Between Madness and Art: The Prinzhorn Collection (review)

In July 1937 the Nazi Party opened an exhibition in Munich entitled Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”). More than 3 million visitors came to see the show, which included work by Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. These artists stood accused of “cultural decadence” and were decried as being either Jewish, mentally unsound or Bolshevik. To prove the point, alongside the modernist works, paintings by mentally ill patients were displayed, many of which came from a remarkable collection that had been compiled in the 1920s by the art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933). The fascinating tale of this collection is the subject of Christian Beetz’s Between Madness and Art.

After taking an assistant’s job in the Psychiatric Clinic of Heidelberg University, Prinzhorn augmented a small pre-existing collection with over 5,000 works by more than 400 patients. In 1922, his magnum opus Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill) was published. Here Prinzhorn focused on the work of “ten schizophrenic masters,” arguing that madness and art were linked through the freeing-up of the “unmitigated human will.” Likening the work of his patients to “savage” and “primitive” art, Prinzhorn claimed here and elsewhere that bildnerei (artistry) was the expression of “primal, elemental ideas” [1].

The Freudian overtones here are obvious, and as Prinzhorn systematized his findings through the 1920s, they became more prevalent. Indeed there is a neat turn that the film might have made on the concept of sublimation: The dual purpose of art for the mentally ill, as expression and therapy, finds a direct analogy in the Freudian concept, which rests upon assumptions about the universality and torment of the subconscious and was linked by Freud explicitly to artistic expression qua catharsis. Certainly it is the latter, curative emphasis that has outlived Prinzhorn’s theories; the sensitive portrayal of contemporary artist-patients who have contributed to the collection is one of Between Madness and Art’s notable achievements.

However, it is Entartete Kunst that emerges as the central event in the history of the Prinzhorn collection. It not only secured the survival of the works through the Nazi era but it also reminds us that among the victims of the death camps were many of Prinzhorn’s patients. However, the horror of the exhibition and the yoking together of madness and modernism also bring to the surface some of the more unsettling connotations of Prinzhorn’s project. At one point in the film a health-care worker likens the extreme behavior of mentally ill patients to performance art. While one can understand his meaning, this kind of category error suggests a need for the careful delimiting of the cultural and the medical. If we lose sight of the difference between the two, we risk reducing the symptoms of mental illness to anecdote and trivializing contemporary art.

That is not to say, of course, that there are not real masterpieces on offer in Between Madness and Art. One merely suspects that, stripped of Prinzhorn’s universalizing, the art is easy to tell from the symptom. Many of his favorites, for example, were accomplished artists before their incarceration. Franz Karl Bühler in particular, a virtuoso wrought-iron worker who had exhibited at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, stands out. Bühler’s captivating allegorical and fantastical watercolors were recognized, during his 42-year institutionalization, by contemporary artists, one of whom, we are told, wrote, “It is hard to believe that a madman could create artwork characterized by such an economic use of colour.” In this way, the misprision on both sides was exacerbated, and Bildnerei der Geisteskranken became a bible for the surrealists. Undoubtedly that influence is of great historical moment, but the questions remain: Did the modernists exploit their sources, in this case and that of native art? How should we treat the Prinzhorn collection in a climate of such intense medicalization...