Hans Prinzhorn

Psychiatrist and art theorist Hans Prinzhorn played a major role in the reception of visual works created by patients in psychiatric institutions (also known as “patient art”). Part of the collection he helped to assemble at Heidelberg University’s Psychiatric Hospital from 1919 onward is now preserved in the hospital’s Museum Sammlung Prinzhorn, founded in 2001.

After completing a doctorate in philosophy from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with a dissertation on the aesthetic theories of German architect Gottfried Semper, Prinzhorn went on to study medicine, obtaining his medical degree in Heidelberg in 1919. That same year, he was recruited by Karl Wilmanns, then-director of Heidelberg University’s Psychiatric Hospital, to help curate and expand the hospital’s collection of works produced by patients in psychiatric institutions, which had been established by renowned psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin between 1891 and 1903.

Although Prinzhorn’s work at the psychiatric hospital was relatively short (1919–21), it had lasting consequences for the institution. With the active patronage of Wilmanns, Prinzhorn significantly expanded the collection, which by the end of his stay in 1921 included more than five thousand works by around 450 patients. These works were drawn from the medical files of patients at both the university’s psychiatric hospital and a number of other psychiatric institutions in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

In 1922 Prinzhorn published Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), his magnum opus featuring nearly four hundred pages of text and numerous reproductions of works from the hospital’s collection. Alongside theoretical arguments largely influenced by anti-rationalist philosopher Ludwig Klages, the main section of the book focused on the works of ten patients (including August Natterer and Karl Genzel), whom Prinzhorn designated as “Schizophrenic Masters.” While Prinzhorn’s was not the first book on the subject, its range, theoretical ambition, and attention to design and illustrations put it in a category of its own, one between medical tract and art book.

Read well beyond specialized medical circles, Artistry of the Mentally Ill resonated with the interwar avant-garde’s sustained interest in the visual and written productions of patients in psychiatric institutions and was discussed at length in the writings of numerous avant-garde artists and writers, including Hugo Ball, André Breton, Max Ernst, and Alfred Kubin. Works from the collection were exhibited periodically through the 1920s, most notably at the Galerie Max Bine in Paris alongside works from the Auguste Marie Collection (1929).

While Prinzhorn himself notoriously expressed support for the rise of Nazism in a number of publications from 1930 until his death in late 1933, the fate of his collection and the artists represented within it ultimately suffered under Nazi Germany. Works from the collection were featured in the touring entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibitions in Germany and Austria from 1938 onward for propaganda purposes and are now lost. A number of artists represented in the collection were assassinated from 1939 as part of the Nazi regime’s systematized murder of psychiatric patients, known as the Aktion T4 program.