In the early decades of the 20th century, a physician at a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg, Germany, began collecting drawings, paintings, sculptures, and writings created by patients in mental institutions. Many of these works had been produced by individuals who were isolated from society, their artistic abilities largely overlooked, and their creations regarded primarily as symptoms of mental illness. Known today as the Prinzhorn Collection, this remarkable collection of unconventional art brings the work of people on the margins of society into the attention of artists, scholars, and the public.
The collection was originally assembled by psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin around the turn of the 20th century for medical research and teaching. After Kraepelin left Heidelberg in 1903, his former assistant Karl Wilmanns continued to develop the collection. When Wilmanns became director of the university's psychiatric clinic in 1919, he appointed Hans Prinzhorn to expand the holdings and undertake a systematic study of the works.
Prinzhorn was born in Hemer, Germany, in 1886. He studied philosophy and art history before pursuing medicine. He possessed an understanding of artistic theory as well as a medical background, making him particularly suited to examining the relationship between psychological experience and creative expression.
Following his appointment, Prinzhorn and Wilmanns sent letters to psychiatric hospitals, sanatoriums, and other institutions throughout the German-speaking world, requesting artworks produced by their patients. The response was remarkable. Drawings, paintings, sculptures, embroidered objects, handwritten texts, and other creations began arriving in Heidelberg from institutions across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Between 1919 and 1921, the collection grew to include several thousand works created by approximately 450 individuals. Many of the artists had been diagnosed with severe mental illnesses, including schizophrenia.
Prinzhorn's interest, however, extended beyond the medical significance of these objects. He believed that the works possessed artistic qualities worthy of serious consideration in their own right. Rather than treating them simply as evidence of mental illness, he sought to understand the creative impulses that had produced them.
In 1922, Prinzhorn published his ground-breaking book Artistry of the Mentally Ill, where he critically examined the relation between the art and the creators’ psychosis. The richly illustrated volume presented a selection of works from the Heidelberg collection and offered an extensive examination of their artistic characteristics. According to Prinzhorn, there are six basic drives that give rise to image making: an expressive urge, the urge to play, an ornamental urge, an ordering tendency, a tendency to imitate, and the need for symbols. Image making, he concluded, is driven by our intense desire to leave traces.
When we cover a piece of paper with doodles, when a child arranges colourful pebbles on his mud pie, or when we plant flowers in our gardens, one quality is common to all of these quite different activities, namely the enrichment of the outer world by the addition of perceptual elements. Like the need for activity, it is a final, irreducible psychological fact – an urge in man not to be absorbed passively into his environment, but to impress on it traces of his existence beyond those of purposeful activity.
The book attracted considerable attention beyond the medical community.
Prinzhorn left Heidelberg in 1921 and later died in Munich in 1933. Although he had hoped to establish a permanent museum for the collection, that ambition would not be realized during his lifetime.
The Prinzhorn Collection's history took a darker turn with the rise of Nazi Germany. The regime's ideology was deeply hostile to people with mental illnesses and disabilities, whom it regarded as undesirable and a burden on society. Modern art was also condemned by Nazi authorities, who frequently denounced its unconventional forms as evidence of cultural degeneration.
In 1938, Carl Schneider, the director of Heidelberg's psychiatric clinic, ordered that works from the collection be sent to the Nazi propaganda exhibition Degenerate Art. The exhibition had originally been organized in Munich in 1937 to ridicule modern art, presenting it as a manifestation of cultural decline. The works from the Prinzhorn Collection were used to suggest that modern artists and psychiatric patients shared similar pathological tendencies.
The fate of the artists themselves was even more tragic. Under the Nazi regime, thousands of psychiatric patients were murdered as part of the so-called Aktion T4 programme, a systematic campaign of killing people with disabilities and mental illnesses.
Following the Second World War, the Prinzhorn Collection was largely forgotten and languished in the university storage until it was rediscovered in 1963 by Swiss curator Harald Szeemann. An exhibition was organized at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland leading to a renewed interest. The collection gradually gained international recognition, and its works were exhibited in museums and galleries across Europe and beyond. In 2001, the Prinzhorn Collection finally acquired its own museum at Heidelberg University Hospital.
The Prinzhorn Collection has continued to grow since its original formation acquiring new creations by people with psychiatric experiences. Today, the collection encompasses approximately 40,000 visual artworks, texts, and musical compositions dating from around 1825 to the present.
References:
# A window on the mind: Heidelberg hospital displays art of the mentally ill. Stripes
# Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922). Public Domain Review
# University, Museum Prinzhorn Collection. Heidelberg University Library
# Hans Prinzhorn. Universitätsklinikums Heidelberg
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