They used sketches, sculpture and writing to chart aspects of their psychotic reality, or to communicate messages from an isolated interior. Diagnosed mostly with schizophrenia, these individuals didn’t always intend to make “art”. Between 19, he amassed the world’s most significant collection of psychiatric art, thousands of pieces of every type, executed with every available variety of media – toilet paper, discarded rotas, wooden parts of asylum beds – by hundreds of inpatients. But it was his work on the art of the insane, conducted at Heidelberg university psychiatric clinic, that would stand as his greatest achievement. Hans Prinzhorn was a qualified physician, a doctor of art history, a decorated soldier and a professionally trained baritone. His doctors didn’t much care for his art – if, indeed, a “madman” could create art at all – and many of his sketches languished in his case file for two decades, until an important visitor arrived from Heidelberg. Later he produced searing self-portraits and garish creatures from his psychotic visions: demonic dogs and death-angels. He began by sketching the people around him, documenting the pointless repetitive activities of institutionalised life. It reveals the debt art owes to mental illness, and the way that connection was used to wage history’s most destructive culture war.īühler was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and as he was moved from one psychiatric clinic to another, he devised a way to cope with his situation: he would teach himself to draw. He would remain in the dubious care of the German psychiatric system for the next 42 years, one of hundreds of thousands of patients who lived near-invisible lives behind the asylum walls.īühler’s incarceration disturbed him, but it also marked the beginning of a remarkable story, one in which he played a leading role. ![]() ![]() So he was taken to the nearby Friedrichsberg “madhouse”, as it was known then, and taken inside. When he was hauled on to the bank, soaked and shivering, it became clear to passersby that there was something odd about the man. So he plunged into the dark water, close to freezing at this time of year, and struck out for the far side. There was only one way to escape, he thought. Franz Karl Bühler was in a panic, fleeing a gang of mysterious agents who had been tormenting him for months. ![]() On a winter’s day in 1898, a stocky young man with a handlebar moustache was hurrying along the banks of a canal in Hamburg, north Germany.
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