American Imago

In his book Artistry of the Mentally Ill of 1922, Hans Prinzhorn presented the Swabian electrotechnician August Natterer (1868-1933) as one of ten "masters" to whom he devoted brief monographs. He gave him the pseudonym Neter, described his life and reproduced his oeuvre, or rather a very specific selection of his works. His choice concentrated on paintings that in his view portrayed "schizophrenic experiences quite nakedly" (Prinzhorn 1972,171). Consequently, Prinzhorn only included those works that illustrated his ideas of non-intentional, authentically schizophrenic painting. The result was that he allowed the representational side of Natterer's oeuvre that lacked a certain mystery to go by the board, for he viewed it as "soberly realistic" and "amateur" (1972, 163). He only reproduced poetically loaded works that were replete with the desired mystery, such as Natterer's Antichrist (ill. 1) or Miraculous Shepherd which shortly after were to be discovered by the Surrealists. ¹

Prinzhorn failed to include a reproduction of Natterer's Witch's Head-Landscape ² (ill. 2) presumably because he considered it too grotesque and banal. Many puzzled later over the drawing and found plenty to say about it, but did not subject it to a close examination. The findings of such an examination and the history of the picture's genesis make it very clear that the intention and autonomy of a work get lost when people attempt to interpret it within a narrow conceptual framework as paranoid and incoherent, as some primal text of the mind or as coded events from the dreamworld. [End Page 407] [Begin Page 409]

Prinzhorn, Kris and the Artistry of the Mentally Ill.

The art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn was fascinated by the way hallucinatory experiences were revealed in pictures, even if he was less interested in deciphering these pictures than in their hallucinatory origins. Natterer had depicted his "apparitions" in a series of eleven drawings which he kept in a neatly inscribed envelope. One picture, he noted, had been "stolen by Dr. Rank", the head of Weissenau mental hospital until 1913, and Prinzhorn let several others "fall under the table" when selecting the illustrations for his book. Like the witch's head landscape, the Eyes of the Redeemer--which may have reminded him of votive pictures--was perhaps a shade too banal, and the portrait of Prince Regent Luitpold as a Roman Knight ³ (ill. 3) in chain mail too carnivalesque. The pictures had to be inaccessible, because Prinzhorn was fascinated by the "quality of strangeness and the supernatural which agitates and fascinates us so inexplicably" with its "fake organisms" and "pointless logic," and regarded it as a sign of a "specifically schizophrenic emotion" (Prinzhorn 1972, 170-1).

Ernst Kris took a cooler approach. He was interested in the collection at Heidelberg in his capacity as art historian and psychoanalyst, and in 1931, ten years after Prinzhorn left the town, he made random controls of the artists whose works were included in the Artistry of the Mentally Ill, and showed that the choice was biased. He reported on this in his article "Bemerkungen zur Bildnerei der Geisteskranken", ⁴ in which he distanced himself from Prinzhorn's expressionist approach, which was interested "in intellectual intuition"(Wesensschau). The Viennese researcher recognised that the choice of illustrations "was meant to support an aesthetic thesis and to plead the cause of German expressionistic art" (Kris 1964,88) rather than to address psychological questions. Whilst Prinzhorn was bent on uncovering a universal power of expression, Kris was content with the question of how psychotics come to mobilize "previously untrained or neglected modes of expression" (93). At the same time, he made hallucination more accessible as an oneiric, encoded fulfilment of unconscious wishes. Dreams, hallucinations and "art" were based on the same mechanisms: [End Page 409] "Objects change their meaning; a certain external similarity forms the bridge on which images are joined together" (101). Kris...