversees. Colonel F. Lee Reynolds of the U.S. Army Reserve met me at the fort’s heavily guarded entrance, then led me across the base, past ranks of disused Humvees, to a utilitarian brick building where Forgey awaited us. Passing through another layer of security, we arrived in a giant four-acre climate-controlled storage facility which reminded me of IKEA, only here instead of flat-pack furniture the steel racks held thousands of pieces of war art.
Hitler’s watercolors were stored in a gunmetal-gray cabinet, but for today’s purposes they had been laid out across a pair of tables. There were four in all, each enclosed by the same slim gilt frame in which their former owner, Heinrich Hoffmann, had enshrined it. Before his capture by American soldiers in May 1945, Hoffmann had tried to hide these works in a castle outside Munich, but they were discovered and handed over to Captain Gordon Gilkey, the Oregonian artist President Roosevelt tasked with tracking down Nazi propaganda art. Gilkey sent the Hitler paintings to America along with around nine thousand other confiscated pieces. Almost all of this material had subsequently been returned, but a few hundred of the most inflammatory items remained in the United States, including these four watercolors.
The earliest of them, dated 1911 or 1912, shows a famous street corner close to the Mariahilf quarter of Vienna where Hitler lived. Next, from 1914, was a careful rendering of the Alter Hof, a Munich landmark, which Hitler had presented to Hoffmann on the photographer’s fiftieth birthday. Both these earlier works appeared to be copies of postcards. The latter two paintings date from 1917: One shows a ruined village on the western front, with minutely rendered brickwork and substantial errors of perspe
ctive; the other is unusually dynamic, a hastily sketched war scene in which men hurry along a railway cutting under shellfire.
Forgey, an art historian by training, used adjectives such as “adequate” and “proficient” to describe Hitler’s ability as an artist. “They don’t show a tremendous amount of skill,” she said. Without trying to diagnose him, I wondered what else they revealed about their author.
When the dictator’s biographer Joachim Fest received one of Hitler’s paintings from Albert Speer, he felt he could read certain character traits in it: a dependence on guidelines, reverence for the past, aloofness, pedantry, even his petit bourgeois taste. Forgey went further. The most obvious conclusions could be drawn from Hitler’s figures, she said. I could see what she meant. In the Mariahilf street scene, he had proficiently copied out the image of a woman on a bill poster, but the only living person in the painting is a pedestrian in the distance who is so clumsily rendered she might be made of matchsticks. Life, in fact, was a real problem in Hitler’s art. The more Forgey looked at the painting of the Alter Hof, she said, the more disturbing she found it: The water in the fountains of the stone courtyard had no hint of sparkle; no ripple of air stirred the leaves on the two trees. I was reminded of Kubizek’s description of his friend’s painting, of how “the rapid catching of an atmosphere, of a certain mood…freshness and liveliness…was completely missing in Adolf’s work.”
It’s difficult of course to divorce Hitler’s watercolors from the knowledge of who he was and what he did: Even looking at these works at first feels ghoulish. The awful context never disappears, but it recedes, and then the overriding impression is of emptiness: There is very little here with which a viewer can engage. In this sense, Hitler’s painting supports Arendt’s theory of National Socialism—that it was defined by its banality and lack of empathy. The Nazis relied on the ability of people not to imagine themselves in someone else’s shoes. The lack of a connection was very much the point.
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Another continent, another artist. A century after Prinzhorn moved to Heidelberg, I followed his path across the town, from the steep-sloping streets beneath the Renaissance castle, through the medieval squares and cobbled alleys, to Voßstraße, the broad avenue lined with grand hospital buildings that stand back from the empty road. The psychiatry clinic seemed little changed from Prinzhorn’s time, but for the addition of a 1998 memorial to the children killed for Schneider’s research. A huddle of people—nurses or patients, I couldn’t decide which—stood about the entrance, smoking furiously.
The new gallery housing the Prinzhorn collection lay a hundred yards up the road, in an old neurological lecture theater extended with glass and steel. Inside, a dozen visitors wandered around the generous space. I recognized a gang of small, angry Genzels in a glass vitrine, and on the walls some of the miracles Carl Lange found in his shoe insoles. Bühler’s works were on display on a mezzanine level upstairs. I hunted out the crayon portrait on which he had written the date March 1919 and the words Das Selbst (The self).
Prinzhorn compared a similar Bühler work from this time with a late Van Gogh self-portrait, the only other image he could recall in which an individual seemed to be as inconsolably destroyed, or who looked at the observer with such burning tension. More recently, a curator at the Prinzhorn collection had connected Das Selbst with Edvard Munch’s The Scream, another powerful account of alienation at the dawn of the new industrial age, by another so-called degenerate. Bühler seemed entirely worthy of these comparisons. He had been in Emmendingen for almost two decades when he created this portrait. At the end of the First World War, he would have been near starving, and his condition meant he could barely speak. Yet Das Selbst is so powerful, so open and direct, it feels as though he is here in the room. His cheeks are emaciated, his hair thin, the eyes divergent black pools. But it is the gaping hole of the mouth that drew me in. Standing on the brink of that black, red-rimmed O, I felt the dizzying lure of the schizophrenic interior, and the questions he still provoked.
“What is this world?” the artist seems to say, and “Where do I fit in?”
© Prinzhorn Collection, University Hospital Heidelberg, Inv. No. 3018
Franz Karl Bühler’s self-portrait, Das Selbst, dated March 1919. In Prinzhorn’s eyes, Bühler’s art reached the pinnacle of creativity at this time.
Franz Karl Bühler photographed in Offenburg in the 1890s
The University of Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic, 1895
Hans Prinzhorn circa 1922
Bühler’s Der Würgengel (The choking angel), which Prinzhorn compared to work by Grünewald and Dürer
© Prinzhorn Collection, University Hospital Heidelberg, Inv. No. 2945
Franz Karl Bühler, “Untitled” (Angel playing with dolls)
© Prinzhorn Collection, University Hospital Heidelberg, Inv. No. 184
August Natterer, “Hexenkopf” (Witch’s head), circa 1911–1917
© Prinzhorn Collection, University Hospital Heidelberg, Inv. No. 4267
Else Blankenhorn, “Untitled I,” before 1917; thought to be a self-portrait
Hindenburg, by Karl Genzel, represents the German field marshal Paul von Hindenburg. The artist wished to draw attention to his fat cheeks, large ears, and protuberant nose.
© Prinzhorn Collection, University Hospital Heidelberg, Inv. No. 176
The Prinzhorn artist August Natterer’s work was especially popular with the Surrealists, including Max Ernst. Natterer’s Wunder-Hirte II (Miracle shepherd II), 1911-1917, above, clearly influenced Ernst’s Oedipe (Oedipus), 1931, following. Ernst borrowed Natterer’s vision of a female form floating freely in space.
© Prinzhorn Collection, University Hospital Heidelberg, Inv. No. 1490
Paul Klee was also entranced by Prinzhorn’s book. The artist’s 1923 work Prophetisches Weib (Prophetic woman), following, may have been inspired by Johann Knopf’s Lamm Gottes (The lamb of God), above, from the Heidelberg collection.
© bpk/Hamburger Kunsthalle/Christoph Irrgang
© US Army Center of Military History
Alter Hof, Munich, Adolf Hitler, 1914. Hitler showed some ability painting buildings but was poor at depicting people. He was rejected from the Vienna Academy for drawing “few heads.”
Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s 1928 book Kunst und Rasse (Art and race) made an explicit link between modern art and disability, juxtaposing paintings with case photographs.
© Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg/Kladderadatsch
“Der Bildhauer Deutschlands” (The sculptor of Germany), a 1933 cartoon from Kladderadatsch magazine, reflected Hitler’s plan to genetically reengineer the German people as an artist remodels an artwork.
Nazi propaganda, such as this advertisement for the magazine Neues Volk, targeted psychiatric patients. The words read: “It costs 60,000 reichsmarks to look after this genetically sick person over his lifetime. Comrade, that is your money, too.”
© Prinzhorn Collection, University Hospital Heidelberg, Inv. No. 8083 fol 20
Wilhelm Werner is the only psychiatric patient known to have documented his own sterilization by the Nazis. His work is now in the Prinzhorn Collection.
© Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Alamy Stock Photo
Hitler in Dresden in 1935, visiting one of the precursor exhibitions to the shows of “degenerate art” that would tour the Reich from 1937.
© Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Alamy Stock Photo
A crowd at the entrance to the Munich Entartete Kunst show, 1937. Overcrowding was deliberately engineered to present t
he artwork in the worst possible light.
© Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo
Hitler previewing Entartete Kunst in Munich in July 1937, with Goebbels to his right (holding hat) and Adolf Ziegler and Heinrich Hoffmann (in pale suit) to his left
© Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo
Goebbels inspecting the Berlin Entartete Kunst show in February 1938. To his right is Hartmut Pistauer, the fanatical young curator who selected Prinzhorn works for the exhibition.
© Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo
The Entartete Kunst exhibition opened in 1938 in Berlin at the Haus der Kunst. More than a hundred Prinzhorn works were sent to the capital for consideration.
© bpk/Bayerische Staatsbibliothek/Archiv Heinrich Hoffmann
Hitler examines confiscated modern art at the depot in east Berlin, 1938. The German leader personally chose works to add to Entartete Kunst.