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In 1922 Hans Prinzhorn, a Heidelberg psychiatrist, published a book that set the art world on fire. At first glance Artistry of the Mentally Ill didn’t sound as if it was breaking new ground. Ever since the 19th century, medical men working in asylums – “mad doctors” by another name – had pored over the drawings, paintings and sculptures of their more nimble-fingered patients to see if they could discern some sign or signature of madness. Was it possible to spot schizophrenia just by looking at the way someone drew a horse or coloured in the sky? Could you discern neurosis simply because an artist had failed to give her figures two eyes and a mouth?
Using art as a diagnostic tool, though, was not what Prinzhorn was about. With a PhD in art history, his interest in the patients’ painting was aesthetic and philosophic. When a delusional metalworker from Hamburg called Franz Bühler produced The Choking Angel, an intense rendering of God’s messenger with a shining crown and a blank, torturer’s face, Prinzhorn didn’t hesitate to compare the work to Albrecht Dürer’s. Another inmate artist, seamstress Agnes Richter, produced a subversive version of her institutional uniform, by restitching the arms on backwards and embroidering it all over with expressions of her plight: “I am not big”, “I miss today”, “you do not have to”. Intriguing too was a former builder called Karl Genzel who produced wooden effigies including one of the German field marshal Paul von Hindenburg that drew simultaneously on the ancestor art of New Guinea and the scurrilous vernacular of political cartooning.
This was certainly not art to soothe the soul. But then, soothing the soul, or any of the senses, was not what modern art was about. From the end of the previous century, artists such as Gustav Klimt, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele had devoted themselves to describing the agony of modern selfhood. In Van Gogh’s looming sunflowers, Munch’s horrified scream or Schiele’s warped human forms, you could feel a rising tide of madness. And it was that “madness”, which might be better described as a heroic refusal to fall for the easy nostrums of “civilised” society, that Prinzhorn’s asylum artists seemed to be able to access at will. While “sane” painters were obliged to scrape off layers of social conditioning and academic training before they could reach those hidden parts of themselves, asylum inmates appeared to have a shortcut to their unconscious (Prinzhorn was a follower of Freud). Rather than being pitied or patronised these artists of the interior were to be envied and revered.
And copied, too. That certainly was the response of Paul Klee, then teaching “pictorial theory of form” at the Bauhaus, who greeted the images in Prinzhorn’s book with raptures. In these oddly shattered shapes, with their jagged outlines, shifts in perspective and intentional incompleteness, Klee saw an authentic response to all the fractures of the post-first world war world. From now on he would use Prinzhorn’s book as a source of imagery whenever his own artistic practice needed a jolt. One striking example is his 1923 work Prophetic Woman, a primitive figure that appears to owe something to Lamb of God, a dense geometric pen and ink drawing by Johann Knüpfer, a former baker who was convinced he was Christ.
Among the surrealists, too, Prinzhorn’s book was a hit. Max Ernst drew inspiration from August Natterer, an electrical engineer from Upper Swabia who claimed to be a direct descendant of Napoleon. Natterer’s intensely detailed, densely coloured paintings, which he said had come to him in a vision, provided inspiration for Ernst’s seminal 1931 collage, Oedipus. Salvador Dalí, meanwhile, borrowed from Carl Lange, a former salesman who saw miraculous figures in the sweat-stained insoles of his shoes. Dalí, to his credit, tried very hard to go insane as a way of improving his painting but never quite managed it: “The only difference between myself and a madman,” he declared, is that “I am not mad”.
Two years after Prinzhorn’s book was published, another self-taught artist was sitting in a Bavarian prison. A psychologist had assessed the new inmate as “a morbid psychopath … prone to hysteria … with an inclination toward a magical-mystical mindset”. Although this sounds promising, the 35-year-old’s paintings were not the kind of thing likely to interest Dr Prinzhorn. This artist was keen on Alpine peaks and lakes with the occasional fairytale schloss. His best works, though, were his drawings of municipal buildings, the sort of thing a town planner might do by way of a hobby. Having twice failed the entrance exam to Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1907, Adolf Hitler scraped a living by copying postcards of Munich’s favourite views and selling them in bars and cafes. Until, that is, he ended up in prison, shouting nonsense at the admitting psychologist.
Hitler was serving a sentence for his part in the Beer Hall putsch of 1923, in which he led 2,000 Nazi stormtroopers in a botched attempt to topple the Weimar Republic. While his fortunes were about to change – within 10 years he would be chancellor of Germany – his ideas about art remained constant. Indeed, they hardened into a dogma that became a founding principle of the Third Reich. “Healthy art”, for Hitler, was an art that painted exactly what was in front of its nose, with a bit of swagger thrown in for good measure. People should look like people – Aryan people, naturally, with firm limbs and rosy cheeks – and landscapes should resemble the postcard art he used to churn out for the tourists. The sky was blue, the grass was green, and to make sure everyone understood this, the Führer introduced legislation to ensure that painters followed the rules of “natural” coloration. You fooled around with an amber sea or blue horses at your peril.
Any art that did not follow these rules was “degenerate” and a deliberate ploy by the Jewish-Bolshevik nexus to destroy Germany. To make sure this didn’t happen, in 1937 Hitler ordered the confiscation of all troublesome art from Germany’s galleries and museums. This rounded-up treasure, including a number of pieces by the Prinzhorn artists as well as work by Klee, Marc Chagall and Otto Dix, was put on display in the Degenerate Art Exhibitionin the same year. Later iterations of the show, which proved immensely popular, contrasted modernist art with paintings and drawings made by the Heidelberg patients in order to hammer home the connection between biological and artistic degeneracy.
By this time the patients themselves were in a remarkably vulnerable and friendless state. Prinzhorn had died in 1933, just as Hitler came to power, and most of the professional artists whose work featured in the Degenerate Art Exhibition had gone to ground. Klee was in Switzerland, Chagall, Dalí and Ernst were in New York, while Oskar Schlemmer and Dix were doing their best to keep their heads down. So there was no one left to speak up for the asylum artists when, in the autumn months of 1939, Hitler set out to exterminate them.
The rationale was eugenics: psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia were heritable, so it made sense to purge the general population of these unfortunate people who, in Hitler’s phrase, represented “life unworthy of life”. In fact, it turns out that costcutting was the more immediate driver: long-term psychiatric care cost money and, as Germany prepared to go to war with Britain, those marks would be better spent on panzer tanks. Charlie English reckons that at least 30 of Prinzhorn’s artists were among the quarter of a million inmates driven into gas chambers during the early months of the war. The “lucky” ones got away with forced sterilisation.
English has written a terrific book, taut and thematic where it could so easily have been slack and baggy. Finding a focus cannot have been easy – Prinzhorn, the sort-of hero of the account, dies far too young, and the lives of the asylum painters are lost in the dishonest jumble of Nazi bureaucracy (relatives of the murdered were told that their loved ones had died of a “heart attack”). And Hitler is so huge a figure that a less assured writer would have had trouble cutting him down to size and keeping him in play. But English manages all this deftly; the result is a book as beautiful as it is bleak.
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