Prinzhorn’s decision to quit was as pathological as it was planned. The research for his book was more or less complete, and he was ready to free himself of Wilmanns’s influence, but the swooping trajectory of his correspondence in the spring of 1921 suggests he had his own psychological problems in the form of depression, stress, and perhaps even latent war trauma. His long absences from Heidelberg, combined with his growing dislike for psychiatry, made the time he spent at the clinic increasingly unpleasant as the year progressed. He described himself as an “outsider” and suspected his colleagues of plotting against him—if he made the slightest professional misstep, it would provoke a “howl of joy,” he told a friend. In his letters, he accused Wilmanns of deliberately undermining him and excluding him from social events, and suspected the professor of “grubby tricks” in his failure to find money for a museum of pathological art. In March, Prinzhorn diagnosed himself as an “unstable psychopath with hysterical traits,” and felt he was losing his grip, “floating in the space between heaven and earth, inwardly bound for nowhere, at home nowhere, with no goal.”
The task of writing up his conclusions added to his burden. In April he retreated to the small holiday home he and Erna kept in the Black Forest. Snow lay deep on the ground, and he was alone. He worked fifteen hours a day, until his head was “thick,” and became mentally “helpless” and “depressed.” He hoped to become a psychotherapist when the art project was complete, but had begun to question himself, and even the book now seemed “dubious.” The following month he was back in Heidelberg, “a bundle of feelings of insufficiency,” and believed Wilmanns was treating him in a disgraceful manner. On July 15, he resigned.
Prinzhorn was thirty-five years old, a respected doctor of medicine and philosophy, a husband, and a father of two, but he celebrated like an undergraduate, hooking up with his friends the Schroeders and a mysterious blond woman he called “the ivory Swede” for a twelve-hour pleasure boat trip on the Neckar. They decked out the small vessel with so many plants and bouquets it looked like a “pile of flowers,” and they wore swimsuits, Prinzhorn borrowing Frau Schroeder’s. He described their attention-grabbing progress along the river in a letter to his friend Käthe Knobloch:
[Schroeder was] a slender, sinewy young athlete in a black short swimsuit, [Frau Schroeder] in a white robe with a colorful headscarf, the boyish blond Swede in light wine-red raw silk pyjamas with poppy seeds in her hair, me in the Schroeder woman’s miniaturized bathing suit, with a cloth around the shoulders and, as a hat, a knotted handkerchief with cornflowers.
Erna did not feature in this reminiscence. She may have been on one of her extended visits to her parents’ house in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Quite what her husband’s cavorting did to her fragile mental state is not recorded, but the marriage was in difficulty. The Prinzhorns had spent much of their relationship apart: While he was in the army, she had split her time between the Bellevue sanatorium, their home in Freiburg, and St. Gallen. Now, with the added demands of two young children, the atmosphere in the apartment on Neue Schloßstraße was strained. A significant chunk of the blame lay with Prinzhorn, who was indecisive, neurotic, and resisted attachment of any kind—indeed, these were the qualities that had drawn him to psychology in the first place. But the irony was not lost on him that they had fallen in love as he tried to help Erna through her mental illness, and now the tables were turning. He noted bitterly how “this person, in whose schizophrenia I have penetrated so deeply and actively that I am somehow complicit in its presence…turns majestically away from me.”
More and more, Prinzhorn looked to escape Heidelberg. In 1921–1922 alone he went to Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Cologne, Hanover, Munich, Zurich, Bern, Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna, lecturing, training in psychotherapy, building up his freelance work, and finishing the book. He secured an introduction to Freud through Binswanger, the director of the Bellevue. Prinzhorn had “an artistic nature with a strong impulse toward independence and a great opposition to all authority,” Binswanger wrote, and had curated the Heidelberg collection “very well.” On October 12, 1921, Prinzhorn delivered a guest lecture at the Wednesday meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, with Freud in the chair. His themes—the special relationship between the work of mental patients and contemporary art; the idea that the capacity for artistic configuration is given to everyone—were the major lines of inquiry in the book he was close to finishing. Freud gave Prinzhorn a good review, telling Binswanger that he had “personally made a good impression,” though no lasting relationship was established.
Prinzhorn felt a deeper connection to Carl Jung. In November, he began a three-month placement at the Burghölzli hospital in Zurich, where Jung worked as a clinical psychiatrist. The apprentice was impressed. “The profound wisdom and insights I have always felt in this man are really there,” he wrote to Knobloch. “We work hard together….That he offered me this, so to speak, au pair, or honoris causa, naturally pleases me.” Next time they met, he told his friend, he would identify her “type” in the Jungian manner.
Prinzhorn’s travels through the postwar intellectual German world continued into April 1922 when he visited the Bauhaus art school in Weimar. Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus’s founder, was initially wary of the whole idea of psychiatric art. “I do not want to let Prinzhorn speak here,” he told his lover, Lily Hildebrandt. “Such border crossings are dangerous and confusing, and the minds here are already sufficiently overwhelmed.” But Prinzhorn won Gropius around. The images he showed were “really quite astonishing,” Gropius told Hildebrandt afterward, and Prinzhorn himself seemed “a fine person.”
Throughout this period, Prinzhorn kept up a long and difficult correspondence with his publisher, Julius Springer, over the editing of the book. The text was too long, and he had to trim the number of schizophrenic artists profiled from a dozen to ten, dropping the Swiss watchmaker Hermann Mebes and the only woman, Else Blankenhorn. He decided to produce separate monographs on each at a later date, though these would never materialize. He made great demands of Springer: The book’s title had to be printed in a special “runic” font, the cover had to be black, and he wanted lavish quantities of high-quality images. At last, by the end of April, these issues were resolved, and on May 4, 1922, he held a copy in his hands for the first time.
Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the mentally ill) was a monumental achievement, an object of elegance and substance. If he had failed in his ambition to create a physical museum, the book itself was a virtual art gallery. It would be hailed as an “inaugural act” and an “emergence,” which gave patient works a worthy presentation for the first time. Weighing almost three pounds, with 361 luxurious pages, it contained 20 plates, many in color, and 167 black-and-white images, the highlights of the five thousand pieces of art by around 450 patients—mostly from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, but also from the Baltic states, Italy, and Japan—that Prinzhorn had gathered at Heidelberg. Springer was a scientific publisher, but this was an art book from its opening folio, which showed a full-color, near-life-sized reproduction of Der Würgengel, one of seven full-page images of Bühler’s works. Dozens of Genzel’s sculptures were also included, along with copious pieces by Meyer, Schneller, Lange, Wieser, Zinowiew, and many, many more.
Prinzhorn’s unusual title addressed the core controversy of whether this material constituted art. The word Kunst (art) implied a value judgment and led to the dismissal of everything else as “non-art,” the doctor explained, so he had borrowed a word used by Fraenger, Bildnerei, which translates as “artistry,” but also “imagery” or “pictures,” to describe all objects produced by the creative process. Bildnerei was the result of the primordial human need for self-expression via configuration, and was therefore equally valid whether it was produced by a schizophrenic mind or a sane one. It could neither be “sick” nor “healthy.”
Developing this theme, he turned his considerable skill as a writer against the psychiatric profession and its attempts to use art—the highest manifestation of the human spirit—as diagnostic material. He attacked Cesare Lombroso for reinforcing the idea that geniuses were more or less insane and sparking a wave of attempts to pathologize important cultural figures. Though he didn’t name him, Prinzhorn’s fury was clearly aimed at Weygandt, who had dismissed the material as “congenital nonsense,” and perhaps at Wilmanns, too, who had once hoped to use the Heidelberg collection as a medical tool. Any psychiatrist who attempted to dismiss a controversial work of art by casting the suspicion of mental illness on its author acted “carelessly and stupidly, no matter what his qualifications,” Prinzhorn argued. It would simply not do to “explain” artists’ works by pathographic investigations of their lives. Even “reputable psychiatrists” were making vulgar and sensational comparisons between professional art and the art of patients in the press, and these served only to “arm the philistines.” It was “superficial and wrong” to infer that the authors of two separate paintings shared the same underlying psychic conditions simply because their work bore an external resemblance:
The conclusion that a painter is mentally ill because he paints like a given mental patient is no more intelligent or convincing than another…that [the artists] Pechstein and Heckel are Africans from the Camerouns because they produce wooden figurines like those by Africans from the Camerouns.
A common error of psychiatry, in Prinzhorn’s view, was the lazy comparison of schizophrenic configuration with “degeneration,” or decadence. There were various problems with the term “degeneration,” which was not defined but implied that there was a “norm” from which the artist deviated. There was no norm, Prinzhorn insisted, and he would avoid such value judgments. In fact, since psychiatry had no standing in the cultural field, all its pronouncements in the field of art were irrelevant.
Having dealt with his main enemy, Prinzhorn turned to analyzing the pictures using the knowledge of the philosophy of art that he had acquired from Lipps, Schmarsow, Freud, Fraenger, Jaspers, and Klages. The works in the collection were direct expressions of the psyches of their authors, all of whom had a fundamental drive to “build a bridge from the self to others”: These were compulsive, vital acts of communication. The configurative process itself was an honorable phenomenon, and only someone hostile to it on principle would make cheap fun of the result, however distorted or strange it appeared. The tragedy of contemporary art, he wrote, was that it had lost touch with this primeval purpose. Artists were taught that there was an objective reality, a “correct” photographic version of the world, when there was no such thing. The mental image of a particular scene was interpreted differently by every individual, and its expression could sit anywhere on a scale from the narrowest realism to the broadest abstraction. In fact, the chimera of correctness and completeness, particularly in representations of the human body, had done a great deal of harm to art. It was wrong to judge a work on its correspondence to reality, as such judgments could only be based on the dogma of the moment. Instead, the value of a work lay in its author’s ability to relate whatever moved them, so that the observer could empathically participate in the experience as closely as possible. Expressive power, rather than technical ability, was what made this possible. Children, “primitive” people, and the insane all demonstrated expressive talent in their art.
At the center of the book lay Prinzhorn’s pièce de résistance, his all-important, lavishly illustrated profiles of the ten “schizophrenic masters” he had found in the collection, each of whom had been given a pseudonym to protect their families’ reputations. He began with Genzel (whom he called “Brendel”) and followed with Klett (“Klotz”), Meyer (“Moog”), August Natterer (Neter), Joseph Knopf (“Knüpfer”), Clemens von Oertzen (“Orth”), Hermann Behle (“Beil”), Wieser (“Welz”), and Schneller (“Sell”). His greatest artistic find, Bühler (“Pohl”), was saved for last, with Der Würgengel picked out as his crowning glory. Some of the pieces here were so clearly artistic, Prinzhorn wrote, that many an average “healthy” work was left far behind. Indeed, professional artists’ attempts to mimic the work of schizophrenics appeared ersatz when compared with genuine examples of “mad” configuration, which were the epitome of artistic authenticity. The patients with schizophrenia in his collection were “in contact, in a totally irrational way, with the most profound truths.” Unbound from the repressive customs of civilization, they had reproduced, unconsciously, pictures of transcendence as they perceived it.
For Prinzhorn to complete such a project in little more than two and a half years was astonishing. A courageous psychological explorer, he had wandered into the little-charted borderlands between art and madness and returned with a schizophrenic treasure trove that mirrored the spirit of the age. It was true that he had romanticized the idea of the autonomous schizophrenic and glossed over the fact that several of his artists were formally trained, but his book would still be hailed as the standard work of his field many decades later. He had rescued art from the diagnostic clutches of psychiatry and placed the previously despised output of the mentally ill on a pedestal, equal to or higher than that of some of the most vaunted artists in German history.
His ideas would infuriate cultural conservatives, as he must have known they would. He had provoked the psychiatric establishment by ordering it out of the cultural sphere altogether, and by batting away its favored concept of degeneracy. He had also demolished the value system of the academies—of realism, objectivity, and years of training in technique, color, perspective, and anatomy—and held up individual expression and raw configurative power as the key ingredients for art, just as the avant-garde did. There would be consequences, for art and for his artists, as the nationalists and reactionaries sought their revenge. In the coming Germany, only one individual’s expression would matter: that of Adolf Hitler. Painting, sculpture, and design would be placed at the service of his vision of a pure ethnic community, marching in unison to the National Socialist drum. There would be no room in these ranks for Prinzhorn’s schizophrenic acts of configuration, or for the people who produced them.