Mary Ellen Mark's 1976 Photographs Of Patients In A Locked Psychiatric Facility for Women

 

A new book by Mary Ellen Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs compiles photographs and interviews from 1976 with patients at Oregon State Hospital’s Ward 81. Here, Jacobs talks about the project’s illuminating legacy.

In the spring of 1976, photographer Mary Ellen Mark and her friend Karen Folger Jacobs, a writer and mental health professional, embarked on a trip to a women’s mental institution: Oregon State Hospital’s Ward 81. There they stayed for the duration of a month, photographing and interviewing the women confined within its walls. Often pushed to the margins of society and dismissed as dangerous, the patients of Ward 81 responded with delight to the interest from these visitors. Under the squalid living conditions and barbaric mental health treatments at the state hospital, these women were unaccustomed to the kindness and respect Mark and Jacobs approached them with throughout their project.

Mark’s photos, which have been compiled in a new book, Ward 81: Voices, flit between capturing deeply tender and jarringly raw moments, showing a vulnerability in her subjects that humanise them. Patients are caught with a sometimes surprising levity: striking a silly pose under harsh fluorescent lighting, doing yoga on the sanitarium’s sterile linoleum floors, watching Elvis Presley, starry-eyed, on a television screen. Portrait-style shots depict some of the Ward 81 women standing proudly in their stark surroundings: by a bath, next to a bed strewn with a few belongings, wrists strapped in the middle of an empty room. While Mark’s images reveal relatable qualities in her subjects (a sense of romance, for instance, as two women hug in a corner) some photographs reveal the undoubtedly disturbing truths of mental institutions, capturing electroshock therapy treatments and the cold loneliness of isolated living.

The book depicts a nuanced perspective on mental health in a moving exchange between Jacobs and a Ward 81 patient named Beth. “Beth, how do you feel?” Jacobs asks. In response, she says, “If I didn’t keep hearing all these voices talking to me all the time, things would be a lot better.” When asked about what the voices say, Beth’s response is so earnest and candid, it’s almost jarring: “Oh, they tell me I should break up with Mona and all kinds of things, but I don’t listen to ‘em.”

Nearly 50 years after the project, Karen Folger Jacobs reflects on Ward 81: Voices:

“Mary Ellen and I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and went to the same high school. We were people who really wanted to see wider horizons. We wanted to get out of our small suburb, and we both wanted to get out in the world. She ended up in New York and I ended up in California. So we wanted to do a project together, and she said that while she was working on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, she had gotten to see the locked ward for women – Ward 81. I have a background in mental health and I’m licensed as a therapist in California, so we made plans to go there. My feeling was that this was going to be emotionally taxing for us. We were going to be with women who had been locked up, some for years, and we were not going to be able to do anything to release them.

 “We agreed that we would not interfere with the treatment of the people, we would not argue with the patients and we would not argue with any of the staff, despite any feelings we had about them. We would just be open to the patients, and get to know them and their culture. Mary Ellen and I had to be a team. We had to approach this together, and we never had any arguments or disagreements. There were times when we felt really angry about something that happened, or at some staff people, but we had each other.

“What we were trying to do was demonstrate life there. It was kind of an ethnography because we were trying to demonstrate a different culture, which she and I had already been doing in our work: going to other cultures and societies. It was very stressful, but one of the things I insisted on is that every night, Mary Ellen and I would talk about what happened. What we thought about it, what we did right or wrong, what she would do the next day. And during the day, I used my tape recorder to record the patients. They liked being able to talk, and having someone to listen. Often, they would just take the tape recorder and talk to it themselves.

“In the 70s, we had deinstitutionalisation, and most people were discharged from mental hospitals. This was Jimmy Carter’s thing, and I was on the presidential commission for mental health advising them about women. The Carter administration put these people out of the hospitals and the plan was to have community support and mental health, but the fact is, it didn’t get funded, so it didn’t happen. All these people get turned out in the street, and what happens? Nothing good. Where are they living? In a cardboard box, in a tent, on a corner, in a street in a big city. It’s terrible for these people, but they are products of our society. The book was written about people in 1976 and our world is very different now. Our world has, believe it or not, more stresses on people, particularly young people.

 “You and I may still have doubts and worries and problems, but these people mostly came from really disrupted families. Many of them were abused in various ways. What we need for mental health is not only focus on treating the people, but focus on what’s causing it. Why are these people so upset? How can we make living more generous, more bountiful, make people happier, enable people to have better lives?

“I insisted that we not see the patients’ records, what they allegedly had done, any psychiatrists’ evaluation. We didn’t want to see what anybody was accused of, because these people were all put in by a judge who had determined that they were a danger to themselves or others. I wanted us to treat these people as people and be friends with them. To be honest, I think they were thrilled to have someone who was interested in them. The staff were just obligated to do these tasks, give them medicine, serve meals, et cetera … Mary Ellen and I didn’t have tasks except to hang out with the patients all day.

“Every morning I would go out and run a few miles, just to de-stress. I would see all these flowers and stuff, it was spring. One time, coming back, I saw a Camellia bush. I started taking some for Mary Ellen, and then I thought, ‘oh no, I’m taking them for who really needs them.’ I brought the flowers upstairs and gave one to every patient. And one said, ‘this is the nicest thing that has ever happened to me in this hospital.’ Nobody did anything special for them. They didn’t have choices. They were deprived of a lot of things that we think of as normal.

“We felt really sad to be leaving them. They didn’t want us to – they kept telling us, ‘don’t go, we want you here.’ But we knew when we came that we were going to stay about a month. We didn’t feel that this treatment – being locked up, electroshock therapy – was very healthy for people. But our intent there was not to make an evaluation. Our intent was to be a pair of anthropologists. We were documenting a culture. We were seeing what was going on in a locked ward people couldn’t visit.

“I’m very glad that we were allowed to come and do this project. I feel incredibly privileged not to be in a hospital like this. I got this newfound gratitude for life from there and I still have it. I can choose things, I can go to the store and get clothes, get food I want, talk to people, have contact with anybody I want. It’s a gift. I have freedom in a way that these people didn’t have, and most people aren’t aware of other people without freedom. Mary Ellen and I appreciated the choices that we have, and the thing about when you’re in one of these institutions, you don’t have choices about stuff. We both said to each other that the Ward 81 project was perhaps the most important thing in our lives. And it still keeps impacting us. It’s been almost 50 years.”

Ward 81: Voices by Mary Ellen Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs is published by Steidl and is out now.

A Humanising But Harrowing Portrait of a 1970s Women’s Psych Ward. By Niki Colet.  AnOther,  May 25, 2023.

Throughout the span of her prolific, decades-long career, photographer Mary Ellen Mark made it her mission to document people on the margins of society — those whom she referred to as the “unfamous.” From homeless teens on the streets of Seattle to circus performers in India, she displayed unwavering compassion for every subject she met and inevitably kept in touch with most of them, a practice she maintained until her death in 2015.

Back in 1976, Mary Ellen undertook her biggest long-term project yet — photographing the women of Ward 81, an all-female psychiatric treatment facility inside Oregon State Hospital in Salem. She had her first encounter with the residents — many of whom were deemed ‘dangerous,’ — while on the set of the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975. After a back-and-forth with the institution, along with the patients and their families, she managed to gain access almost a year later. Together with her collaborator, licensed therapist Dr. Karen Folger Jacobs, she lived and worked in Ward 81 for almost five weeks, returning to an adjacent wing at night to sleep.

“I became interested in the patients and asked their permission to come back later for some pictures,” Mary Ellen recalled later in an interview. “I lived very intensively with the patients for [several] weeks. I slept in a small cell and I ate with them in the morning. Just like everywhere, during my presence, people behaved tough and outside themselves [at first]. At some point, they got used to me and forgot I was there at all.”

Two years later, Mary Ellen published her seminal book Ward 81, which was praised for its nuanced portrayal of female psychiatric patients in the United States. A new exhibition now on view at the Image Centre in Toronto, Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81, revisits this captivating body of work through a collection of 130 photographs, alongside audio recordings and other archival materials which have never been seen before. Created in collaboration with the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and her husband Martin Bell, the exhibition accompanies a recent photo book from Steidl, Ward 81: Voices, which was released in January. Along with the show, the monograph expands upon Mary Ellen’s original book, providing a behind-the-scenes look at the project and some of her subjects’ distinct identities.

“We have quotes from the women on display, as well as some audio recordings and lots of other materials that contextualize Mary Ellen’s work and the time she spent in the ward,” says Gaëlle Morel, one of the show’s curators. “As a photographer, she really wanted to understand the quotidian lives of these women and what was happening to them. And in the process, of course, she also questioned the validity of the institution in a compelling way.”

Employing a social science method known as ‘participant observation,’ Mary Ellen and Karen enmeshed themselves in the daily goings-on of the residents, capturing anything from arts and crafts classes to the immeasurable horrors of electro-shock therapy. Even more groundbreaking than their sensitive approach was the pair’s dedication to consent and patient autonomy. Each of the residents chose whether or not they wanted to participate in the project, and some selected their own pseudonyms. This underlying sense of trust and familiarity reveals itself through Mary Ellen’s intimate shots of the women bathing, embracing, or staring longingly out the window, yearning for a world beyond the metal grates.

“One of my favorites is the photo of Beth and Mona together, because not only is it telling of the institution’s environment, but also their unique personalities,” Gaëlle says about a picture depicting a couple confined in the ward. Captured amidst a hydrotherapy session, one patient, Mona, stares defiantly at the camera, hands on her hips. She’s standing protectively in front of her wide-eyed partner Beth, whose body language is stiff and reserved. “You can immediately recognize the differences between the two of them and understand that these are people with their own individuality and character. That was very important to Mary Ellen.”

When they weren’t working in the ward, Mary Ellen and Karen left behind polaroid cameras and tape recorders for the women to put to use, granting them a right usually denied to those who’ve been involuntarily institutionalized: the freedom to shape their own self-image. “The idea was to give a voice to these women, to reverse the power dynamic, to give them a presence,” Gaëlle explains. “They had the opportunity to put on makeup or choose their own clothing, for example. It gave them agency in their representation.” Polaroids showing the patients smoking, laughing or simply posing with friends demonstrate the duality of life in a psychiatric facility, the emotional limbo of an experience that seemed to have no end in sight.

A similar sentiment underscores the curation at the Image Centre, featuring photographs grouped together by pseudonyms — Laurie, Carol S., Mary Grace, Suzie and so on – in order to let each of them stand out. Additional archival materials collected throughout the project range from recorded conversations between Mary Ellen and Karen, as well as conversations with the residents, to letters or drawings the women made, signed patient waivers, contact sheets, and press coverage. "They treat you like you're no good,” reads one wall quote from a patient named Tommie. “What they're saying is, you're in a mental hospital and therefore, you're stupid, you're an idiot, you're dumb [...], you're ugly, and you're no good, and you don't belong in this world..”

Ward 81 closed in November of 1977, when it was combined with another wing of the hospital to create a co-ed treatment facility. Still, the project came at a pivotal period for the discipline of documentary photography, as critics questioned the fine line between exploitation and empathy, especially regarding images of disenfranchised populations. “This was one of her first big projects, but the same themes were present throughout Mary Ellen’s whole career. She was constantly dealing with vulnerable people, especially women,” Gaëlle tells me. “How do you find the best approach to show the necessity of the situation, but also remain respectful? How can you do justice to the people or problems represented? It’s about recognizing them without othering them.”

Mary Ellen distinguished herself from a controversial history of aestheticizing patients in mental illness facilities by eschewing false notions of objectivity and infusing her photographs with tenderness and soul. She cared deeply about her subjects, not only during her weeks in the ward, but long after she left, carrying their stories with her wherever she went. Her unflinching images continue to have an impact nearly 50 years later, preserving the women’s humanity at a time when the state had attempted to strip it away.

“The women of Ward 81 are tattooed on our memories. We know that for the rest of our lives we will often dream about them. We will be surprised to wake up in a bed without straps or locks, and to be able to see out windows without wire barriers. And whenever anyone says ‘That’s bullshit,’ we will be reminded of the inmates and their emotional directness, their honesty, and their intolerance for phoniness,” Karen wrote in Ward 81. “We identify with the fragility and the strength of these women we came to love, these adopted sisters of ours. They are women we might have been or, women we might one day become.”

Photographing a women’s psychiatric ward in the 70s. By Christina Elia. i-D, March 16, 2023. 

Ward 81 — In 1976, Mary Ellen Mark was given unique access to Oregon State Hospital to photographlife on the high security Ward 81, creating a nuanced and compassionate portrayal of female mental health patients.

Ken Kesey’s groundbreaking novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was adapted for the silver screen in 1975, captivating audiences worldwide with its unflinching look at life inside the high security ward of a state mental hospital. That same year, American photographer Mary Ellen Mark was commissioned to do a story on the making of the film, which was shot on location at Oregon State Hospital. While there, she met the patients at Ward 81 – the state’s only locked psychiatric facility for women.

In February 1976, Mark spent 36 days living on Ward 81 with Karen Folger Jacobs, a writer and licensed therapist, to photograph and interview the women. Together they created Ward 81 – a compassionate chronicle and rare insight into the lives of women institutionalised for mental illness.

“I wanted to do an essay on the personalities of people who are locked away – to show a little bit of what they’re like, especially the women. I didn’t want to show them as exotically crazy,” Mark told Time in 1978, when the work from Ward 81 was first exhibited and published as a book.

The work has largely gone unseen — until now. With the forthcoming book from Steidl and ongoing exhibition at The Image Centre, the women of Ward 81 return to view, their stories and experiences preserved in photographs, audio recordings and archival materials weaved together throughout the exhibition.

Mark and Folger Jacobs took care to avoid sensationalism, treating the women they encountered as complex individuals. “The approach they designed embodies the concept of care ethics, which emphasises, above all, that we exist in relationship to one another and can help each other meet basic needs and avoid suffering,” says  co-curator Kaitlin Booher, Newhall Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art.

“After going through an extended process to get permission to photograph, they approached the women foremost by paying attention to them and getting to know them, and that translates into the work they produced,” Booher continues. “It’s clear from the audio tapes the women recorded, the cards and letters they wrote, and the level of intimacy revealed in the photographs that Folger Jacobs and Mark were not only accepted there – but they made an impact.”

After Ward 81 was published, Folger Jacobs joined President Jimmy Carter’s mental health task force, presented her findings, and argued that women did not receive the same levels of care and treatment afforded to men by the state.

Nearly half a century later, conversations about mental health have become more open, yet many stigmas persist, making the work Mark and Folger Jacobs did all the more resonant.

“The idea was to provide a different perspective on mental health, and in particular how it affects women,” says co-curator Gaëlle Morel, Exhibitions Coordinator at The Image Centre. “Being able to experience an exhibition where the photographer tried a different approach (closeness, empathy, time) can guide us towards a better understanding and acceptance.” 

 Inside Oregon's Only Locked Psychiatric Facility for Women. By Miss Rosen. Huck Magazine, March, 6, 2023. 

          

The Book published by Steidl

In 1976, American photographer Mary Ellen Mark spent thirty-six days living in the Oregon State Hospital with licensed therapist and writer Karen Folger Jacobs, Ph.D., to photograph the patients of Ward 81—a high security, locked psychiatric facility for women. Mark’s unique access led to a nuanced and compelling portrayal of female mental health patients. This exhibition brings together the resulting photographs, audio recordings and archival materials to offer an in-depth view of the artist’s experimental and groundbreaking approach to documentary-style photography.
 
Organized by The Image Centre, Toronto in collaboration with Falkland Road Inc./The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation, New York.

Join IMC Exhibitions Curator Gaëlle Morel and Guest Curator Kaitlin Booher for a virtual talk focused on Mary Ellen Mark's groundbreaking approach to documentary photography and her seminal project portraying the lives of female mental health patients in the Oregon State Hospital (1976). Presented in conjunction with the exhibition "Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81," on view through April 1, 2023, at the IMC. This event took place on Wednesday, March 22, 2023, via Zoom.

The Image Centre, March 23, 2023. 

Show at The Image Centre

­­It's been five years since filmmaker Martin Bell lost his wife and professional partner, documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark.

From the time she first picked up a Brownie Box camera at age 9 until she received a Masters in photojournalism at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School, Mark became increasingly smitten with the storytelling power of a well-framed photograph — her subjects of choice: people rarely depicted in the cultural zeitgeist. "Mary Ellen could see a story in the ordinary that you might just walk by and not even see," Bell says. "And she had the ability to reduce that story, as simple or complex as it was, to a single frame."

Bell is unsure whether it was a labor of love or act of madness (or perhaps a little of both), but immediately after Mark's death, he began the daunting task of sifting through all of her contact sheets and Kodachrome slides — more than two million images —representing her life's work. "Nobody in their right mind would take on this task," says Bell. The mission was to cull the frames down for a retrospective book that would be true to the photographic trail she blazed around the globe.

For the better part of four years, Bell, along with Meredith Lue and Julia Bezgin, who run Mary Ellen Mark's photo library and studio, distilled Mark's brilliant career down to 515 plates: photographs shot over more than a half-century, from 1963 to a month before her death in 2015. Mark's lenses captured recurring interests — the Indian circus, the Twins Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, growing up in America and often, faces of people on the margins of society we too often ignore. The essence of Mary Ellen Mark's work now fills three coffee table books, 850 pages total, weighing in at more than 16 pounds and boxed as The Book of Everything (Steidl).

When he opened the door to greet Mary Ellen Mark in 1992, Clayton Moore was wearing a mask and never took it off during a shoot for Mark's photo essay on old cowboys. Moore was, after all, the Lone Ranger, and stayed the Lone Ranger in personal appearances for 40 years after the hit television series ended in 1957.

 "I photographed him at his home. It was a modern house, but he still lived the part of the Lone Ranger. He insisted on wearing his famous mask for all the pictures. I had to do everything I could to make him feel at ease with my camera and me, because he was extremely paranoid. When I was finished photographing him, he insisted that I sign all kinds of papers. As I left, I told him how much I enjoyed meeting him and that I was a big fan. He said to me, 'if you're such a big fan ... what was the name of my horse?' I said, 'Trigger.' He looked at me in a very scornful way. I quickly realized that I had made a serious blunder. Trigger was Roy Rogers's horse; Silver was the Lone Ranger's horse. I'm sure he never forgave me."

During her career, Mark found herself on more than 100 movie sets — as a "special stills photographer," hired for publicity or advertising shots — Fellini's Satyricon, Gandhi, Apocalypse Now, among them. But it was on the set of Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, where her commercial and documentary work intersected.

While One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was being shot, the director of the hospital gave Mark a tour. She was so affected by the maximum security women's Ward 81 that she corresponded with Dr. Dean Brooks for nearly a year and finally got access. For 36 days she lived on Ward 81, shining a light on a corner of life few of us see — the institutionalized mentally ill.

Mark's lifelong passion was to give visibility to the invisible. It would be an assignment for Life Magazine in 1983 that became a lifelong project, personally and professionally. Life sent Mark to Seattle, which had been named "America's most livable city," to document runaway teenagers. The story got a lot of attention.

Author John Irving called Mark's photos of the runaways on Pike Street "the perfect characters for the perfect story because they were both perfect and important victims...pimps, prostitutes, and petty thieves, they were eating out of dumpsters, falling in love, getting tattooed, being treated for the variety of venereal diseases passed on to them by their customers."

As Senior Producer of Nightline at ABC, I took Mark back to Seattle as she checked in with the runaways, now in their 20's for a two-part Nightline special on the 10th anniversary of her Life story. It was a rare opportunity to see up-close Mark's special ability to relate to the subjects she shot. Martin Bell put it this way: "Her relationship with the people she photographed was amazing. It was like an instant connection."

Mark didn't simply parachute into her assignment and move on to the next one. Each one became part of her effort to build a tapestry of relationships. Case in point: Erin Blackwell — better known as "Tiny," who Mark first encountered and photographed as a 13-year-old, surviving any way she could on Seattle's streets —including selling herself to men who were interested.

Mark and Bell were so taken with Blackwell that they returned to Seattle months later and featured Tiny in Bell's Oscar-nominated film Streetwise.

Tiny would become part of Mark and Bell's extended family. She's now 51, still in touch with Bell, still struggling and still a survivor with ten children.

 On a balcony overlooking New York's Fifth Avenue, at the celebration of Mary Ellen Mark's life a few months after she died, I heard a familiar voice. When I looked up, Candice Bergen was engaged in a conversation next to me. Mark and Bergen were at the University of Pennsylvania together and remained friends throughout their lives.

More than a decade after their college days, Mark had a magazine assignment to photograph Bergen's father, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, but they didn't want the dummy, Charlie McCarthy, in the picture. As Mark told an interviewer, "I first started photographing him alone, and he was very self-conscious; he was uncomfortable. So Bergen's son, Kris, got Charlie, Bergen sat down in the chair and took him out of the suitcase."

"I think it's two frames — it just happened so fast. I thought it was amazing. It's just one of those things — you know exactly what it is. Photography's very weird because it has to be extremely subtle, and yet it has to be non-subtle at the same time."

I would see Mark a final time at a photo lecture she delivered at the Smithsonian's Museum of American Art in Washington in 2013 where she projected the sweep of her work before a filled auditorium. Mark didn't know it at the time, but her talk was a preview of The Book of Everything — the story of her professional life, a project she never planned, let alone saw completed.

Near the end of that lecture, Mark took questions. One was about her preference to shoot in black and white. She explained, "I see in black and white. The subjects I seem to pick work better in black and white." Mark may have seen in black and white, but given the complex stories she reduces to a frame, one could say she specialized in shades of gray.

Documentary photography had all but vanished from the pages of magazines by 2013 when someone asked Mark if there was a future in the world she had been immersed in for much of her career. "I haven't had a magazine call me for over a year," she lamented, because today's magazines are heavily Photoshopped and they want a certain style. I'm kind of a purist who loves reality. I'm not an illustrator. I'm not going to let a bunch of art directors have me stop photographing."

Then she stopped and punctuated her point for the Smithsonian audience, "I feel lucky in a way because I had the best of it. You have to fight for what you believe in if you want to do anything worthwhile."

Bell doesn't sugarcoat the toll it took on his wife. "It was a difficult reality for Mary Ellen to confront. She'd lived and worked essentially through the golden age of magazines where photography was often coming from the streets. It was hard for her to deal with this, but it didn't stop her from going out and working."

There are countless places the public doesn't see. Occasionally, a photographer allows a peek into the hidden. Such was Mark's Life Magazine assignment to photograph patients suffering from Hansen's disease, formerly known as leprosy.

 "Officials there tried to steer me to what they wanted me to see," she said. But when she walked past this woman's room she stopped and asked if she could take pictures. The woman agreed. Blinded by her disease, her face is like a death mask held delicately in the strong arms of her nurse.

In Mark's ongoing effort to document how children are often the canaries in the coal mine of society — providing clues to the future health of a neighborhood — she spent some time in a South Dallas community devastated by crack in 1998 for Texas Monthly. The magazine reported that the kids wouldn't stay away from the drug scene because it often provided the only jobs — even lookouts were paid $100 a day.

One of the last photographs Mary Ellen took, just a month before she died, was for CNN, documenting New Orleans ten years after the floods of Hurricane Katrina. Fittingly, The Book of Everything concludes with a photograph of Thomas Schulingkamp, 26, whose family evacuated to Michigan for eight years after the hurricane and only returned when a New Orleans' school that could accommodate Thomas' special needs reopened.

Thomas' mother, Miriam Schulingkamp, who's adjusting her son's bow tie in the photo, sums up Mary Ellen Mark:

"Mary Ellen, with her long braids and open presence, tuned into Thomas, dressed in the manner of a Southern gentleman in a seersucker suit. He points to jewelry and items of clothing to start conversations, which can startle people. Mary Ellen did not hesitate with her words or look to me for instruction. She spoke directly and easily with Thomas, as if they had known each other for years. His bow ties were laid out so she could pick the one she wanted. With great attention, she talked with Thomas about the possibilities and they jointly made a decision. I did have reservations about how Thomas would cope with a photo shoot, as he does not always respond to specific and multiple directions. I feared that Mary Ellen would be frustrated, but she waved away my concern."

Had she lived, Martin Bell is convinced Mary Ellen Mark would never have taken the time to create this book. And it's probably just as likely that had she lived, Mary Ellen Mark would not have stayed hunkered down at this socially distant, masked moment in our lives. Somehow, she would have found a way to break out of her bubble and do what she had always been driven to do — grab her Leica and capture the people and stories others had passed by, making meaningful connections with those on the fringe. As she told an interviewer in Oregon in 2010, taking photographs is "like playing an instrument. The more you play, the better you get."

After spending four years creating this photographic love letter to his late wife, Martin Bell gets the final word on the final page of The Book of Everything. Mary Ellen must be smiling as her husband and partner describes her as "fearless...steadfastly true to herself and to her work. Even when overwhelmed with doubts, she was a defiant warrior."

 

The Essence Of Mary Ellen Mark, The Invisible Made Visible. By Richard L. Harris. NPR, November 22, 2020.

Mary Ellen Mark Website

Art, Insanity and Hitler’s First Mass-Murder Programme

 

On a winter’s day in 1898, a stocky young man with a handlebar moustache was hurrying along the banks of a canal in Hamburg, north Germany. Franz Karl Bühler was in a panic, fleeing a gang of mysterious agents who had been tormenting him for months. There was only one way to escape, he thought. He must swim for it. So he plunged into the dark water, close to freezing at this time of year, and struck out for the far side. When he was hauled on to the bank, soaked and shivering, it became clear to passersby that there was something odd about the man. There was no sign of his pursuers. He was confused, perhaps insane. So he was taken to the nearby Friedrichsberg “madhouse”, as it was known then, and taken inside. He would remain in the dubious care of the German psychiatric system for the next 42 years, one of hundreds of thousands of patients who lived near-invisible lives behind the asylum walls.
 
Bühler’s incarceration disturbed him, but it also marked the beginning of a remarkable story, one in which he played a leading role. It reveals the debt art owes to mental illness, and the way that connection was used to wage history’s most destructive culture war.
 
Bühler was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and as he was moved from one psychiatric clinic to another, he devised a way to cope with his situation: he would teach himself to draw. He began by sketching the people around him, documenting the pointless repetitive activities of institutionalised life. Later he produced searing self-portraits and garish creatures from his psychotic visions: demonic dogs and death-angels. His doctors didn’t much care for his art – if, indeed, a “madman” could create art at all – and many of his sketches languished in his case file for two decades, until an important visitor arrived from Heidelberg.
 

Hans Prinzhorn was a qualified physician, a doctor of art history, a decorated soldier and a professionally trained baritone. But it was his work on the art of the insane, conducted at Heidelberg university psychiatric clinic, that would stand as his greatest achievement. Between 1919 and 1921, he amassed the world’s most significant collection of psychiatric art, thousands of pieces of every type, executed with every available variety of media – toilet paper, discarded rotas, wooden parts of asylum beds – by hundreds of inpatients. Diagnosed mostly with schizophrenia, these individuals didn’t always intend to make “art”. They used sketches, sculpture and writing to chart aspects of their psychotic reality, or to communicate messages from an isolated interior. The initial idea was that this material might help with diagnosis, but Prinzhorn soon realised its expressionistic power and artistic value.
 
Visitors would remark that it “opened windows on a different reality”, or that it was as if it had “bubbled up from the depths of the human psyche”. “Remarkable worlds opened up before me,” one future curator of the collection would write, “drew me into their power; open spaces took away my equilibrium and made me dizzy.” In 1922, Prinzhorn published his conclusions about the project in a groundbreaking volume, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, heavily illustrated with images from the collection. His greatest find, the pick of his “schizophrenic masters”, was Bühler.
 
Artistry became an instant hit with the avant garde, who at that time were exploring madness as a way to understand the horror they had experienced during the first world war. As the dadaist Hans Arp put it, “Repelled by the slaughterhouses of the world war, we turned to art.” For Hugo Ball, the co-founder of Dada, Prinzhorn’s book represented nothing less than “the turning point of two epochs”.
 
When Max Ernst took a copy of the book to Paris, it rapidly became an essential source for members of the new surrealist movement, including Ernst and Salvador Dalí. At last, the surrealist-in-chief André Breton wrote, someone had given insane artists a “presentation worthy of their talents”.
 
Madness had never been in such vogue. But the Heidelberg works were never less than controversial, and by the mid-1920s, art’s connection with insanity had come to the attention of the extreme right.
 
Adolf Hitler was, like Bühler, a self-taught artist. He was also, according to a psychologist who examined him in 1923, “a morbid psychopath … prone to hysteria”. After failing the entrance exam for the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he had scraped a living by copying tourist postcards in watercolours. When war broke out in 1914, he took his brushes and paints to the front, and when he moved into politics after the war, he took his art with him.
 
Art helped him create a Nazi aesthetic, in the party emblems, badges and uniforms he designed, the stage sets he oversaw and the propaganda he sponsored. Art also gave Hitler a higher political purpose. Wars came and went, he liked to say, but in millennia to come the Germans would be judged on their cultural achievements, just as the great civilizations of the past were judged on theirs. To restore German culture was to restore the “ethnically pure” German Volk; to see it decline was to witness the Volk’s decline. And the insane direction contemporary art was taking marked, for him, a decline of epic proportions.
 
There is no proof that Hitler read Prinzhorn’s book, but he would have been exposed to its ideas through newspapers and magazines, and it could well have served as a catalyst for his views. In Mein Kampf he railed against “half-wits” and “scoundrels” who tried to stultify the “healthy artistic feeling” of the high Romantic painters he loved. Modernist “nonsense” and “obviously crazy” stuff was a cynical ploy to stave off criticism by horrified fellow citizens, while movements such as cubism and dadaism were “the morbid excrescences of insane and degenerate men”. As early as 1920, the party manifesto called for a struggle against the “tendencies in the arts and literature which exercise a disintegrating influence on the life of the people”. After 1933, that is what they did.

 
It was Goebbels’ idea, in 1937, to stage the Degenerate Art show. With 3 million visitors, this touring exhibition remains the best attended of all time, but it didn’t celebrate art; it pilloried it. From the second leg, in Berlin, the propaganda directorate rifled the Heidelberg clinic for more than 100 works, including several by Bühler, and displayed a selection of these alongside the professional art. The idea, as the official guidebook stated, was to show that the avant garde were even more “sick” than real “lunatics”. This was held up as evidence of the great Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at undermining German culture and polluting the race with inferior blood. Cultural degeneration, the “slowly rotting world”, as Hitler put it, prefigured biological degeneration, which was hastening the Germans “towards the abyss”.
 
The solution was simple: a “relentless war of cultural cleansing”. Modern art was removed from German museums, to be sold off or simply destroyed, and “degenerate” artists were hounded out of the country. But Hitler’s most ambitious artistic project, his Gesamtkunstwerk, was to refashion Germans themselves. To this end, in 1939 he ordered the first Nazi mass-murder programme, Aktion T4, targeting the mentally ill.
 
In 1940, Bühler was living in an asylum at Emmendingen, in Baden-Württemberg. On 5 March that year, a small convoy of vehicles arrived at the institution, staffed by SS men in civilian clothes. They loaded 50 patients on to the buses, including Bühler, and drove them to a specially adapted home for disabled people at Grafeneck castle, in Swabia. The patients were stripped and pushed into a gas chamber disguised as a shower room, and killed with carbon monoxide. This “euthanasia” action, as the Nazis called it, is widely seen as a precursor to the Holocaust, and when it had achieved its targets, many of Aktion T4’s hardened veterans were reassigned to extermination camps in the east. By the war’s end, about 200,000 psychiatric patients would be killed by Hitler’s regime, including 30 Prinzhorn artists.
 
The war did not mark the end for Prinzhorn’s collection. Miraculously, most of the works survived, and inspired new generations of artists, including Jean Dubuffet, the creator of art brut (“raw art”). Bühler was murdered, as were other Prinzhorn artists, but his achievements live on. They broadened the definition of art, and expanded the circle of permitted art-makers beyond the elite.
 
How the ‘art of the insane’ inspired the surrealists – and was twisted by the Nazis. By Charlie English. The Guardian,  August 8, 2021.

 

In Franz Karl Bühler’s masterpiece Der Würgengel, the artist portrayed a choking man struggling on the ground, unable to breathe, as a blank-faced angel of death prepares to finish him with a luminous sword. It can be read as a portrait of the way he felt treated by the deity and by life, and as an uncanny premonition of his death, which came as he fought for breath on the floor of Hitler’s prototype killing plant, a doctor’s hand on the gas tap. The government’s propaganda stated that he and his fellow victims were killed for economic reasons, because Germany could no longer afford to keep them.

 
In truth this brilliant artist, this “master of the first rank,” as Alfred Kubin described him, was murdered in the service of another sort of art project: Hitler’s Gesamtkunstwerk, his great and terrible design to refashion the Germans in accordance with his artistic vision, a stew of degeneracy theory, Wagnerian myth, late-period Romanticism, and his own furious psychopathology. The artist-dictator had set aside his pencils and paints to work with humanity, and at the time of Bühler’s death, this work was just beginning.
 
As winter turned to spring in 1940, Hitler’s private office in Berlin, the Kanzlei des Führers (KdF), ordered the Grafeneck killing station to ramp up its activities. The transport squadron would be given an additional bus, which meant it could carry seventy-five people at once, and the gas chamber was enlarged to fit them all. Other victims were shipped in by train. At 8 am on Thursday, March 7, a giant rail transport of 457 patients arrived at the little station at Marbach an der Lauter. Deep snow had fallen in the Swabian Jura, and it took the SS eight hours to unload them all. Egon Stähle, Leonardo Conti, and Karl Brandt came to oversee the operation, taking their turns at the gas chamber window, but there were too many to kill in a single day, so 138 women were temporarily housed in the asylum at Zwiefalten.
 
They were brought back at the start of April, when Stähle returned with a new group of dignitaries from Berlin who wanted to see the women die. Memorable on this occasion was a victim who screamed “We are all killed!” as the carbon monoxide began to take effect. Stähle’s guests then observed the ovens, noting with surprise how much smoke was produced. Over the following weeks, a sort of gas tourism grew up in the Swabian Jura. Some visiting physicians were even invited to take part by performing the cursory final examinations.
 
They murdered 9,839 people at Grafeneck that year, including six artists of the Prinzhorn collection, the huge and influential trove of art by inmates of psychiatric institutions that was collected by the doctor and art historian Hans Prinzhorn from 1919. The first of these artists was Mathäus Lorenz Seitz, an adventurer and French Foreign Legion veteran who had lived for two years with a pasha in Hyderabad. In 1921, Seitz was diagnosed as suffering from “delusions” and sent to Wiesloch asylum, where he spent the next two decades. He was killed at Grafeneck on or around February 29, 1940. Bühler was the second Prinzhorn artist murdered there, on March 5. Ernst Bernhardt, the third, was a former art teacher who drew an eerie self-portrait with a gallows over his head while at the Heidelberg clinic.
 
After living for much of the 1930s in the asylum at Rastatt, he was gassed at the castle in April 1940. Konstantin Klees loved to depict his full, well-groomed beard in yellow and green pencil and signed his designs “master baker, confectioner, and grocer.” He was killed on or after July 24. Grafeneck’s gas chamber took two more artists in October: Johann Faulhaber, a shoemaker whose drawings bore a striking resemblance to work by Picasso and Kubin, and Josef Heinrich Grebing, the former chocolate salesman who had designed the beautiful “Air Ark” ocean liner for the skies.
 

As Grafeneck scythed through the psychiatric population in south-west Germany, Berlin expanded the “euthanasia” program across the Reich, constructing new industrialized murder facilities based on the Swabian prototype in six strategic locations around Germany and Austria. These new centers were referred to by the letter codes B, Be, C, D, and E. Grafeneck took the letter A.
 
Killing station B was built in a converted prison in Brandenburg an der Havel, forty miles west of Berlin, and opened within days of Grafeneck, in January 1940. The SS “Death’s Head” unit that staffed this plant was overseen by the ambitious young Austrian psychiatrist Irmfried Eberl, who would later command the Treblinka extermination camp. Nine thousand seven hundred and seventy-two patients would be murdered at Brandenburg, according to the official count, and at times there were so many corpses in the ovens that the flames that leapt from the top of the chimney were sixteen feet long.
 
The operation produced a horrific smell of roasting human flesh that tended to settle over the city, but this problem was solved in the summer, when the cremation units were moved to a shed some miles away, where the corpses were delivered by a Reichspost van every day at 5 am. The body of the Prinzhorn artist Paul Goesch would have been burned here. A painter of bright watercolors with religious themes, Goesch was gassed at Brandenburg in August 1940, although killing-center staff wrote on his death certificate that he died in Austria in September, both to throw his relatives off and to fraudulently claim extra money for his upkeep.
 
In November, Eberl moved on to Bernburg, near Halle an der Saale, to establish killing center Be. Bernburg was unusual in that it was built in the wing of a functioning regional asylum whose staff had to be sworn to silence about the murders that were taking place on the premises. The hundred or so T4 employees who worked at Bernburg did little to ingratiate themselves with the deaconesses who ran the asylum, partying so late and so hard that the killing center was internally known as the Nuttenstall, or “whorehouse.” Almost nine thousand patients would be killed at Bernburg, including the Prinzhorn artist Karl Ahrendt, who drew intricate, psychedelic patterns and brightly colored symbols. Ahrendt had once been a coachman and was committed in 1907 after marching around Berlin’s Alexanderplatz in a general’s uniform. He was in his late eighties when he was murdered, on or after March 18, 1941.
 
Killing center C was at Hartheim, a medieval castle outside Hitler’s hometown of Linz, where operations began in January 1940. Of the six murder facilities, Hartheim killed by far the largest number, at 18,269. The victims included Alois Dallmayr, who liked to draw androgynous figures with lots of curly hair, and was gassed here in August or September 1940, and Anton Fuchs, a woodcarver who probably died in February 1941.

 
In April 1940, Grafeneck’s expert gas doctor, Horst Schumann, was recalled to Berlin, and his role at the castle was taken over by Ernst Baumhard, a newly graduated medic and enthusiastic party member. Schumann was sent to Pirna-Sonnenstein, near Dresden, where he opened killing center D. Among the 13,720 victims of this former fortress were a half dozen Prinzhorn artists, including four women. Gertrud Fleck and Johanna Melitta Arnold had both lived in the Pirna-Sonnenstein asylum for more than three decades. Fleck was an amiable patient who had a canary and loved to paint large, brightly colored flowers. She was transferred out of Pirna in November 1939 while the T4 men installed their equipment, and brought back a year later to be murdered. Arnold, a creator of rich, energetic pastel drawings, lived at Pirna until 1934; she returned to Pirna to die on July 18, 1941.

Auguste Opel and Anna Margarete Kuskop, meanwhile, are represented in the Prinzhorn collection by a single drawing each: Opel by a ghostly, almost imperceptible townscape, Kuskop by a pastel portrait in which the subject’s head is tilted slightly, eyes closed, as if absorbed in an inner retreat. This may be a likeness of a friend she met in the asylum system, Miss Alice, to whom Kuskop once wrote: “Above all, I ask you not to forget me.” Opel was transported to Pirna on December 6, 1940; Kuskop on May 8, 1941. They were both gassed.
 
Wilhelm Werner, the artist who drew cartoonish pictures of his own sterilization, also died at Pirna-Sonnenstein. In theory, sterilization should have protected him from “euthanasia” since he was already unable to pass on his allegedly defective genes, but his care givers at Werneck were keen to be rid of him, noting on his T4 registration form that he was a “weak-minded chatterbox” with “a very primitive imagination.” He was taken to Pirna on October 6, 1940.
 
By the end of that year, T4 had killed 35,000 psychiatric patients and disabled children, and the decision was taken to close Grafeneck, which had far outstripped its initial target of killing 20 per cent of psychiatric inpatients in southwest Germany. At the start of December, young Dr. Baumhard invited his counterpart from Zwiefalten, Dr. Martha Fauser, to a “camaraderie evening” at Grafeneck to celebrate his unit’s departure: The evening included an invitation to watch the gassing of a transport of women. The facility was shut down soon afterward and Baumhard went on vacation with his staff—or most of them, anyway: He had killed his chief nurse by shutting her in the gas chamber by accident.

In the new year, the Grafeneck team moved en masse to Hadamar, a village conveniently placed for the Wiesbaden-Limburg-Cologne motorway, to open station E. The gas chamber at Hadamar would kill ten thousand people in its eight months of operation. One of these was the Prinzhorn artist Peter Zeiher, a convicted murderer who protested his innocence and drew elaborate reconstructions of the crime scene to try to prove it. Another was Gustav Sievers, the artist who had inspired Max Ernst, and who liked to draw humorous, bosomy women riding to and fro on bicycles, or dancing with overpowered men.

 
Excerpted from  The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler's War on Art. By Charlie English, 2021.
 
Remembering the Artists Who Were Among the Early Victims of Nazi Death Camps. By Charlie English. LitHub, August  11, 2021.

In 1908, Paul Klee, struggling as a painter, saw his first van Gogh canvas at a gallery in Munich. The Dutchman’s genius was at once clear to him; so, too, and inseparably, was his madness. ‘Pathetic to the point of being pathological,’ Klee wrote, ‘this endangered man’ has a brain ‘consumed by the fire of a star’. Three years later, and shortly before joining them himself, Klee reviewed a show of works produced by the Blaue Reiter group. Once again, it was the irrational that drew his eye. ‘Neither childish behaviour nor madness are insulting words here, as they commonly are,’ Klee enthused. ‘All this is to be taken very seriously, more seriously than all the public galleries, when it comes to reforming today’s art.’

 
A decade later, the polymath Oskar Schlemmer, shortly to take up a teaching post at the new Bauhaus in Weimar, went to a slide show of images of the art of the insane. What he saw in Stuttgart that night stirred him to ecstasy. ‘For a whole day I imagined I was going to go mad,’ an excited Schlemmer wrote to his fiancée, ‘and was even pleased at the thought, because then I would have everything I have been wanting.’
 
For all that, the young Swabian spotted a problem. ‘Klee’, he went on, ‘has seen these things and is enthusiastic’; the work he and other moderns were making bore ‘surprising similarities’ to that of the mad – men such as the ‘schizophrenic master’ August Klett, who thought himself Christ and, locked for decades in an asylum, produced émaillée paintings of odd beauty with names such as Die Republik der Hähne in der Sonne hat ohne Kostüm gegessen und getanzt (‘The Republic of Roosters Ate and Danced in the Sun without Costumes’). But if the art of the moderns resembled that of the insane, then the reverse was also true. With what would turn out to be unhappy prescience, Schlemmer saw that this resemblance would one day be used as a weapon against modernism. ‘See!’ he went on, rhetorically to his fiancée. ‘They paint just like the insane!’
 
Between Klee’s Blaue Reiter review and Schlemmer’s letter had come the First World War. Having seen, in many cases first-hand, the insanity of the trenches, avant-garde artists across Europe found themselves moved to paint something more than reality. The Surrealists in Paris found their subject first in the irrational of the Freudian pre-conscious and then in the communitarian unconscious of Jung. In Germany, the drive was towards abstraction, so-called non-objective art. Here, particularly, the insane had a head start. ‘The madman lives in a realm of ideas which the sane artist tries to reach,’ Schlemmer wrote sadly. ‘For the madman it is purer, because completely separate from external reality.’
 
As he had also realised, opposition to this view in Germany was already growing. If modernists sought to redeem madness by owning it, a counter-tendency aimed more simply to eradicate it. This latter movement was led by a plodding and talentless figurative painter called Adolf Hitler. The realism ordained by Hitler was to give rise to a kind of madness beyond the wildest schizophrenic dreams of Klett. Officially prescribed art presented a fantasy world in which men were universally strapping, women subservient and pink-cheeked and children had unvarying blue eyes.
 
***
 
This parallel shift in German thinking on art and insanity is the subject of Charlie English’s compelling new book, The Gallery of Miracles and Madness. Its two principal themes, the demonising of modernist art as degenerate and the murder of the inhabitants of asylums in the so-called Aktion T4, are well enough known. Where the particular fascination of English’s book lies is in his discovery of an overlap between them.
 
By 1938, Schlemmer’s prediction had come woefully true. In that year, the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition in Munich juxtaposed a pair of self-portraits by Oskar Kokoschka with another by a man called Georg Birnbacher. The accompanying guide asked visitors to guess which of the works was by a supposed master, which by ‘an amateur, an inmate of a lunatic asylum’. ‘You will be surprised!’ the text crowed. Birnbacher was a long-term resident of the psychiatric clinic at the University of Heidelberg and a patient of Hans Prinzhorn. Prinzhorn, a brilliant psychiatrist, had been the first to recognise the extraordinary artistic talent of many of the inmates, particularly those diagnosed as schizophrenic. He had carefully collected and catalogued their work and travelled the world proselytising on its behalf. It was his slide show that Schlemmer had seen in Stuttgart in 1920.
 
In English’s narrative, the twin strands of Hitler’s thinking on art and racial purity draw remorselessly together. The year after the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition, a National Socialist couple from Leipzig wrote to the Führer, begging his permission to kill their badly disabled infant son: ‘the monster’, as his father referred to him. In July 1939, the baby became the first victim of a policy of state murder that would see the death of perhaps three hundred thousand Germans deemed ‘ballast’ and ‘useless eaters’. Some seventy thousand of these were inmates of asylums, among them many of Prinzhorn’s artist-patients.

 

One was Paul Gösch, who, as English notes, had had the unique and unenviable distinction of having his work included in the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition on two counts: as an example of professional degeneracy (at the original Munich show) and of amateur madness (when it moved to Berlin). Unusual among Prinzhorn’s stable in having trained as a professional painter, Gösch had first been incarcerated with schizophrenia in 1917. In 1934 he was moved from an asylum in Göttingen run by his brother-in-law to another, more brutal one in Teupitz. In 1940 he was taken to the killing centre at Brandenburg an der Havel to be gassed with carbon monoxide.
 
The same fate awaited Franz Karl Bühler, whose Blakean crayon drawing Der Würgengel (‘The Choking Angel’), used as the frontispiece to Prinzhorn’s ground-breaking book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken in 1922, proved an appalling premonition of his own end. Trained as a master blacksmith – his trio of Baroque gates had been the centrepiece of the Chicago World Fair in 1893 – Bühler was taken in March 1940 from the asylum in Emmendingen that had been his home for four decades to the castle at Grafeneck, one of the most efficient of the Aktion T4 killing centres. There, in a scene that prefigured the killings in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, he was herded into a room tricked out as a communal shower and gassed with fifty-three others as an SS doctor looked on through a spy window. Carbon monoxide kills by choking its victims. One observer at Grafeneck recalled seeing ‘patients, naked … with their mouths terribly wide open, their chests heaving’.
 
My only cavil about English’s book is that it is too long. For all its fascination, the awful tale it tells is in essence a micro-history, concerning at most a few dozen people who had the great misfortune to be both talented and incarcerated as mad. A tighter focus on these and less time spent on the tectonic shifts that would eventually crush them might have made The Gallery of Miracles and Madness more memorable than it already is.
 
Virtuosos of the Asylum. By Charles Darwent. Literary Review, August 2021. 

A scant few pages into Charlie English’s The Gallery of Miracles and Madness, I was reminded of a recent, strange phenomenon: several accounts cropping up on my Twitter feed zealously devoted to “Traditionalist architecture.” Their pages were full of photos comparing Gothic and Neoclassical buildings with what they termed “communist Soviet-era” apartment blocks. Saturated pictures of idyllic German farming towns were held up next to shots of dreary urban intersections. The sentiment never varied. Take us back to before our cities were polluted. They were sometimes accompanied by captions extolling the virtues of “beauty” and “elegance” – values that they asserted were now irrevocably warped by modern architectural sensibilities.

 I doubt these posters knew how dangerous and terrible the roots of their rhetoric were, disguised under a longing for tradition. Charlie English’s The Gallery of Miracles and Madness would do a fine job of enlightening them as to how inextricably aesthetic, artistic and political sentiments are linked. Elegant and exhaustively-researched, English outlines the rise of “psychiatric art” in Weimar-era Germany, tracking its influence and eventual clash with Hitler’s obsession with remolding the artistic character of Germany. The fact that we all know the inevitable tragic conclusion – the mass murder and sterilization of individuals housed in psychiatric facilities, as a “trial run” for later concentration camps – doesn’t lessen the horror and impact of English’s careful account. It’s upsetting, and challenging. It’s also necessary reading in our current time, where musicians are thrown into jail over “treasonous” lyrics, and artists are imprisoned for creating their work. To those who still ask the perennial question – “Is art still valuable in our disastrous contemporary moment?” – The Gallery of Madness and Miracles provides a definite, indisputable “yes.”

 The first section of Miracles and Madness is structured around the collection of works from the inmates of various psychiatric institutions by Hans Prinzhorn, a doctor and art historian. Prinzhorn, despite his later tentative support of the Nazi regime, was at that time a progressive, opposed to the popular sentiment that “madness” was a sign of a “diseased” or “degenerate mind.” English clearly and vividly outlines the failure of the era to understand mental illness, most particularly schizophrenia, which was believed to carry a sentence of “inevitable decline,” and the additional failings of the psychiatric care available. Hospitals were a convenient storage space for “deviants,” so the general public would be spared from dealing with them. This dehumanizing attitude later led to forced sterilization under the Nazis, and the term lebensunwertes Leben – “life unworthy of life,” providing the excuse for the eventual mass murder that would claim thousands of neurodivergent lives.

 Prinzhorn, however, found the art produced by patients fascinating – and most importantly, of genuine artistic worth. After collecting and exhibiting a vast amount of art from dozens of patients, Prinzhorn photographed the work and published Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill). The book, and the work itself, went on to heavily influence the work of many notable artists of the time. Paul Klee, an avid fan of the Bildnerai, “appears to have taken direct inspiration from a Prinzhorn-owned work, Circle of Ideas of a Man.” Surrealist Max Ernst was so moved by the exhibited work that he began to attempt to create collages that resembled hallucinations. Dalí makes direct reference to a piece by Prinzhorn-owned artist Joseph Schneller in his essay “The Tragic Myth of Millet’s The Angelus,” and Richard Lindner called Prinzhorn’s collection “the most important artistic experience of my life.” There are even claims that Picasso’s Téte de femme is a reference to work by artist Heinrich Anton Müller, who featured in the Prinzhorn collection. Drawings exhibited by Prinzhorn, from artist August Natterer, even influenced Koga Harue to create one of the first works of Japanese Surrealism, Endless Flight (1930)

 English’s deeply thorough account of the influence the Bildnerai wielded reveals the fetishization and objectification of “the insane” by artists – a sentiment that is unfortunately alive and well. Affluent and successful artists took direct inspiration from incarcerated patients, sometimes even copying their images and composition, and made little effort to credit them. The Surrealists, who English admits “romanticized mental illness,” were obsessed with the supposed “purity” of insanity, with some artists, like Dalí, trying their best to induce insanity, in the belief it would make their work more “raw” and “true.” André Breton even remarked that “they [the insane] derive a great deal of comfort…they enjoy their madness.” This parasitic relationship is at times glossed over by English, who gives a detailed biography of several artists – most notably a talented metalworker diagnosed with schizophrenia, Franz Bühler – but gives only brief sketches of others. The result is that The Gallery of Miracles and Madness often feels as if it is populated and driven by ghosts. Their lives, “a succession of steps in an endless routine: sleeping, sitting in bed, waiting for food, smoking, queuing for the barber’s chair,” go mostly non-memorialized.

 The second and third sections, however, are a masterclass in biography. English’s account of Hitler’s early life, his lack of artistic skill, and “artist-Führer” persona, is brilliantly engaging. Hitler’s hatred of modernist art, which he characterized as “degenerate,” is linked clearly to his deep racism and xenophobia, with the entirety of degeneracy theory itself stemming from Gobineau’s hateful racial hierarchy developed in France in the 1850s. In Hitler’s mind, the mentally ill constituted an entirely different race; they were less than human. His hatred provided “a bridge to the public,” who misunderstood the avant-garde and regarded it as confusing and unskilled. Modern art’s “insane direction,” Hitler argued, “was not mere coincidence, but a deliberate plot by the Jewish-Bolshevik nexus to destroy Germany.” That sentiment hit a nerve with the exhausted and angry German populace, and elevated the political importance of supporting art that reflected ethnic Germans, the Volksgemeinschaft. To that end, the Reichskulturkammer organised twin exhibitions – one of acceptable, Aryan, faux-Classical art (Große deutsche Kunstausstellung) and another, of “degenerate art” (Entartete Kunst), to be shown in direct contrast to each other. English outlines these exhibitions, highlighting their darkly comedic absurdity – thousands of people eagerly flooding Entartete Kunst in favor of Große deutsche Kunstausstellung, Hitler throwing tantrums over a painting of a tennis player that was too “smeared” – without ever losing sight of the human cost of the rhetoric. “Art [was] Germany’s social glue,” Hitler declared. Controlling it, manipulating human expression and choking out any depiction that dissented with Nazi ideology, was of immense importance to maintaining the power of the regime.

 The final fourth section, “Euthanasie,” is an exhausting, devastating read. English chooses to include graphic depictions of the mass gassings of patients, which is a decision that feels necessary in driving home the horror and reality of what constituted the beginning of a genocide. “[I] cannot believe [the patients] died without pain,” one observer states. Franz Bühler, as well as eighteen other Prinzhorn-owned artists, lost their lives that way – scared, confused, deprived of human dignity and respect. Their art was either destroyed or committed to storage. It’s here that the injustice of the situation becomes almost unbearable. Affluent or successful artists could escape Germany, but the patients that they had plagiarized could not; first enduring terrible conditions in overcrowded facilities, and then mass murder. Despite the Surrealists’ profession of how valuable insanity was – “the great art,” as Dubuffet said – actual individuals suffering from mental illnesses were only ever fodder for those lucky enough to live outside of institutions. This is a dynamic that seems to have endured to the present day: Mental illness is still deeply misunderstood and fetishized, even in artistic communities. Many still regard neurodivergent people as dangerous, less valuable; simply a problem for society to solve. In other words, “degenerate.”

 Despite occasional gaps in focus – which, admittedly, is most likely informed by the scarcity of surviving records of psychiatric patients at that time – English does a marvelous job of creating a readable, emotional text, elevating fact to narrative – spinning gold out of hundreds of fractured sources. With his capable hand, history comes alive. The Gallery of Miracles and Madness is proof that the past is closer than we think. It was barely eighty years ago that Bühler, master metalworker and artist, one-time representative of Germany at the Chicago World Fair, was being led to his death. We are not as far removed from such violence as we like to believe. In that regard, Charlie English has written something remarkable: a work of historical nonfiction that feels urgent and overwhelmingly relevant to the world we live in.

 Charlie English’s ‘The Gallery of Miracles and Madness’ Is a Necessary Read. By Ella Fox-Martens. The Observer,  August 2, 2021.

 

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.

 

 

The Gallery of Miracles and Madness by Charlie English review – the fate of Hitler’s ‘degenerate’ artists. By Kathryn Hughers. The Guardian, August 5, 2021. 

They were paintings by patients in mental hospitals. To the man who collected them, they were fine art, unschooled and pure. To the Nazis, they were a weapon in their war against modernism. Now the collection has a permanent home; but, asks David Sweetman, will it ever be free of controversy?

It may well be the most unusual art collection in Europe, yet for 80 years it has been with-out a home. This will change in September when the University of Heidelberg opens a new museum to display the 500 paintings, drawings and sculptures that Dr Hans Prinzhorn of the Heidelberg Psychiatrische Klinik assembled in the early 20s. What makes this vast collection so extraordinary is that everything in it was created by patients in mental hospitals across Europe, a mingling of art and insanity that some have found totally unacceptable.

 
The small selection shown at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1996 came as a surprise to many, for on offer were not the dour productions of hospital therapy sessions but some of the most flamboyant and, yes, eccentric images imaginable. We may no longer laugh at the insane, but much of this art is gloriously funny: from the brightly coloured depictions of overweight, overdressed matrons, riding about on worryingly fragile bicycles, to the all-female orgy, which seems to be taking place in a throne room, plentifully supplied with calf-high bootees and whips but short on actual sex (for no discernible reason, one of the ladies seems more interested in wrapping her companion in a length of cloth than in anything remotely naughty). Comic, but also mysterious, like the drawing that advertises itself as a portrait of all the Houses of Correction in the Göttingen area, which does indeed offer meticulously drawn studies of 19 buildings, except that, on close inspection, they all turn out to be exactly the same, identical down to the last window and chimneypot. Occasionally, such perversity seems to hint at something deeper: a swirl of dense spirals might have been a seashell but for the title, I Want To Try; a second, almost identical swirl becomes It Is A Cancerous Testicle.
 
Whatever else they might be, the works from the Prinzhorn collection are clearly not boring. Yet such things were regarded as the mere scribblings of the mad, useful only to study how far a patient's psychosis had progressed, until a few enlightened doctors, Prinzhorn foremost among them, argued that they should be viewed as works of art in their own right. The very words Prinzhorn used to describe the works in his collection reveal his concern: artistry, authenticity, cosmic feeling, empathy, genuine, instinctive, naive, natural expression, primordiality, purity, spiritualisation, spontaneity. Some of the works may have their funny side, but they are all highly original, unfettered by convention and often electric with energy. Prinzhorn devoted himself to pointing this out to a cynical world.
 
Even a brief glance at his story shows that Prinzhorn, born in 1886, was made for the task. As a young man, he had a number of failed ambitions: he studied philosophy and art history, then tried his hand as a singer, until the encroaching mental illness of his second wife led him to train as a doctor. In 1919, he moved to Heidelberg, where, unable to resist the artistic life, he successfully transformed himself into the Diaghilev of psychiatry, satisfying his own creative ambitions by orchestrating those of others. There was already a small collection of works at the clinic when he arrived, but it was Prinzhorn's idea to contact mental hospitals all over Europe, asking them to send him any patients' work they did not want.
 
There are other collections of psychotic art, but nothing on this scale. And what took Prinzhorn's collection beyond the realm of a handful of specialists was his ground-breaking study, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (The Artistry Of The Mentally Ill), first published in 1922 and much reprinted since. In the decade up to 1933, works from Heidelberg were shown in nine German cities and seen by a remarkable array of now-famous artists. Painters such as Paul Klee and Oskar Kokoschka identified with Prinzhorn's championing of an art that celebrated the complexity of individual expression over what they saw as a world reduced to external appearances - a primary preoccupation of western painting since the Renaissance. What seems to have appealed most was the existence of secret, inexplicable worlds - a farmland map, with village and path, hedgerow and stream, suddenly turns into a witch's head; a bald, clean-shaven soldier in the first panel of a diptych sprouts hair and a beard in the second, for no apparent reason.
 
It is not hard to understand why the surrealists found encouragement in these amazing fantasies, seeing the "spontaneous" creativity of the mentally ill as akin to their own attempts to unleash the unconscious. They were introduced to the collection by Max Ernst, who had been planning to make his own analysis of psychopathological art when Prinzhorn's study appeared. What has continued to attract artists to the collection is the sheer range of imagery on offer: unconstrained by schools and isms, unconcerned about critics or fashions, Prinzhorn's artists made whatever they wished. Some created religious icons, others scrawled erotic symbols or drew a blueprint for the perfect mechanical plough, all with a freedom that belied the reality of their physical condition as effective prisoners in mental asylums few would ever leave.
 
In the end, Prinzhorn spent only three years at Heidelberg and, despite his strenuous pleading, the collection was never given a permanent home. He died of typhoid fever in 1933, but his writings continued to influence those attracted to alternative forms of ex-pression, in particular the postwar artistic movement Art Brut, whose leading exponent, Jean Dubuffet, was himself a collector of artworks made by the mentally disturbed. The recent restoration of the collection, along with its presentation in major exhibitions and the forthcoming opening of its home in Heidelberg, has given Prinzhorn something of the status of a secular saint. Today, the Prinzhorn Archive is a major source for research into what is sometimes called "Outsider Art" - art produced by those without special training.
 
Yet despite this renewed interest, many of Prinzhorn's artists remain sadly anonymous. At present, most catalogue entries can list only place of birth, marital status and medical diagnosis as shown in a patient's medical records, though in some cases the rather ominous phrase "last mentioned" is given, followed by a date. It is to be hoped that, as research progresses and the task Prinzhorn began is at last completed, the creators of these extraordinary works will emerge from the shadows to assume their full status as artists.
 
But nothing from that turbulent period of Germany's history is immune to a new generation keen to expose the sins of their fathers, even those of someone as apparently worthy as Prinzhorn. While allowing that he was genuinely trying to change the way mentally ill people are perceived, younger critics point out that he was not above doctoring the evidence in his attempts to show how creative his patients were. Recent research reveals that he strengthened his case by discreetly providing special materials for those he considered particularly gifted. He even rewarded some inmates for "good" work and would omit to record details of any prior training they may have had.
 
As none of this was known at the time, the conclusion spread that it was insanity, rather than innate talent or acquired skill, that made his patients so good at art - an assumption that seemed both to echo the traditional belief that lunacy can induce ecstatic, visionary experiences, and to endorse the link between genius and insanity proposed in the 19th century. Once it was established that all psychiatric patients were naturally artistic, it became harder to counter suggestions that art itself may be the province of the deranged, an equation readily endorsed by the cultural theorists of the rising National Socialist movement, who would later set up a programme of artistic "reform", aided by their allies from the world of clinical psychiatry.
 
Notable among these was Carl Schneider, the Nazi sympathiser who came to Heidelberg after Prinzhorn and completely reversed the way the collection was viewed. Schneider, who had joined the Nazi party in 1932, was a wholehearted supporter of the attempt to "purify" Germany's creative life. He, and others like him, believed that, by using chance, the subconscious, the primitive and the childlike to liberate their work from conventional artistic practice, modern artists had entered the twilight world of "the idiot, the cretin and the cripple", and were obviously mad. This attitude finds its clearest expression in the words Schneider used when referring to Prinzhorn's collection: catatonic, chaos, craving, cretinism, defilement, degeneracy, deviance, disgust, disorientation, grimaces, horror, idiocy, infantile, lust, nonsensical, pathological, shameless, wallowing.
 
Women were especially likely to encounter Schneider's disapproval. Despite the fact that, in the 20s and 30s, there were more women than men in psychiatric institutions across Germany, their art constitutes only 20% of the collection. In the words of a recent curator, female patients "put their energies into women's work, wrote religious verses in their notebooks, and kept quiet". Despite this, it is clear from Schneider's writings that the new director was especially antipathetic to work done by women. Indeed, he was proud of his ability to "reform" those in his care by weaning them away from activities he considered degenerate. In an article for a psychiatric journal published in 1939, Schneider describes his successful treatment of a "schizophrenic female artist [who] had composed pathological productions" and ends by boasting that he has not preserved her work, rather he has had it destroyed.
 
Presumably, Schneider did not destroy works already in the collection because they were useful evidence that the art of the insane was worthless. The oddly dressed ladies on their clearly impractical bicycles and the strangely coiffed women conducting their unerotic orgy would have been ideally suited to his purposes. Of course, what he and his fellow Nazis failed to see is that, while they are undoubtedly comic, there is no reason to assume that this is simply a product of the helpless battiness of the mentally ill. What if their creators knew what they were doing? What if they were laughing at the world - at us?
 
Allow that, and it becomes apparent that many images appear to mock the accepted order of things. The fact that all the Göttingen Houses of Correction are identical would have made perfect sense to the inmates. Perhaps so many works resist interpretation because that was the intention; perhaps they are exercises in disguise? Fail to hide, like the witch's head in the landscape, and you will be caught, snared in the words that are scrawled across so many of the pictures like barbed wire at Passchendaele.
 
Schneider seems to have sensed none of this. Seeing only madness, he was happy to lend works from Heidelberg to the Entartete Kunst, the Degenerate Art exhibitions organised by the Nazis in the 30s to discredit modern art by associating it with the productions of the insane. This more than anything lowered the status of the collection in the opinion of intellectuals across Europe. Even Prinzhorn's reputation was tarnished by Schneider's actions. While it has never been suggested that he gave any credence to the Nazi view of modern art as the work of sick Jews, bolsheviks and anarchists, he has nevertheless been rebuked for his silence at the beginning of the Nazi attacks on his collection, what one sceptic has described as a withdrawal into "pessimistic dandyism", which presumably indicates someone too bored or too fastidious, too preoccupied with higher things, to engage with those he considers beneath him - an attitude some way short of unquestioned sanctity.

 
Schneider is an easier monster. Arrested by the advancing Americans in 1945, he committed suicide in his cell before he could be tried for his part in the Aktion T4 mass euthanasia programme and his role as a T4 Gutachter, "educating" other doctors in the techniques of "mercy-killing" child patients, his "beautiful idiots". Yet even this tale of unrelenting wickedness has its curious twists. In some accounts, Schneider is the son of a pastor and thus a fallen angel; in others, he is the abandoned child of a failed musician who died in a home for the indigent, with the result that the son came to view psychiatry as a means of social advancement, a prize offered by the Nazi Racial Hygiene programme.
 
Both sides tend to agree that at some point he underwent a change of heart. The young Schneider was convinced that eugenics would turn healers into hangmen, but he also had a passionate desire to find a cure for "congenital feeble-mindedness and epilepsy", and when he was offered the means to obtain the enormous quantity of children's brains he believed necessary for his experiments, he was seduced, by a heady mixture of goodness and raw ambition, into taking a leading part in the involuntary euthanasia of thousands of crippled and retarded infants.
 
In the end, any attempt to explain his behaviour gives way to anger when one is confronted with the icy insouciance he displayed towards the gassing or slow starvation of his many victims. In any case, all the official applications for more research assistants, and the interminable arguments over who had the right to which human remains, led nowhere. As with all the other Nazi medical experiments, no cure was found.
 
Given the turbulent history of Prinzhorn's collection, it is likely to remain at the centre of any debate surrounding psychiatry in Germany. That it survives at all is a miracle - although there is a sense in which the credit for that may have to be given to Schneider. When the Entartete Kunst exhibitions finished touring in 1941, no one knew what to do with the exhibits, which were put into storage until the day when someone higher up should send for them. Likewise in Heidelberg, the bulk of the collection was packed in boxes, where it remained until the mid-60s when it was rediscovered and a programme of restoration, research and exhibition begun, intended to lead up to this year's opening of a museum within the university.
 
At this point, it looked as if Prinzhorn's hopes were about to be fulfilled and his collection could finally have a permanent home. But in the summer of 1996, Dr Inge Jadi, the current custodian, heard that an organisation called the Bundesverband Psychiatrie-Erfahrener (BPE) had "decided" that the Heidelberg works should be moved to Berlin to form part of a memorial to the victims of the Nazi euthanasia campaign. Enquiries revealed that the BPE had already applied to the Berlin and regional authorities for aid, only to be told that help could not be given unless their new museum contained material of substance and importance, hence the attempt to take over an existing world-famous collection. Initially, it must have been tempting to treat the whole business as nothing more than a publicity stunt by a previously unheard-of fringe group. But the BPE and its allies were to prove unexpectedly tenacious.
 
 
The BPE is a radical pressure group, made up of ex-psychiatric patients, dedicated to exposing the "crimes" of earlier practitioners, while rescuing present-day "victims". It maintains a safe house where the mentally troubled can take refuge from those they regard as their persecutors, and the proposed museum was clearly seen as a logical extension of this. Thus, when the authorities in Heidelberg tentatively pointed out that Prinzhorn's efforts had preceded the T4 museum, an outraged BPE announced that the works had been taken from the Jews and were "Beutekunst der Mörder" (art plundered by the murderers). A BPE spokesman, Rene Talbot, delivered what many thought an outrageous lecture, entitled Hans Prinzhorn - A Nazi Ideologist Pathologises Art. Further, they claimed that the collection would be housed in rooms Schneider had used for his experiments, a "horror location" that rendered Jadi and her colleagues unworthy custodians.
 
Despite the fury, all this might have gone unnoticed by the wider world had the BPE not attracted a number of influential supporters able to engage the attention of the press. It had also allied itself to the Israeli Association Against Psychiatric Assault, which added some weight to its claim to represent victims of Nazi oppression. Clearly, Jadi had no option but to defend herself. She began by emphatically refuting the major charges, insisting that the works would almost certainly have been destroyed if Prinzhorn hadn't asked for them. However, she also felt obliged to admit that, in their attacks on Prinzhorn, the BPE had been quoting from a doctoral thesis which showed beyond doubt that, shortly before his death, Prinzhorn had indeed "flirted with the idea of National Socialism", writing articles endorsing its policies and generally voicing support. While Jadi insisted that this did not alter the good Prinzhorn had done earlier, her revelation of something far worse than mere "pessimistic dandyism" was a blow to those who had formerly held him in such high regard. While her passionate defence fought off this last attempt to break up the collection, the reputation of its founder, a man admired by many of the most inventive artists of his day, was left somewhat battered.
 
It now remains to be seen whether Prinzhorn's remarkable collection will be allowed to find a peaceful resting place at last. No one knows whether the opening in September will be marked by protests and demonstrations, but whatever happens it will always bear the burden of being not just a museum but also a memorial. What became of many of the artists whose work Prinzhorn brought together is not known for certain, but that curious phrase "last mentioned" indicates that an inmate was removed from an asylum, under the system intended to select those with a "life unworthy of a life", administered by men such as Schneider after his appointment as scientific director of the Mental Patient Extermination Programme. Some received "intensive treatment" at a former state hospital in Grafeneck near Tübingen, others were transported to Upper Austria to be "disinfected" at the castle in Hartheim an der Donau, an outpost of the infamous "school for murderers" at Mauthausen, the training ground for concentration camp killers

Madly Gifted. By David Sweetman. The Guardian, July 28, 2001.