At Last : A George Grosz Museum in Berlin

 

“The ducks had to go,” dealer and collector Juerg Judin told me, pointing at the small, now duck-free pond he had installed in the backyard of his old Berlin residence, a repurposed gas station from the 1950s. His former private home, which also became the habitat of a few exotic geese, ducks, and birds, has been recently handed over to a nonprofit association that will run an institution there over the next five years, the new Kleine Grosz Museum.
 
This privately funded venue, which opens to the public on Saturday, May 14, will be dedicated to the Berlin-born political artist George Grosz, a fixture of modern art history in Germany.
 
The name, which translates to the Little Grosz Museum, is a pun—Grosz sounds like the German word for big. It’s also a cheeky reference to the intimacy of the space, which is spread across two small levels of the revamped Shell station.
 
Despite the size, the modernist location has been expertly outfitted to provide museum-standard climate conditions. “That’s a must if we ever want to exhibit loans from institutional collections,” curator Pay Matthias Karstens said. (That’s also the reason why the exotic fauna had to be relocated.) Until the museum establishes a two-year backlog of climate control with which to approach institutions to obtain loans, the works on view will all stem from private collections—including Judin’s—and from the holdings of the Grosz estate.
 
Through painting and drawing, Grosz, who was active in the early 1900s until his death in 1959, captured the social realities of Berlin without euphemism. His caricature-like figuration has established him as one of the German capital’s most well-known artists from that last century; and yet, the Kleine Grosz Museum is the first institution dedicated to his oeuvre. This private initiative probably would not have happened if it weren’t for Ralph Jentsch, the managing director of the estate and the editor of Grosz’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné. The museum’s future beyond its initial five-year run will depend on its success in drawing in visitors and accruing financial support from additional funders.
 
Georg Before George; Gross Before Grosz

 
The museum’s ground floor houses a permanent collection that provides a chronological overview of the artist’s career, highlighting major periods of work during the Weimar years as well as his time in the U.S. It outlines a narrative that not only follows the sharp-eyed artist and draftsman’s sensibilities but also the horrors of the first half of the 20th century and the economic boom of the post-war years.
 
In 1928, Grosz created the stage set and costume design for Erwin Piscator’s staging of the dark comedic story Soldat Schwejk, and the watercolors he created as studies are a wonderful highlight of the exhibition in Berlin. Like much of the museum, it conjures a Berliner story: The German theater director’s famed Piscator-Bühne was just around the corner from where the museum is located, in the neighborhood of Schöneberg.
 
The upper level of the museum is dedicated to changing exhibitions; there will be two per year, ten in total for the museum’s already-secured duration. The first one, titled “Gross Before Grosz,” focuses on the artist’s very early years: already as a teenager, the young country boy named Georg Ehrenfried Gross exhibited a great talent as an illustrator. After the current show closes in September, the second exhibition set to open in November will explore Grosz’s 1922 travels to Soviet Russia where he met Lenin.
 
A selection of drawings from the current exhibition dating to 1904, when the artist was only 11 years old, are the first works visitors will encounter here. One drawing on a torn piece of paper features four anthropomorphized frogs. “You see very early on that someone is trying to master the technique, who has the ambition to become a real artist,” Karstens, the show curator, said. “Many of the motifs we see later are already present here.”
 
This early work is prominently signed G. Gross. Key to the artist’s ambition was to be recognizable, successful, and a brand—to do that, his birth name was simply too common in Germany at the time. In 1906, aged only 13, he already began experimenting with signing his creations under the name Grosz. It is only much later on during World War I that the artist became politicized and radicalized, developing anti-German sentiments that prompted him to change his first name as well to its anglicized version, George.
 
Grosz, the Great Observer
 
Alongside works created as a student in Dresden, the temporary exhibition also includes works from his early years in Berlin. Interestingly, these show a certain fear of the big city and its colorful characters. Human figures suddenly begin to appear in works such as Nächtlicher Überfall (translated: nighttime robbery) and Selbstmord (the German world for suicide), or a drawing of a derelict bar (all from 1912), which show scenes of violence and despair. “Moving in the city by day and night, he drew what he saw,” Jentsch said. “Grosz is not a caricaturist, he’s an observer.”
 
The artist’s canny observations, which Grosz is most well-known for, continue in the permanent exhibition on the ground level. Works in the chronological show include output from the 1950s, after Grosz and his family had moved back to Germany from the U.S. Never having reached the financial success he had hoped for on the other side of the Atlantic, a self-portrait shows the artist in his studio, bitter and defeated. The canvases around him are in disarray, and are punctured by a bean-shaped hollow that also features on the artist’s forehead. In his later years, George Grosz, one of the artists most closely associated with Berlin’s history, considered himself a failure.
 
Despite his tumultuous career, what he depicted ended up being occasionally prophetic. A watercolor from 1934, done when Grosz was already living in the U.S., called the Menace, shows Hitler as a murderous monster. “Created three years before Guernica,” Jentsch pointed out, “the work already anticipates what Hitler would soon become responsible for.”
 
A Former Gas Station in Berlin Has Been Revamped Into a Museum Dedicated to the Celebrated Weimar Artist George Grosz. By Hili Perlson. ArtNet News, May 11, 2022.

Filled with lustful murderers, dishevelled streetwalkers and hollow-eyed wartime amputees, George Grosz’s jagged sketches of Berlin street life during the Weimar Republic never sought to capture the German metropolis at its most beautiful.
 
Only fitting, then, that Berlin’s first museum dedicated solely to its master chronicler should not be in the gilded neoclassical halls of the German capital’s Museum Island but a seedier part of the city in which the satirist and Dada artist was born and died.
 
The Little Grosz Museum opens on Friday inside a former petrol station on the dusty Bülowstraße thoroughfare, overlooked by a noisy elevated metro track, and a stone’s throw from the German capital’s red-light strip around Nollendorfplatz.
 
It began as a privately funded initiative started seven years ago by Ralph Jentsch, the managing director of Grosz’s estate. It does not have its own collection but will present works loaned from other galleries over two compact gallery floors.
 
“George Grosz is an artist of worldwide renown, yet there is no museum on this globe that permanently shows more than two of his paintings,” Jentsch told the Guardian.
 
This is in part because his work was spread far and wide in the tumult of 1920s and 30s Germany, and in some cases destroyed. Subject to several court cases during the Weimar years – over defamation of the German army, blasphemy and “attacks on public morals” – about 300 of Grosz’s works were seized, then sold or burned as degenerate art by the Nazis after he emigrated to the US in 1933. “Plans for a Grosz museum were long hampered by that dispersal,” said Jentsch.
 
The small museum, which cannot hold more than 60 people at a time, serves up a reminder of the relevance of an uncompromising artist politicised by the horrors of war – while also correcting some of the myths about its hero along the way. In spite of his pacifist inclinations, Grosz volunteered to join the army in November 1914, in the hope of preempting conscription and avoiding being sent to the front.
 
One commonly told story, fed in part by the artist’s own vague descriptions of his wartime activity, is that the violence he witnessed in the first world war fired up the violent imagination of his later works and alienated him so radically from Germany that he decided to anglicise his name from Gross to Grosz to make a political statement.
 
The curators of “Please write Grosz instead of Gross”, the museum’s first exhibition, say that tells only half the story. After tracking down Grosz’s military medical records, they say it is likely the dadaist never experienced any frontline action first-hand. While his regiment fought trench warfare in Flanders in February 1915, Grosz was recovering at Berlin’s Charité hospital, having fallen ill with sinusitis on the way to the front. How closely to the front the artist was when he collected impressions that would result in a series of four sketches with titles such as Battlefield, is unclear.
 
When being redrafted into the reserve army two years later, Grosz had a mental breakdown, with officers finding him naked from the waist down on his first night. After the then 23-year-old tried to attack a medical officer with a knife, he was sent to a specialist hospital for patients with nervous system disorders where he spent the rest of the war.
 
“Grosz saw the flipside of wartime heroism, but mainly from within hospitals, in the company of those spat out by the front,” said Pay Karstens, the exhibition’s curator.

 
Digging through Grosz’s archive of early works, Karstens discovered that the artist’s change of surname took place years before the war, making a purely political motive unlikely. Born Georg Ehrenfried Gross, he signed his first work “Grosz” in 1906, aged 13, when an anti-nationalist sentiment was unlikely to have been held as a principled belief.
 
“Grosz wanted to become a successful illustrator for satirical magazines at the time, and he needed a brand name,” said Karstens. “Gross was too much of an everyday name for that.”
 
The anglicisation of his first name, by contrast, was a deliberately provocative act, at a time when other artists and poets celebrated their hatred of the wartime enemy, England.
 
“After witnessing this year of war, I am no longer such a strong friend of my fatherland,” he wrote to a friend in June 1916. Pictures such as 1917’s German Men, piled with grotesquely fat men in uniforms, show an artist thoroughly disgusted with his country of birth. From 1917, the letters he sent from his hospital bed were signed “George Grosz”.
 
Unlike his Dada jester-in-arms Helmut Herzfelde, who anglicised his name to John Heartfield around the same time, Grosz never sought to change his name officially by deed poll after the end of the war.
 
Instead he voted with his feet and left for New York, and later Huntington, shortly after the Nazi party emerged as the biggest political force in the 1932 elections. One of the planned exhibitions at the Little Grosz Museum will focus on the works he produced in the US, a country in which he felt enough at home to opt for naturalisation, but where his new work was often ignored in favour of his sketches of Weimar Berlin.
 
Other shows will focus on Grosz’s pioneering photo collages and his 1922 trip to the Soviet Union, which included an audience with Lenin.
 
With a total of 10 six-month temporary exhibitions planned, the museum’s lifespan is likely to be limited to five years. “If Berlin still wants to have a Grosz museum after that, it needs to cough up,” said Juerg Judin, the Swiss art collector who turned the converted Shell petrol station into his home 10 years ago and has temporarily offered it to the curators.
 
 
George Grosz: museum dedicated to city’s master chronicler opens in Berlin.  By Philip Oltermann. The Guardian. May 11, 2022. 

Tankstelle wird Grosz-Museum In der Berliner Bülowstraße kann man bald einen besonderen Kraftstoff tanken, nämlich Kunst. Eine Tankstelle wird dort zu einem Museum für Werke des Malers George Grosz.

Tankstelle wird Grosz-Museum.  Von Christhard Läpple. ZDF, May 5, 2022. 

1  He was a master of disguise
 
George Grosz was born Georg Gross in Berlin in 1893. No accepted explanation has been given as to why, in his twenties, he changed his name, other than that he loved the art of disguise. In public he often pretended to be a cowboy or a Dutch businessman, while in private he occasionally greeted first-time visitors to his home by saying he was Herr Grosz’s butler and apologising for his master’s absence. He also adopted a range of pseudonyms throughout his life: from Count Bessler-Orffyre and George Leboeuf to Dr William King Thomas.
 
2 No matter how many times Grosz left Berlin, something kept drawing him back
 
Grosz was born in Berlin but grew up in Stolp, a small town in Eastern Pomerania, not far from the Baltic. He returned to Berlin in 1910 to study at the School of Arts and Crafts, becoming a regular at the Café des Westens where the German Expressionists gathered. Arguably an even more important artistic influence on the young Grosz, however, was Futurism. The dynamic angularity of the jostling forms in his two breakthrough paintings, The Funeral: Dedicated to Oskar Panizza (1917-18) and Germany, A Winter's Tale (1918), shows a clear debt to the movement.

 
3  He joined the army twice during the First World War — and twice was discharged
 
War broke out while Grosz was still a student. He reluctantly signed up for the Deustches Heer in November 1914, only to be invalided out of the conflict with a sinus infection months later. Recalled to the front in 1917, he soon suffered a breakdown and was admitted to a field hospital, and then a military mental asylum, where doctors declared him unfit for service on grounds of insanity. The experience prompted a number of rapidly sketched drawings — featuring, in the artist's own words, ‘the beastly faces of comrades, arrogant officers and lecherous nurses’.

 
Gefährliche Straße  (above) captures Berlin’s descent into moral and physical chaos. It is one of a series of around 20 paintings — roughly half of which are now lost — that Grosz made of the city at night between spring 1917 and November 1918.
 
Peace would be signed with the Allies on 11 November 1918, two days after Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated as Emperor. In the wake of Germany’s defeat, Grosz said he ‘was disappointed not because the war had been lost, but because the people had suffered for so long without heeding the few voices raised against the mass slaughter’.
 
 
4  He became a key figure of the Dada movement
 
Starting in Zurich, before spreading to other European cities as war came to an end, Dada was rooted in disbelief that a conflict as absurdly long and devastating as World War I could have been fought in the name of progress. Dadaists concluded that the world had gone mad and that received values must be turned on their head.
 
In a defeated, demoralised Berlin, this included provocative stage performances — such as an obscene tap-dance routine with which Grosz made a name for himself. He also helped pioneer the technique of photomontage, which involved assembling fragments of photographs to create a synthetic new image — a reflection of the fractured Europe that was being unconvincingly pieced back together in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles.

 
5   Grosz was the pre-eminent chronicler of Berlin in the Twenties
 
Between the collapse of Germany's monarchy in 1918 and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, Berlin gained a reputation for being the bawdiest, most licentious city in Europe. Its cabaret acts were outrageously explicit, and its brothels were infamous. It is said that cocaine could be bought in the city's nightclubs for half the price of a decent dinner. ‘Barbarism prevailed... the times were mad,’ wrote Grosz in his autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No. His best-known works are visions of the seamy side of German metropolitan life at this time, which, along with Christopher Isherwood's ‘Berlin’ stories about Mr Norris and Sally Bowles, have indelibly shaped our picture of what the German capital was like in the Weimar years. They give off a heavy whiff of social decadence and political corruption. Take, for instance, Grosz’s 1922 watercolour Orgie, depicting a dingy bar in which a grotesque, cigar-chomping drunk spews wine through his teeth, while other patrons defecate and copulate around him.

 
6    He was sued on various occasions
 
In his drawing collections such as The Face of the Ruling Class and Ecce Homo — as well as in his work for journals and broadsheets — Grosz depicted greedy capitalists, smug bourgeoisie and nouveaux riches hags, among other social groups. Blessed with a razor-sharp wit, he was a social satirist who saw himself continuing in the tradition of William Hogarth.
 
As the German philosopher Hannah Arendt observed years later, however, Grosz's cartoons ‘seemed to us not satire so much as realistic reportage. We recognised these types, they were all around us’.
 
Pimps and prostitutes abound in Ecce Homo, a book that caused such a furore that Grosz felt compelled to apply for a pistol license on the grounds of self-defence. He was also taken to court on charges that 52 of the book’s 100 images were pornographic. Grosz was tried in February 1924 and was fined 6,000 marks. Numerous plates from the publication were confiscated and banned. This was the first of three separate occasions on which Grosz was successfully sued for producing offensive artwork.
 
These events may have led to his extended trip to France in 1924, and a further stay in Paris from June to October in 1925. The Dingo American Bar was opened in 1923 and quickly gained notoriety among English-speaking artists and writers, not least because it was one of the few drinking-houses that was open all night. Ernest Hemingway first met F. Scott Fitzgerald there in April 1925, two weeks after the publication of The Great Gatsby and a few months before Grosz executed a study of the bar.

 
7     He briefly became a Communist
 
Grosz's work often expressed sympathy for poor, downtrodden workers suffering at the hands of rich, fat-cat bosses. ‘To show the oppressed the true face of their masters is the purpose of my work,’ he once said.
 
For a while, he was a member of the Communist Party, even receiving his membership card personally from Rosa Luxemburg (though over time, and after an underwhelming meeting with Lenin in the Soviet Union in 1922, his party loyalties waned).
 
Grosz felt that the fall of the Kaiser removed few of the inequalities that had long existed in German society. In 1930, he found an outlet for his frustrations by designing the costumes for Carl Sternheim’s adaptation of Flaubert’s political satire, The Candidate. Updated from 19th-century France to contemporary Berlin, it follows an ambitious candidate for the Reichstag who is courted by three different political party leaders — and who ultimately gives up his own wife to one of them to win the election.
 
8    His work was included in the Nazis' exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’
 
After a brief, enjoyable spell spent teaching in New York, Grosz returned to the US on what turned out to be a long-term basis in 1933, just a week before Hitler became German chancellor. (He would remain in America for more than two decades.) Grosz’s subject matter was highly objectionable to the Nazis: they labelled him ‘Cultural Bolshevist Number One’, destroyed many of the works he’d left behind and included another 15 in their Entartete Kunst exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ in Munich in 1937.
 
By this point, however, Grosz was revelling in life across the Atlantic: as an artist he largely split his efforts between street scenes of Manhattan and windswept landscapes of Cape Cod. For the former, he roamed New York by day, sketchbook in hand, creating finished versions of his scenes by night — a typical result of this process being Quick Lunch, which shows customers of all socio-economic backgrounds crowding around a fast-food counter.
 
9   He became an American citizen
 
In 1938, having been stripped of his German citizenship, Grosz legally became an American. His style softened in these years, although there was still the occasional, apocalyptic painting of hell-fire on earth, which suggests the repression of freedoms back in his birth country were never far from his mind.
 
More than a hint of poignancy can be found in certain works on paper, too, such as the ink drawing titled Refugees, a self-portrait with his two sons. During the Second World War, his mother (who hadn't emigrated to the US with him) was killed in a bombing raid.
 
10   Grosz returned to Berlin six weeks before his death
 
By the 1950s, Grosz had started to drink heavily, and his wife Eva hoped that a change of surroundings — namely a return to post-Nazi Germany — would help him kick the habit. In May 1958 they moved into her parents’ old flat in West Berlin; but in July, after falling down a flight of stairs during a heavy night’s drinking, Grosz died. He was 65.
 
 
10 things to know about George Grosz. By Alastair Smart. Christie’s, January 9, 2020.

 

A new exhibition of work by the German artist George Grosz is staged, this autumn by Richard Nagy in London.  This major display will be the first in the UK since the Royal Academy’s retrospective almost 20 years ago. Some 50 works by the titan of German satirical art have been assembled from leading private and public collections around the world.

 
The works in this exhibition include savage caricatures and nightmarish visions that articulate Grosz’s sharp contempt for all aspects of bourgeois life in Germany. His childhood distrust of authority figures found its outlet after the catastrophic events of the First World War. Later in life he would describe his experiences in the trenches as ‘wholly negative’ and his caricatures of military generals in works such as Vor der Kaserne (In front of the Barracks) (1918) exude his hatred for the empty bluster of German militarism.
 
In the years following its humiliating defeat, Germany was cast into political disarray. Grosz established a reputation as a formidable satirist, producing bloodcurdling images such as Nieder mit Liebknecht (Down with Liebknecht) (1918) and encapsulating the cynical humour of Berlin’s Dada Movement with his wry illustrations for Die Pleite. Grosz became particularly fascinated by the decadent side of cosmopolitan
 
Berlin in the 1920s. In his art he fought against the base preoccupations of bourgeois society by uncovering a shadowy world of crime, murder and erotic license. Lustmord (Sexual Murder) is a prominent motif in his work, in which the combination of sexuality and violence is presented as a ritualization of the human quest for power, exemplified by political practice.
 
A highlight of the exhibition is an important work that was recently discovered in a private collection and has never been shown outside of Germany. The work is an earlier watercolour version of what Grosz claimed to be his greatest oil painting, Deutschland, Ein Wintermärchen (Germany, a Winter’s Tale) (1918), which was likely destroyed in the early 1930s. The title harks back to a classic of German literature, a satirical poem by Heinrich Heine, but the object of Grosz’s contempt is decidedly contemporary. In the centre of the image a well-fed bourgeois nationalist (Biedermann) sits at a dinner table with an upright knife and fork as though ready to start carving. In the chaos around him the viewer can distinguish brothels, factories and tenement buildings, while figures symbolising the pillars of society – the Church, the Military, and Education – turn a blind eye and loom in the foreground.
 
Several striking watercolours from Grosz’s famous series Ecce Homo (1923) are also on display. Dämmerung (The Gloaming) (1922) shows the day ending and nightlife awaking in the twilight of the big metropolis. A pimp with a cigar in his mouth watches over his harlots roaming the streets, while a neatly dressed businessman can be seen next to a prostitute who is wearing a striking red hat. A blind man at a house corner is selling matches. In the far distance one can detect a suspicious man walking towards the onlooker. A policeman, the so-called Schupo (Schutzpolizei), watches the scene from the corner of his eye, ready to intervene at his discretion.
 
At the root of Grosz’s political message is a moral imperative. As he wrote in 1921, ‘You can’t be indifferent about your position in this activity, about your attitude towards the problem of the masses… Are you on the side of the exploiters or on the side of the masses?’ For this reason, Richard Nagy is pleased to announce that the show will serve to benefit Global Witness, a charity dedicated to protecting communities and their environments from the abuses that result from natural resource- related conflict and corruption. Patrick Alley, Director of Global Witness comments: ‘We are delighted that Global Witness will share a platform with this fascinating and timely George Grosz exhibition. Being so savagely critical of corruption and injustice, his work resonates strongly with our campaigns to tackle the international systems, and political, financial and economic norms which exacerbate these problems.’
 
George Grosz (1893-1959) was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß in Berlin, Germany, though he spent most of his childhood in the Pomeranian town of Stolp. At the age of 15 he was dismissed from high school for striking one of his disciplinarian teachers. Fortunately Grosz had demonstrated artistic talent and he was encouraged to apply to the Dresden Academy of Art. In 1909, at the age of 16, he began a two-year course of study for his art diploma and was accepted into the Berlin Academy in 1911. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 delayed his ambitions to be an artist and illustrator, but he was eventually released from service on medical grounds. Back in Berlin, he published artwork in Franz Pfemfer’s leftist journal, Die Aktion, and soon became a prominent member of the anti-establishment Dada Movement.
 
Grosz’s artworks quickly attracted the notice of the authorities and in 1921 he was charged with defaming the German army. He would be charged twice more prior to his departure for the United States in the early thirties. During the Third Reich, hundreds of his paintings and drawings were confiscated and many destroyed. In the latter part of his career he tried to establish himself as a pure painter of landscapes and still life, but also continued to produce compositions of an apocalyptic and deeply pessimistic kind. He returned to Berlin in 1958, where he died a few months later.
 
 
George Grosz Exhibition Explores Berlin Prostitutes, Politicians And Profiteers Between The Wars. Artlyst, July 26, 2013.

George Grosz in Germany, on view at the New York Studio School Gallery, offers a rich overview of Grosz’s development as an artist and dissident. The works on paper, all from the Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection, featured in the show from 1913–1925 could be considered collectively like a piece of documentary, a primary source for visualizing life in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. It is the portrait of a war victim coming to grips with the underlying horror of everyday reality.
 
Much of his early work, before 1920, fits well into more traditional forms of graphic art like newspaper illustrations, political cartoons, and one work that echoes the lines of Durer’s engravings. Grosz’s pen and ink drawings like “Das Ende,” Chaos,” and “Untitled (Man Walking His Dog),” are less typical for being unapologetically raw and impulsively drawn. They might be Grosz at his best and most disturbed, truly “degenerate.”
 
In the aftermath of World War I, Grosz’s loose, almost painterly approach is more soberly inflected. Grosz’s drawings from this period are described as caricature, in that they serve as a caustic remark upon the Weimar Republic, however, his message is not explicit, in fact, Grosz’s use of cartoon-like imagery and its perceived inferiority in the hierarchy of the arts only sublimates his askance glance at German society. In works like, “Bar Montmartre,” “Berlin Cafe,” and “Portraits,” Grosz offers a gadfly on the wall view of Bourgeois Berliners in situ: on the streets, in cafés, nightclubs, bars, and brothels. His slice of life portraits are immediately nerve wracking, asking the viewer to look for whatever it is that’s awry.
 
Grosz’s deranged yet graceful pen work might first appear as the aping of primitive or outsider art, but it is not merely an artistic affection. His cross-sectional surveying of a scene, marked by intersecting lines, suggests a sustained observation of a subject over time; despite looking like cartoons, they are not imaginary. Grosz’s fluid composition has added fluency in the era of the moving picture — his work unfolds across the paper. Harsh variance in line thickness, suggesting a depth-of-field, further emphasizes a cinematic perspective. In many works Grosz’s seemingly inexpert handling of facial features, the eyes and mouth in particular, gives each subject a distinct personality; however, his rendering of hands is most telling of all.

 
The gnarled hand featured in detail on the cover of the exhibition’s catalogue hints at what lurks within each work. They recall the contorted appearance of barbed wire, the impact of mustard gas on the nervous system, or the jittering recoil of a machine gun: suggestions of World War I’s lingering trauma. While an entire generation of men was lost or physically wounded, a tell-tale sign of the war’s immediate impact, the psychological toll was more easily repressed. Shell shock, what we now know as PTSD, was disregarded by prominent doctors at the time because it was viewed as a sign of weak will and no conclusive test could prevent anyone from claiming it. However, in extreme cases, PTSD did produce a physiological response, caught on film for the first time and shown in news reels — psychological trauma made indisputable.
 
While Grosz’s military service was brief — he was discharged after a month of service — it had a profound influence on his work. The catalogue text for the recent Dada exhibition at Museum of Modern Art mentions that Grosz “may have suffered shell shock.” After some internet sleuthing, I found that he did, in fact, suffer from shell shock towards the end of the war in 1917.
 
Grosz’s own words describing the mental turmoil he suffered on the battlefield:
 
““My nerves broke down, this time before I could even get near the front and see rotting corpses and barbed wire … Nerves, down to the tiniest fiber, nausea, revolt — pathological, maybe —anyway, a total breakdown, even in the face of omnipotent regulations”
 
 
As Grosz’s experience suggests, shell shock is much more than a temporary condition caused by exposure to shock waves from bomb blasts. Shell shock, or PTSD, is a lasting impression left by any sort of exposure to the grotesqueries of war. PTSD is a suitable condition to ascribe to Germany itself post-WWI, made all the more relevant by the fact that Hitler’s experience with the disorder is suggested to have led to his radicalization. Unfortunately for the world, Hitler did not recover through cathartic mark-making like Grosz.

Caricature serves as perfect metaphor for a mind off-kilter, Grosz reduces Weimar society to a few discernible lines, and each stroke provides him a platform for airing his grievances. His restraint is at once raw and elegant, a calculated vacillation between astute draftsmanship and unrestrained gesture, offering a level of psychological insight we risk losing with increasing dependence on computer intervention between the artist and object. Grosz’s pen and ink on paper drawings provide indelible intimacy with a mind maimed by war.
 
George Grosz in Germany, curated by Karen Wilkin, is on view at the New York Studio School Gallery (8 West 8th Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) until January 4.
 
The Shock and Awe of George Grosz. By  Robert Cicetti. Hyperallergic, December 12, 2013.

  

The heirs of German artist George Grosz are demanding the return of works that were stolen during the Nazi era and now hang in museums. They want to exhibit the works in a Grosz museum, but their legal status is murky.

 A rear apartment building in Berlin's Wilmersdorf neighborhood; a studio on the top floor; a journey to the past: Art historian Ralph Jentsch holds photos that are more than 90 years old. "Unbelievable," he says. The radiator is still the same, and so is the door. "This is the way it looked when George Grosz painted in this room."

 It was in this studio where Grosz, the great expressionist, Dadaist and social critic, created the art that made him world-famous -- paintings and drawings of fat speculators, cynical military officials and extravagant prostitutes, of the maimed victims of war and the emaciated poor. Until 1932, Grosz painted in the studio, with its five-meter (16-foot) ceilings, where an artist from Moscow paints today.

 When stormtroopers broke down the door of Grosz's live-in studio on Jan. 31, 1933, the day after the Nazis came to power, the artist and his family were already in New York. "I very much doubt I would have made it out of there alive," he later wrote.

 Grosz had consigned most of his paintings and drawings to his art dealer. But the dealer, who was Jewish, also had to flee the Nazis and took only some of the works out of the country. In connection with their campaign against so-called "degenerate art," the Nazis confiscated 285 of Grosz's works in museums, some of which they sold. (Most were burned.) About 70 paintings vanished without a trace. Ralph Jentsch, visibly moved as he looks around in Grosz's former studio, is the managing director of the painter's estate. He wants to "make up for the injustice" that the Nazis inflicted on the artist. He says: "They plunged him into misery."

 When Grosz learned that the Nazis had burned a large share of his life's work, his wife Eva wrote after the war, "there was a complete collapse," and he began to suffer from "anxiety, particularly nightmares" and "to drink without moderation." In July 1959, shortly after his return to Berlin, Grosz was found in a stairwell one morning, unconscious from a drinking binge. He died a short time later.

 Of course, it's impossible to make up for Grosz's tragedy half a century later. Jentsch knows this. He has spent 20 years assembling a catalog of Grosz's works, a compilation of about 14,000 photos and seemingly endless lists. "At least the stolen pictures should be returned to his family," says Jentsch.

 Grosz was a prolific artist. He created about 450 paintings and more than 15,000 works on paper. Pictures from his Berlin days are worth millions today, and Jentsch has traced some of them to prestigious museums in New York, Vienna, Tokyo and Bremen. But their directors are opposed to returning the works to Grosz's heirs. They see themselves as the rightful owners.

 This claim, however, is at least up for debate. Since the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, there has been international agreement that works of art stolen or "confiscated as a result of persecution" during the Nazi years should be returned to their former owners. In the Grosz case, this would be his son Marty, 78, who lives in Philadelphia, and his sister-in-law Lillian, in Princeton, New Jersey. The Grosz heirs agree that they do not want to place restituted works on the market. Instead, they hope to exhibit the paintings and drawings confiscated in the Nazi era at a George Grosz museum, and they are considering Berlin as a possible location.

 Grosz has undoubtedly earned a museum of his own -- particularly since not a single art collection in the world contains more than two of the Berlin native's works. This is ironic, because Georg Ehrenfried Groß, as his name appears on his birth certificate, was one of the most prominent German representatives of modernism. His first solo exhibit, in Munich in April 1920, provoked angry criticism. The Bayerischer Kurier newspaper warned against the "witch's cauldron from which this mad, caterwauling brew emerges, in rutting ecstasies of wild, unbridled instincts." It didn't take long before the public prosecutor's office began charging Grosz, a Dadaist and radical provocateur, with insulting the Army of the Reich, disseminating obscene writings and blasphemy.

 

Not Jewish, but Persecuted

 In 1926, Grosz signed a contract with gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim, the most influential art dealer in the Weimar Republic, who also represented Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee and Ernst Barlach. Their business relationship ended when the art market collapsed during the Great Depression, and Flechtheim cancelled the contract in 1931. It was a heavy blow to Grosz. Though museums were buying his paintings, he was chronically broke and depended on Flechtheim's advances. The situation was "grim, at least as far as the (German) mark is concerned," Grosz concluded. "My source of income is gone."

 His socially critical art made Grosz, a leftist and pacific, a hated figure of the right. An officer shot at him in a restaurant, but hit a waiter instead. He received anonymous threats on a regular basis, and he once found an iron pipe in his studio with the following note attached: "This is what you'll get, you old Jewish pig, if you continue what you're doing."

 Unlike Grosz, Flechtheim, the art dealer, was Jewish. So he was also at risk when the Nazis came into power, and when he fled to Paris in 1933, Flechtheim left at least 70 paintings by Grosz and many more watercolors and drawings in Berlin. Before an insolvency administrator could take over the company, Flechtheim managed to move about half of the Grosz works to Paris, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to sell them.

 In a secret "Census of Leading Men of the System Era" compiled by the SS, Grosz was described as "one of the most despicable representatives of degenerate art, who works in an anti-German fashion." The document notes that he was "deprived of citizenship on March 8, 1933." Meanwhile, a despondent Grosz was in New York and didn't know what had happened to the paintings and drawings that had remained in Berlin. The loss made him "sad and angry," says his son Marty.

 In late 1952, however, Grosz discovered his painting titled "The Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse" at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which the MoMA was proudly presenting as a new acquisition. Grosz wrote to his brother-in-law in Berlin: "The Modern Museum exhibited a painting stolen from me (am powerless to do anything about it). They bought it from someone who stole it."

 When estate administrator Jentsch and the family's attorney recently negotiated with the MoMA over a possible return of the painting, its attorney coolly noted that the museum considered itself the painting's rightful owner.

 David Rowland, a lawyer who specializes in restitution, successfully negotiated the controversial return of the painting "Berlin Street Scene," by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, one of Grosz's contemporaries. Rowland has proposed declaring the Grosz painting shared property of the heirs and the museum for three years. If the MoMA could not substantiate its property rights within this period, he argued, the painting should go to the heirs. The museum has recently rejected the proposal.

 Through painstaking detective work, though, Jentsch managed to trace much of the portrait's adventurous path to New York. After Grosz emigrated it was still at the Flechtheim Gallery in Berlin. In 1937, an art historian named Charlotte Weidler said she had inherited it from Flechtheim. But before he died in exile in London in March 1937, Flechtheim had designated his nephew as his sole heir.

 Weidler immigrated to the United States. In 1952 she sold the "Portrait of Max Herrmann-Neisse" to the MoMA through an agent. The museum paid $850 for the work. Today, that's dirt cheap. But before World War II, other Grosz works were unloaded for a fraction of this amount. In 1936 Flechtheim consigned more than two dozen works to Carel van Lier, an Amsterdam art dealer. After Flechtheim's death, van Lier contacted neither his wife in Berlin nor Georg Grosz in the United States, but held an auction instead.

 The auction was rigged in advance, and 24 paintings sold for an average of 15 reichmarks apiece -- about €150 ($203) today. Van Lier bought five of the most important paintings himself and re-sold them later for a substantial profit.

 The Kunsthalle Museum in Bremen has two of Grosz's works today: the painting "Pompe funèbre," one of the works sold off in the rigged Amsterdam auction, and "Still Life with Okarina," which was seized in Berlin.

 Six years ago, Jentsch wrote to Wulf Herzogenrath, the director of Kunsthalle Museum. Herzogenrath still argues today that the paintings were bought at auction in Amsterdam "during peacetime." "Besides," he continues, "they no longer belonged to Grosz, but to Flechtheim."

 Strong Resistance

 Other Grosz paintings were dispatched around the world from Amsterdam along similarly serpentine and legally contested paths. "Promenade" is on display at the Bridgestone Museum in Tokyo, and Vienna's Museum of Modern Art insists that it is the rightful owner of the painting "Keepsake -- The Alliance."

 Private collectors have proved to be more understanding than, for example, the restitution advisory panel of the Austrian Ministry of Culture. An American brought the painting "Ideas of the Time," which had been hawked in Amsterdam, to the Sotheby's auction house in New York. After Jentsch told the owner of the painting about its history, he returned it for a finder's fee. A similar arrangement is being negotiated with a German-American family that owns the painting "Still Life with Pipe and Okarina."

 But Marty Grosz continues to meet strong resistance at museums. "In theory, the Washington declaration on the return of art stolen in the Nazi era is very good," says the painter's son, but in practice, he adds, things are "pretty unfair." And the heirs lack the necessary funds to sue the museums for the return of Grosz's works.

 Marty Grosz is becoming increasingly skeptical over whether his dream of a Georg Grosz museum will ever become reality. "Suing would take forever," he says. "By the time the courts decide, I'll be long dead."

 

Re-Collecting George Grosz's Art. By Michael Sontheimer. Der Spiegel, March 26, 2009.

 

 

 

Further info here

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.