Published on the occasion of the exhibition, 5 December 1996 - 23 February 1997, organised by the Hayward Gallery. The exhibition was originally shown (slightly modified) in Charleroi, Belgium, in the winter of 1995/96, under the title: La beauté insenseé. The Prinzhorn Collection is kept by the Psychiatric Institute of the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Includes bibliographical references (page 195).
Contents:
The Collection of Works of Art in the Psychiatric Clinic, Heidelberg - from the Beginnings until 1945 / Bettina Brand-Claussen -- Points of View - Perspectives - Horizons / Inge Jadi -- Precious and Splendid Fossils / Caroline Douglas.
Summary:
"In the early 1920s, the German art historian and psychiatrist, Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933), amassed a remarkable collection of some 5000 paintings, drawings, manuscripts, objects, and collages made by the patients of psychiatric hospitals throughout much of Europe. His interest, unique at the time, lay as much in their value as art as in their importance for the study of mental illness ... The works; all created between 1890 and 1920, sprang from the patients' urgent need to impose order on chaos, to communicate, from a 'drive towards expression' as Prinzhorn put it. Particular themes and motifs recur in the works: mechanical inventions; religious images; sexual fantasies; obsessive patterning on paper and in embroidery; fantastic beasts; intricate internal and external worlds. By the 1930s, when the Nazis declared such work 'degenerate', the Collection itself had fallen in to disrepair. Only in recent years has it been retrieved and restored. The images provide a fascinating insight in to the nature of artistic expression and the links between creativity, rationality, and illness - compelling subjects which remain intensely relevant to this day."--Jacket.
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