‘The Gallery of Miracles and Madness’ Review: Triumph of the Ill
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Self portrait by Franz Karl Bühler, 1919. PRINZHORN COLLECTION, HEIDELBERG UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL
Whenever I read about Hitler’s youthful dream of becoming an artist, I imagine an alternate history in which the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna accepted his application to study there. But the august academy said no to the future Führer not once but twice, and Hitler himself declared that the academy’s rebuff struck like “a bolt from the blue.”
Yet as the journalist Charlie English demonstrates in his penetrating chronicle “The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler’s War on Art” (Random House, 304 pages, $28), even so ego-shattering a blow as that did not deter Hitler from his artistic ambitions. Instead they became ever grander. As he rose to power, he fashioned himself the “artist-Führer,” destined to sculpt a new German culture and “pure” Aryan race. And the maniacal path Hitler charted to realize that vision, Mr. English contends, began with his war on modern art and the degeneracy he condemned in modern culture.
Mr. English traces that trajectory in fascinating, grueling detail. Hitler’s outrage against modern art was initially fueled by the increasingly abstract, distorted, angst-filled works of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the years prior to World War I, and especially in its devastating aftermath in Germany, exaggerated colors, expressive brush strokes and gory subjects served to reflect the era’s roiling aesthetics, societal uncertainties, and economic and political crises. Such dynamic canvases contrasted sharply with the emotionless “pleasant little pictures” that a friend recalled Hitler painting at about the time he was applying to the academy.
By 1919 Hitler may not have completely formulated his twisted ideology conflating art degeneracy with the eugenics-based pseudo-science of racial degeneracy. But the research of the German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn, who that year began studying the art produced by the mentally ill, would over the next decades kindle Nazi propaganda and Hitler’s own incendiary hatreds and prejudices.
From his position at the psychiatric hospital of the University of Heidelberg, Prinzhorn was astonished by the variety and quality of the art produced by the patients he oversaw there. So much so that he went on to collect about 5,000 examples from psychiatric institutions across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and elsewhere. In these works he discovered unfettered inventions utilizing not only sketchpads and ink, or canvases and paint, but “scraps of newspaper, tissue, old sugar bags, toilet paper, and the contents of wastepaper baskets,” Mr. English writes. “Sculptures were molded from chewed bread or carved from bits of old wooden furniture.”
The art ranged from self-portraits and landscapes to bizarre symbolic constructions and often provided glimpses into the patients’ interior worlds, religious visions, sexual obsessions, hallucinatory delusions, nightmare horrors and other fixations. The main point for Prinzhorn, however, was that his patients’ psychiatric ailments hadn’t affected their need for expression or ability to create. In Prinzhorn’s assessment, his patients exhibited more than enough skill, originality, imagination and invention to elevate their creations, however unconventional, from mere medical artifacts to works of art meriting attention in their own right.
In 1922 Prinzhorn highlighted the works of these artists in his lavishly illustrated book “Bildnerei der Geisteskranken” (“Artistry of the Mentally Ill”). For avant-garde artists like André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Paul Klee and others, the book was an instant hit. Seeing in it the mirror of an age still in recovery from the madness of World War I, they nicknamed it “the Surrealists’ bible,” an inspirational guide to help illuminate their art with the deeply buried, uncensored images of their own unconscious.
For critics on the far right, however, the very idea of placing the art of the insane on a pedestal was testimony to the degeneracy of modernist art and culture. Hitler decried Cubism, Dada and other modernist art movements as at once “the morbid excrescences of insane and degenerate men” and the manifestation of a malevolent Jewish-Bolshevik plot to infect and destroy German culture as a whole. The only solution to saving Aryan culture would be to “cleanse” from its midst the carriers of the degenerate, non-Aryan blood destroying their country.
With modernist art by now synonymous in the Nazi lexicon with insanity and racial impurity, in 1928 Hitler created the Combat League for German Culture, whose political purpose, Mr. English writes, was to “push the narrative that all areas of society, science, and the arts were in a deep crisis, and only an authoritarian state could avert the danger of complete degeneration.” Soon the league was targeting museums and galleries, demanding the removal of “tainted” paintings and firing the curators who had chosen to display such work.
It was far from the last time Nazi followers would use such tactics. In 1933, Hitler, now chancellor of Germany, declared: “Blood and race will once more become the source of artistic intuition.” To lead a state-endorsed assault on modern art and culture, Hitler tapped Reich minister Joseph Goebbels.
It was Goebbels who initiated the infamous “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art) exhibit of 1937, which displayed 650 examples of modernist works seized from museums throughout Germany. Intended to humiliate, shame and delegitimize the owners, artists, critics and supporters of such art, it included canvases by Otto Dix, Max Ernst, Paul Klee and Oskar Kokoschka, among others, alongside works from Prinzhorn’s collection. Adorning one wall was Hitler’s pronouncement from a 1935 party rally: “It is not the mission of art to wallow in filth for filth’s sake, to paint the human being only in a state of putrefaction, to draw cretins as symbols of motherhood, or to present deformed idiots as representatives of manly strength.”
Hitler’s mission was to persuade the German public of the necessity of cultural cleansing as a precursor to racial cleansing. Approximately 3.2 million people viewed the exhibit, in Munich and over the course of the Reich-sponsored tours that took it through the German territories until 1941. By then, not only was World War II well under way, so was Hitler’s program of annihilation, which began in 1939 with a secret euthanasia program targeting the mentally ill.
Many of Prinzhorn’s schizophrenic artists were among those rounded up and killed. The methods used, including gas asphyxiation, were prototypes for the machinery of mass murder implemented to kill millions more at Auschwitz and elsewhere. Mr. English leaves unsaid that among those victims were also many extraordinary artists of Jewish and otherwise “impure” blood.
At times, Mr. English can be repetitive, but he deftly links art history, psychiatry and Hitler’s ideology to devastating effect. Because seeing art through Hitler’s eyes, as Mr. English compels us to do, is nothing less than soul-crushing, I often needed to pause for air.
I was therefore grateful to learn, in the book’s final chapter, that after long neglect the collection of Hans Prinzhorn, who died in 1933, is now housed in a museum on the campus of the Heidelberg University Hospital. Prinzhorn remains an ambiguous figure; having conferred so much credibility on the art of the mentally ill, he also wrote essays in support of Hitler. But he was nonetheless an important early advocate for work now often called “outsider art.” That the work of so many of these artists is now routinely displayed and admired in exhibits and museums around the world is a necessary reminder that, despite Hitler, art ultimately prevailed.
—Ms. Cole is the author of the memoir “After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges."
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