By the age of thirty-two, Hans Prinzhorn was at once a qualified physician, an art history Ph.D., a decorated combat veteran, and a professionally trained singer with an expressive baritone voice that could move his audience to tears. In later years, he would add psychotherapist, writer, lecturer, champion of the Navajo nation, and translator of the works of D. H. Lawrence and André Gide to his impressive résumé. But it was his work on the art of the insane, conducted at Heidelberg, that would stand as his greatest and longest-lived achievement. With Prinzhorn’s help, madness would become a lens through which to view the horror of the First World War, and a vehicle to explore the newfound psychological territory Sigmund Freud had identified in every human mind.
Prinzhorn arrived at University of Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic in January 1919, two months after the armistice was signed. He and his young family—Ursula was a toddler, and his wife, Erna, was pregnant with their second child, Marianne—moved into a house on Neue Schloßstraße, a steep street of switchbacks that climbed past mock-baronial mansions adorned with battlements, coats of arms, and even a knight in full armor, all carved from the local red sandstone. From their windows, the Prinzhorns could look out over the town, a picturesque mile of red-tiled roofs and church spires, squeezed between the fast-flowing river Neckar and the shoulder of the Königstuhl mountain. Writers and artists had flocked to this center of the German Romantic movement for more than a century, to clamber among the green hills and hunt the perfect view of the ruined castle, the verdant Odenwald, and the sun-dappled river. This was a student city, a place for philosophy and poetry, for messing about in boats, for lovers, and for long walks in the fairy-tale forests. Mark Twain, who spent a year here struggling with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, described it as “the last possibility of the beautiful.”
The university hospital lay a brisk thirty-minute walk away, a campus of stern imperial buildings set out on the flat land between the railway station and the river. The four-story psychiatry clinic looked a little run-down in those days: It had been short of investment even before the war, and now it needed several million marks’ worth of repairs. Even so, it retained its global reputation as the birthplace of modern psychiatry. It was here in 1898 that a former director, Emil Kraepelin, had revised the old taxonomies of mental illness down to just two: manic-depressive psychosis and dementia praecox, later known as schizophrenia. It was here, too, that Karl Jaspers had written the seminal work of theoretical psychiatry, Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General psychopathology). If it hadn’t been for the atmosphere at the clinic and his colleagues there, Jaspers declared, this volume would simply “never have arisen.”
Prinzhorn entered the clinic via the botanical gardens, through a double-height portico, and climbed a short flight of steps to the reception hall, which reverberated with the sounds of a mental hospital in the era before antipsychotic drugs. As elsewhere in the German system, the clinic was zoned according to gender and the state of the inmates. While the unruhig (agitated) were held in a separate block far from the entrance, halbruhig (semi-calm) and ruhig (calm) individuals were kept in the main wing, off the long corridors that stretched away at either side, women to the left, men to the right.
Prinzhorn found his place in the attic, a warren of small rooms and offices divided by heavy wooden rafters, which the junior staff shared with a group of nuns who had been drafted to help out during the war. As he settled in, he began to turn to the problem he had conceived several months before: how to put together the greatest collection of psychiatric art the world had ever known.
Prinzhorn was a radical in many ways, conservative in others, and sometimes both at the same time: He would later describe himself as a “Revolutionary for Eternal Things.” The most dazzling assessment of him comes from the American psychologist David L. Watson, who believed he was “one of the significant literary men of our time,” with a nature so noble he could be compared with the poet John Keats. In his profundity, Watson wrote, and with a kindness drawn from strength rather than weakness, Prinzhorn embodied Nietzsche’s ideal of the coming twentieth-century man: He would make “outstanding contributions to the spiritual guidance of the race.” Those who knew Prinzhorn better pointed out less flattering traits. He had a wild oppositional streak. He could be vain. He was psychologically frail and almost pathologically restless. He would blame these latter characteristics on his parents and on his upbringing in the rural community of Hemer, in Westphalia, where he was born on June 6, 1886.
Prinzhorn’s father, Hermann, was a self-made man who had left rural Saxony for the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and afterward found a job in a paper factory in Hemer, working his way up from the shop floor to become co-owner. Hermann married Julie Varnhagen, the daughter of the local pastor, and together they settled into a bourgeois existence of faith, self-discipline, and financial prudence. Hans would describe Hermann as a tyrant in the home—“dully threatening,” a “slinger of absolute lightning”—but he was even harsher on his mother, Julie, who appeared to him as a sort of maternal black hole. He couldn’t recall a single moment of friendly emotion ever having emanated from her, he wrote: “I have never experienced or ‘had’ a mother in the spiritual sense, as the embodiment of all simplicity of being, of all security and the gateway to the universe.” The idea that he could ever have turned to her for help was “grotesque.”
Even so, his parents did pass on certain advantages to Hans, the third of their five children. One was his mother’s musicality. She had a beautiful, ample singing voice, and when he heard it floating through the house he would slip into the dining room, where the piano stood, pull up a footstool, and listen in happy excitement. Another was the gift of good looks. Prinzhorn would grow up tall and fine-featured, with wavy blond hair swept back from a high forehead and pale, intelligent eyes; though his relationships were often disastrous, he would never be alone for long. Sex for Hans began at ten, with an equally precocious girl in a forest glade, and continued through his teenage years with a long list of boys who gathered after school for mutual masturbation. He developed an obsession with death, which drew him to the village slaughterhouse. Here he would crouch among vats of foaming blood to watch animals being dispatched amid the penetrating stink of their own spilled intestines. It was an eerie premonition of his war service. “Killing…gained a horrible power over me,” he remembered.
The Prinzhorns were an educated family, and Hans found school easy, “like a game.” After rebuffing his father’s attempts to push him into business, he was allowed to pursue his cultural interests at Germany’s best universities. He began at Tübingen, majoring in art history and philosophy, but left after a term for Leipzig, where he was taught by the celebrated art historian August Schmarsow. After three semesters he was on the move again, to Munich, to study under Theodor Lipps, the philosopher of aesthetics. He reached the Bavarian capital in the spring of 1906, age nineteen, ready to begin the most vibrant period of his life.
Munich stood at that time with Paris and Vienna as one of the most splendid cultural centers in Europe. Above all it was a city of art. As Thomas Mann described it: “Art is flourishing, art rules the day, art with its rose-entwined sceptre holds smiling sway over the city.” Beneath its famous vault of shining cobalt sky, great painters drove with their mistresses in open carriages, drawing the salutes of passersby and the admiration of policemen. Young men with round artists’ hats and loose cravats went out strolling, whistling Wagner motifs, seeking love and sex and inspiration, while the sound of cellos and violins drifted from open windows. The artistic quarter of this artistic city was the Schwabing, a hotbed of Bohemian experimentation, where every fifth house had an atelier. Dramatists, avant-gardists, socialists, and conservative revolutionaries stalked the drawing rooms here, gathering in circles around the most charismatic personalities—the poet Stefan George, the mystic Alfred Schuler, the philosopher Ludwig Klages—to hammer out theories and ideologies. These ideas were not universally welcomed—as the painter Lovis Corinth noted, “In no city in Germany did old and new clash so forcefully”—but they flourished nevertheless. It wasn’t an accident that this city gave birth to a host of modernist art movements, including the Munich Secession, the Phalanx, the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (Munich New Artists’ Association), and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider).
As Prinzhorn wrote to his father, in Munich there was more of what he desired than he had thought possible. He formed an art association with friends, putting on festivals and shows in which he sometimes performed. He reviewed exhibitions for the Vienna papers and went to the theater and the opera, hoovering up new productions of Ibsen and Wagner. He was introduced to Nietzsche’s philosophy (“dangerous” was how Hermann described it) and made dozens of friends in the cultural world, from the musician Wilhelm Fürtwangler to the artist Hans Schwegerle. Schwegerle captured Prinzhorn’s youthful euphoria in a portrait. Naked beneath a long coat, he wears a hat and holds a lyre, half Apollo, half Orpheus.
“Tübingen gave me freshness, Leipzig new ways, Munich the necessary courage,” Prinzhorn wrote home. Later, looking back at those years, he would state simply: “A richer time can hardly come.”
In 1908, he completed his Ph.D., on the architect Gottfried Semper. Around this time, he met and married Eva Jonas, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish lawyer from Berlin, and began five years of training to be a professional baritone. It was while he was studying at the Conservatoire in Leipzig that serious mental illness encroached on his life for the first time.
In the spring of 1910, one of the Conservatoire’s singing teachers killed himself three days before he was due to marry Prinzhorn’s fellow student, Erna Hoffmann. The bride-to-be was pitched into such a severe depression she had to be hospitalized, and for the next two years, as Prinzhorn tried to rescue her from a succession of crises, he and Hoffmann grew increasingly close. In 1912, he divorced Eva to marry Erna. A few weeks after the wedding, Erna suffered a relapse and had to return to full-time care. Prinzhorn now abandoned all hope of a singing career. Instead, as he told his sister, Käthe, he had decided to “tackle a righteous profession in which one must undoubtedly do something good”: He would become a doctor. He took Erna to the exclusive Bellevue sanatorium in Switzerland, then moved to Freiburg, in the county of Breisgau, to begin his medical degree.
He was still there in the summer of 1914 when the war broke out, and he was drafted as a medic. It was a chance wartime encounter that led Prinzhorn to the task that would secure his place in art history.
Karl Wilmanns was a senior army doctor charged with reorganizing more than forty thousand beds in hospitals across southwest Germany for the war effort. In civilian life, he was a psychiatrist and had trained at the Heidelberg clinic under Kraepelin. He was fascinated by a small collection of patient art Kraepelin used for teaching, and had been thinking about ways to exploit it further. His initial idea was for a number of researchers to study individual cases, probably with the aim of drawing diagnostic conclusions from their paintings and drawings. When, in late 1917, Wilmanns met Prinzhorn in a military hospital near Strasbourg, the conversation turned to the images and objects produced by the mentally ill, and the thought processes behind them. With his medical and art history training, this was an area Prinzhorn was unusually qualified to research: He had briefly investigated the psychology of creativity in his doctoral thesis, and had discussed similar material with artist friends and with Ludwig Binswanger, the director of the Bellevue asylum. Wilmanns, who had a knack for spotting talent, asked if the young medic would care to explore the Heidelberg works. Prinzhorn initially said no, believing the collection was “too little” and “too insignificant.” Yet the seed of an idea was planted that he would carry with him to the front.
In the summer of 1918, Prinzhorn was sent to the Marne Valley to command a mobile dressing station in the last major German offensive of the war. The early hours of Monday, July 15, found him in a forest west of Reims, hunkered down in a foxhole among fifty-two divisions of German troops preparing for the assault. Shortly after midnight, the artillery around him opened up with a deafening roar; the enemy responded, and soon the scene around him began to resemble a “feast of hell.” At 3:00 a.m., his unit began to advance through the pitch-dark wood in ankle-deep mud. Prinzhorn picked his way among the gun emplacements, which flared in spasmodic eruptions. As he reached the edge of the trees, a vision opened up of the river and the battlefield lit by the stars and colored flares:
In the misty valley floor, flames from the village of Dormans licked the sky, where moments before a thousand mines had just detonated in a single explosion, the glow of the fire illuminating the meandering river. All around you could clearly now see the shape of the slopes and countless muzzle flashes.
With the dull light of dawn spreading in the east, Prinzhorn and his unit pressed forward toward the Marne under a continuous barrage. Suddenly, a “substantial bugger” landed barely ten yards behind him; he felt his left leg fly up, and he let out a scream of pain. Lying in the mud, feeling for the wound, he found only a bruise, and struggled on to the next scrap of cover. There, almost overcome with dizziness, he examined the leg again and found that “the red juice flows.” He hobbled back through the roaring howitzers with his arm around a stretcher bearer. Six days later, he was lying in crisp sheets at the Victoria Hotel in Wiesbaden, his war effectively over. He would be awarded the Iron Cross, first class.
Since their meeting, Prinzhorn had continued to mull over his conversation with Wilmanns. Eventually he wrote to the psychiatrist to suggest that they attack the problem “on the broadest possible front” by trying to persuade other asylums and clinics to provide material. Wilmanns agreed. That winter, as the conflict sputtered to an inconclusive end, the psychiatrist was appointed director of the Heidelberg clinic, and he wasted little time in offering his junior acquaintance a job expanding the art collection. In January 1919, just weeks after being demobilized, Prinzhorn moved to the university town on the Neckar to take up his post as a psychiatric assistant.
In the spring of 1919—the fifth spring of the war, as the young Bertolt Brecht dubbed it—Germany was defeated, humiliated, broke. Above all, it was hungry. The Allied food blockade continued for eight months after the armistice was signed, leaving the country in a state of famine that would last until the following summer. Difficult decisions had to be made about who ate and who did not, and psychiatric patients were at the back of the queue. What food they were given was indigestible, lacking cereal, meat, and fat, and the patients’ poor nutrition turned everyday infections into killers. Thirty percent of Germany’s asylum population, more than seventy thousand people, died between 1914 and 1919 from starvation, disease, or neglect. The deliberate prioritizing of the healthy over the sick would have far-reaching consequences. As Karl Bonhoeffer, the chairman of the German national psychiatric association, put it, it was almost as if the country had witnessed a change in its concept of humanity:
We were forced by the terrible exigencies of war to ascribe a different value to the life of the individual…we had to get used to watching our patients die of malnutrition in vast numbers, almost approving this, in the knowledge that perhaps the healthy could be kept alive through these sacrifices.
While Bonhoeffer warned that there was a danger of the situation “going too far,” others saw it as an opportunity, a chance to remove an economic burden from the defeated and impoverished state. In their pamphlet Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (Permission for the destruction of life unworthy of life), Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche set out a scheme to extend the attrition of certain types of psychiatric patient through “involuntary euthanasia.” For Binding, a retired legal expert, these “incurable idiots” were “not merely worthless, but actually existences of negative value,” a “travesty of real human beings” who occasioned disgust in anyone who encountered them. Hoche, a professor of psychiatry at Freiburg, gave the treatise a medical gloss, describing inmates who existed “on an intellectual level which we only encounter way down in the animal kingdom.” It cost the state 1,300 reichsmarks a year to keep each “idiot,” the two men argued, which thereby sucked up “massive capital” from the national product. It was only right, given Germany’s dire position, that such “ballast existences” be thrown overboard.
Binding and Hoche introduced the term lebensunwertes Leben or “life unworthy of life” into the discourse over mental health care and sparked a debate among psychiatrists, theological experts, and lawyers that would last for more than a decade. Some supported Binding and Hoche’s idea and suggested ways to flesh out the details; many did not. For the time being, at least, the pamphlet’s recommendations were not implemented.
The mentally ill weren’t the only ones on short rations. Across the nation, German daydreams were filled with food. Carl Zuckmayer, a war veteran and poet who moved in the same Heidelberg circles as Prinzhorn, remembered a “crazy hunger” in the spring of 1919, a chemical craving for sweets and alcohol. He and his friends longed for the cans of gluey condensed milk that came in foreign aid packages, while the quintessence of nutrition was a tin of corned beef. Any alcohol they could lay their hands on—including sour wine, and schnapps made by state distilleries from potato peels—was consumed until their “skulls smoked.” Clothes were in short supply, too: The only material that existed in abundance was gray-green uniform cloth, which they cut up to make suits. Yet all the deprivation could not dampen the veterans’ elation, since they awoke each morning knowing they would not be shot, and went to bed each night knowing that no alarm would tear them from their beds. “We had life,” Zuckmayer remembered, “and we wanted to use it and savor it to the limit, with all our power.”
Prinzhorn was in a similarly liberated frame of mind. A generation of young men had been forced to walk into the jaws of the guns, and for what? Germany’s defeat showed that their deaths had been futile, and everything was now open to question, from faith in human progress to reason itself. Prinzhorn felt “the deepest nihilism” for all forms of culture, he wrote. No religion or ideology could offer him a connection, or even support; he was “as free of all such bonds as is possible for present-day man to be.” Determined to discover the real purpose of life, seeking “the vibrancy of other living things, of nature and the work of men,” he threw himself into his job.
The collection Prinzhorn found in the Heidelberg clinic was small, probably consisting of no more than a few dozen pieces, arranged by diagnosis. Wilmanns had already picked out a few drawings for him to study, and the professor’s authority and reputation would help him gain access to other asylums. It was Prinzhorn, though, who defined the problem. This was spelled out in a first round-robin letter to the directors of psychiatric institutions, two brisk paragraphs typed on a single sheet of A4 letter-size paper. It began:
Dear colleague,
The pictorial arts of the mentally ill have repeatedly been the subject of scientific investigation. However, the material from which previous results were obtained has been limited.
If institutions would be prepared to send in paintings, drawings, and sculpture by their schizophrenic and paranoid patients, he continued, it was near certain that an “unusually rich and instructive body of material” would result. The Heidelberg clinic would bear any costs and would only require the works for a short time, after which they would be returned undamaged. It would be extremely useful if the medical files of the creators could be sent along, too. Finally, if any of the material was to be published, Prinzhorn would first seek the relevant permissions.
Copies of the letter were signed by Wilmanns in his neat hand, and sent out in the middle of February to psychiatric institutions across Germany. The response was swift, almost overwhelming. Psychiatric patients had been making art in hospitals across the country, and the fruits of their labor now came flooding into Prinzhorn’s attic. As time went by, he would expand his search, sourcing material from all over Europe, even from Latin America and Japan, but the earliest and richest seams were asylums in the German-speaking world. The works they sent in were of every conceivable type, executed with every available variety of media. Alongside drawings and paintings, there were collages, pieces of music, and handmade books. The better-off patients had filled sketchpads, diaries, and canvases. Others used scraps of newspaper, tissue, old sugar bags, toilet paper, and the contents of wastepaper baskets—meal plans and nursing rosters, used envelopes and pages torn from newspapers. Sculptures were molded from chewed bread or carved from bits of old wooden furniture. The most common drawing implement was the indelible pencil issued to hospital staff, which wrote in purple when licked, but there were also watercolors, pastels, vegetable dyes, and India ink. Some pieces had been varnished, washed with chalk, or overpainted to obscure their meanings. There were self-portraits, landscapes, interior designs, texts, and tattoos.
As material poured in, Prinzhorn catalogued it according to content and form. He gave each artist a case number, and protected the works as far as his meager budget would allow, mounting and framing the pictures. The growing collection’s enormous variety was matched by its surprising quality: It wasn’t just medically interesting, Prinzhorn realized, it was interesting as art. He maintained a busy correspondence with the asylums, offering encouragement and support where he could.
His exchanges with Dr. Carl Hermkes, director of the Eickelborn institution in Westphalia, were typical. On March 1, Hermkes sent a selection of patient drawings and sculptures, including work by a former publican, Peter Meyer, and an ex-builder named Karl Genzel. Prinzhorn was impressed with the work and wrote back to Hermkes asking if he might be so kind as to encourage Genzel and Meyer to do more. Another Genzel sculpture arrived in May, a small, bulbous wooden effigy who wore armor, a crown, and an officer’s mustache, which reminded Prinzhorn of ancestor carvings from New Guinea, but was also recognizable as the German field marshal and war hero Paul von Hindenburg. Genzel had drawn attention to Hindenburg’s “fat cheeks,” and had given the figure “large ears because he must hear everything” and a protuberant nose “because he must smell everything.” It wasn’t always easy to follow what Genzel said about his work, Prinzhorn realized, but one remark stood out: “When I have a piece of wood in front of me, a hypnosis is in it. If I follow it, something comes out. Otherwise there is going to be a fight.”
Meyer, meanwhile, was engaged on a painting called The Ten Commandments, Hermkes wrote: At present he would only make religious pieces. It would be “desirable to have some clay and paints” for Genzel, he added, as he was unable to get hold of them.
Were oils or watercolors wanted? asked Prinzhorn, before inquiring about the artists’ inspiration. Had Genzel seen any “so-called Negro sculptures”? Had Meyer, who had lived in the cathedral cities of Cologne and Münster, seen stained-glass windows, which his work resembled? Even if he had, his independent achievement was astonishing. Again, the Heidelberg men asked Hermkes to encourage productivity, adding that they were “more than willing to give a small gift of money.” Hermkes suggested that chewing tobacco for Genzel, and a letter of acknowledgment for Meyer, would “probably stimulate the productivity of both men.”
Around three-quarters of Prinzhorn’s artist-patients were diagnosed with schizophrenia. The rest shared a range of conditions from “manic-depressive” to “paralytic,” “imbecile,” and “epileptic.” Though more than half the patients living in German asylums were female, fewer than 20 percent of the works Prinzhorn received were by women, a reflection both of their status in society and of a narrow definition of art, which excluded many traditionally female handicrafts. An exception to this trend was Agnes Richter’s jacket. Richter, a Dresden seamstress, had been committed in 1893 after being arrested for disturbing the peace. In the asylum at Hubertusberg, she began work on an institutional garment made of gray linen, re-stitching the arms on backward, and embroidering it all over with expressions of her plight. “I am not big,” read one; others spelled out “my jacket,” “I am,” “I have,” “I miss today,” and “you do not have to.” Her asylum laundry number, 583, appeared again and again. The writing was mainly stitched to the inside, where it would have lain next to her body—an attempt to reinforce her sense of self, perhaps, in a place where that was easily lost. The jacket was Richter’s only item in the collection.
Katharina Detzel, too, was represented by very few works. Detzel was a powerful character in the asylum at Klingenmünster: Institutionalized after sabotaging a railway line in an act of political protest in 1907, she resisted the doctors’ punitive “treatments,” and frequently tried to escape. She wrote a book and a play, and began to create tiny figures from chewed bread before graduating to more substantial materials. Her most striking piece was a life-sized mannequin with male genitalia, which she called “man.” When she was angry, she would beat “man” with her fists; when she was happy, she would dance with him.
Clear themes began to emerge from the work. One concerned the near-supernatural power of machines. Jakob Mohr, a farmer with schizophrenia, drew a diabolical device that emitted invisible “influencing” waves, which he thought were producing his strange visions and sensations. Gustav Sievers, a weaver, designed a “flying weaving loom,” which he said would transform life on earth for three thousand years; he even applied for a patent. Sievers also spent time exploring the erotic potential of bicycles, depicting large-bosomed ladies pedaling to and fro: In institutions where men and women were not allowed to meet, sexual fantasies provided another rich vein. Joseph Schneller, a paranoid former draftsman for the Bavarian railways, depicted various pornographic “chicaneries,” as he described them, and produced a magnum opus titled Sadistisches Lebenswerk (Sadistic life’s work), which included vast, detailed plans of establishments in which sex was to take place and the specialist equipment that was required.
Other artists exhibited royal delusions. Else Blankenhorn, the daughter of a wealthy Karlsruhe family, had lived for many years in the Bellevue sanatorium, where she developed an elaborate fantasy life in which she was Else von Hohenzollern, the spiritual wife of Kaiser Wilhelm II. This imagined role required her to help deceased couples in need of redemption, an expensive business which she paid for by painting high-denomination banknotes. She also produced large quantities of beautiful, brightly colored oil paintings, influenced by Van Gogh and Edvard Munch, which often show a young woman floating, untethered, in an Expressionist landscape.
At a time when the church still governed most people’s lives, religious subjects were strongly represented in the collection. Carl Lange, a salesman, believed he had seen a divine face in a piece of meat while traveling in America in 1883. After plotting to assassinate the president of Mexico, he had been taken to the Bloomingdale asylum in New York before being deported and placed in the institution at Schwetz. There, he noticed overlapping heads, figures, and religious symbols that appeared in the sweat-stained insoles of his shoes. He drew more than a hundred such “miracles” in finely detailed pencil sketches, each of which was contained within the outline of a footprint. Josef Forster, a patient at the Karthaus-Prüll institution in Regensburg, believed he could actually become a god by only eating his own bodily excretions. When he achieved the holy state, he would be weightless and able to run through the air at great speed. He envisioned this moment in a magical, thickly painted portrait of a flying man, held to the earth only by the weights he suspended from each hand. In the corner of this work he wrote:
This is to show
That if one’s body no longer has any mass,
One must weigh oneself down.
And you can go
With great speed
Through the air
By summer, Prinzhorn realized it had been a mistake to promise to return the works. In an updated circular letter in June 1919, he wrote that it would be “extremely unfortunate” if this unique collection were to be dispersed and returned to asylum archives, where only a small number of people would have access. Instead, he wanted to keep it together as a “museum of pathological art.” The most interesting pieces would be hung in an exhibition room, while others would be archived and made available for future research.
That autumn, when artwork by around 130 patients had reached the clinic, Prinzhorn published his first article on the subject, in a German psychiatric journal. “The Artistic Work of the Mentally Ill” contained no details about the collection. Instead, it was an overview of the existing literature on the subject, including L’Art chez les fous (The art of the mad) by the French psychiatrist Paul Meunier and Genio e follia (Genius and madness) by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who argued that great artistic ability was akin to insanity. Prinzhorn also summarized shorter treatises by Freud, Kraepelin, and Jaspers. What shone through his analysis was a growing distaste for the diagnostic approach, when few people seemed to have examined the material’s relationship to “normal” art. How was it possible that an “insane” person could create works of undeniable artistic quality? A theory of configuration was required, he concluded, to explain the psychic processes behind artistic creation. Only then could “mad” and “sane” art be directly compared and light be shed on the problem of art’s relationship to insanity. This was the task that lay ahead. He would present his findings in a substantial volume which would showcase the abundant material that was piling up at the clinic.
For Prinzhorn, examining the immense variety of works within his collection was a transcendent experience. He realized he had uncovered an untapped source of schizophrenic creativity that matched or even surpassed professional art in its expressive power. Medical records could give him only a basic understanding of these strange creations, however, and he asked doctors to include the artists’ own explanations of certain pieces, recorded verbatim. Then even that wasn’t enough. To understand this art properly, he needed to interview the artists themselves. He began to travel around Germany, meeting and speaking with patients whose work he found particularly engaging.
There was one individual in his cohort of newly discovered talent who seemed to surpass all the rest for sheer ability. One day in 1920, Prinzhorn set out to pay him a visit.