Part 2. Michael Braunsteiner - The Prinzhorn Collection (de) - a podcast by CastYourArt.com

Michael Braunsteiner - The Prinzhorn Collection

In the early twentieth century,in the course of the modern art's search for the “very early origins” of art, so-called “outsider art” was discovered. At the same time, psychiatrists who hoped to be able to use works of psychiatric patients for diagnostic purposes began actively collecting for the first time on a large scale. Along these lines, the art historian and physician Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933), received a commission from the Heidelberger hospital in 1919 to extend the small educational collection of the institute and to find methods that would help to gain insides into the type of the patients’ illness using their creative works. However, Prinzhorn rejected taking a purely clinical psychiatric approach to the works. Instead, he set the works into an art-theoretical context and thereby brought the aesthetic beauty of the until-then marginalized “mad art” into focus for the first time—a pioneering achievement.

In 1922, Prinzhorn published the book, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, in which he documented and interpreted a large part of the collection, drawing parallels to other forms of artistic patterns and contemporary art. While his colleagues mostly rejected the book, it was enthusiastically received by the modern art world. It inspired artists such as Max Ernst, Alfred Kubin, and Pablo Picasso, and had a substantial influence on twentieth-century art theory and reception, which is reflected in—not least of all—today’s occupation with “state-bound art” and “outsider art“.

Today, the Prinzhorn Collection includes 5000 works from 435 mostly schizophrenic-diagnosed patients of various social backgrounds and age ranges. It brings together drawings, paintings, collages, textiles, sculptures, and texts, which emerged between 1880 and 1933 in the psychiatric institutes of mainly German-speaking countries.

A selection of the Prinzhorn Collection is presently on display in the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Benediktinerstift Admont. (sh/jn)

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