Between Ingenuity and Madness - Lives and Works of Artists in German, Swiss and Austrian Psychiatries in the 19th and 20th Century

A Master thesis

Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of a

Master of Art

In the Graduate Academic Unit of the History Department of the Paris-Lodron University of Salzburg

By

Daniela Vordermaier, BA BA

Supervisor: Ass. Prof. Dr. Alfred Stefan Weiß

Salzburg, September 2019

Contents 1. Introduction ...... 4 1.1 Topical Introduction ...... 4 1.2 State of Research: Art and Artists in Psychiatries - An Approach ...... 6 1.3 Questions and Structure ...... 18 1.4 Methodical Frame ...... 21 1.4.1 Historical Criticism by Johann Gustav Droysen and the Method of the Historical Comparison ...... 22 1.4.2 Erwin Panofsky’s Iconographical-Iconological Method ...... 25 1.4.3 Wolfgang Kemp’s Aesthetic of Reception ...... 28 2. The Pathologisation of the Artist - The Connex of Artistry and Mental Illnesses ...... 29 2.1 The Concept of the Mad Artist - An Overview of Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Ideas about the Connex of Ingenuity and Madness ...... 29 2.2 Art and Madness in the 19th and 20th Century - From Demonisation to Acceptance ..... 37 2.2.1 Lombroso’s and Morel’s Theories and the Perception of the Insane Artist in the Second Half of the 19th Century ...... 38 2.2.2 How Psychiatrists Viewed the Works of Mentally Ill People - Réja’s, Morgenthaler’s and Prinzhorn’s Concepts in Comparison with Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation ...... 41 3. Art Brut, Outsider Art and the Institutionalisation of the Artworks of Mentally Affected People ...... 49 3.1 The Reception of Madness’ Products - Perspectives and Views on Artworks Created by Mentally Affected People in the 1930s and 1940s ...... 49 3.2 Jean Dubuffet’s Concept of Art Brut, its Validity for the Works of Mentally Ill People and the Influence of Prinzhorn and his Collection on the French Writer...... 50 3.3 Leo Navratil’s Haus der Künstler in Gugging and the Promotion of Mentally Affected Artists ...... 55 3.4 The Swiss Reception of the Works Produced by Mentally Affected People - The Collection Dammann ...... 58 4. Lives and Works of Artists in German, Swiss and Austrian Psychiatries - Art as a Form of Therapy and Medium of Expression ...... 60 4.1 Artistry within the Mental Hospital in the 19th and Early 20th Century - Types, Motivations and Materials ...... 60 4.2 Life, Work and Illness of the Schizophrenic Artist Adolf Wölfli ...... 63 4.2.1 Adolf Wölfli’s Biography, Anamnesis and Artistry ...... 64 4.2.2 The Influence of Adolf Wölfli’s Schizophrenia on Style, Topics and Stylistics of his Artworks - Art as a Form of Therapy: Wölfli’s Idea of the Female and the Asylum ...... 67 4.3 Life, Work and Illness of Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern ...... 74 4.3.1 Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern’s Biography, Anamnesis and Artistry ...... 74 4.3.2 The Influence of Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern’s ’Schizophrenia’ on Style, Topics and Stylistics of his Artworks - Art as a Form of Therapy: Schröder- Sonnenstern’s Depiction of Sex and Violence ...... 78 4.4 Life, Work and Illness of Oswald Tschirtner ...... 84 4.4.1 Oswald Tschirtner’s Biography, Anamnesis and Artistry ...... 85 4.4.2 The Influence of Oswald Tschirtner’s Schizophrenia on Style, Topics and Stylistics of his Artworks - Art as a Form of Therapy: Tschirtner’s Vision of the Christian Faith ...... 87

2 5. Lives and Works of Artists in German, Swiss and Austrian Psychiatries - Psychosises as Life Crises and Mechanisms of Artistic Rebirth ...... 91 5.1 Stylistic Change in the Works of Louis Soutter ...... 92 5.1.1 Louis Soutter’s Biography, Anamnesis and Artistry ...... 92 5.1.2 Psychosises as Promoters of Stylistic Change and Creative Regeneration in Louis Soutter’s Oeuvre ...... 95 5.2 Stylistic Change in the Works of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner ...... 100 5.2.1 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Biography, Anamnesis and Artistry ...... 101 5.2.2 Psychosises as Promoters of Stylistic Change and Creative Regeneration in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Oeuvre ...... 105 5.3 Stylistic Change in the Works of Blalla W. Hallmann ...... 109 5.3.1 Blalla W. Hallmann’s Biography, Anamnesis and Artistry ...... 110 5.3.2 Psychosises as Promoters of Stylistic Change and Creative Regeneration in Blalla W. Hallmann’s Oeuvre ...... 112 6. Psychiatries as Total Institutions - Art and Creative Designing as Strategies to Express Autonomy and Self-Determination ...... 117 6.1 Erving Goffman’s Concept of Total Institutions - Characteristics and Examples ...... 117 6.2 Art as a Strategy to Express Autonomy and Self-Determination in Psychiatries of the 19th and 20th Century - Total Institutions in Practice ...... 119 7. Conclusion ...... 124 8. Bibliography ...... 129 8.1 Primary Sources ...... 129 8.2 Secondary Sources ...... 129 8.3 Internet Sources ...... 141 9. Visual Sources ...... 144 10. Bibliography of the Visual Sources ...... 155

3 1. Introduction 1.1 Topical Introduction Vincent van Gogh, Robert Schumann and Rainer Maria Rilke are known as some of the most influential artists living in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century. While the painter van Gogh is considered as one of the founders of modern art, who contributed to the development of avant-garde movements and shaped works and styles of nearly every 20th- century visual artist, Schumann was one of the leading composers of the romantic era.1 In contrast, Rainer Maria Rilke laid the foundations for the development of modern poetics and literature.2 Even if their lives and works seem to have been so different at first sight due to their divergent professions and interests, they shared a feature that shaped not only their wellbeing but also their creations: Lives and works of all three artists were structured and directed by psychosises, whether it was episodic semiconsciousness caused by a temporal lobe epilepsy in case of van Gogh3 or various forms of depression with manic or bipolar features in case of Rilke and Schumann.4 Although their illnesses caused mental, physical and emotional suffering, all three artists considered them as roots and promoters of their creativity and talents and viewed them as essential parts of their lives as artists. When Rilke was asked to try psychotherapy to cure him from his anxieties he therefore rejected treatment5 with the words: ’If my demons leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well’.6 Rilke hereby drew on an ancient topos and concept underlining the connections between ingenuity and madness, creativity and mental illnesses. He pointed out that the artist could gain parts of his ideas and artistic drives from a psychosis, a thought which was already framed in ancient philosophy. For example, in his dialogue about the tranquillity of the mind Lucius Annaeus Seneca described that extraordinary results can only be achieved by a genius who is bound to a mental disorder in order to become creatively active by emphasising that ’no great genius has ever been without a touch of insanity’.7 Within this context mental impairment and borderline experiences were seen as positive factors for the emergence of

1 Wilfried Niels Arnold, Vincent van Gogh: Chemicals, Crises and Creativity (Boston / Basel / Berlin: Springer, 1992), pp. 13 – 14.; Ulrich Tadday, ’Vorwort’, in Ulrich Tadday (ed.), Schumann Handbuch (Stuttgart: Bärenreiter, 2006), pp. IX – X, p. IX. 2 Jeffrey M. Paine, ’Rainer Maria Rilke: The Evolution of a Poet’, The Wilson Quarterly 10:2 (1986), pp. 148 – 162, p. 148. 3 Hartmut Kraft, Grenzgänger zwischen Kunst und Psychiatrie (Cologne: Deutscher Ärzte-Verlag, 1998), p. 167. 4 Erik Frederick Jensen, Schumann, 2nd edition (Oxford: University Press, 2012), p. 311.; Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (Evanston / Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1996), p. 307. 5 Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Angels, 2nd edition (New York: Visionary Living, 2004), p. 220. 6 Andrew Robinson, Genius: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: University Press, 2011), p. 64. 7 Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Minor Dialogs Together with the Dialog “On Clemency“, ed. and transl. by Aubrey Stewart, London: George Bell and Sons, 1900, digitally available under: [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Of_Peace_of_Mind, accessed 20/07/2019].

4 creative processes, so madness in small doses, 8 the so-called amiable insanity, 9 was appreciated. Nevertheless, as soon as this temporary tendency to madness changed into a continuous disorder affecting both the artist and his milieu dramatically, insane behaviour lost its positive connotation and was seen as a sign of abnormity. The works produced by artists suffering from these kinds of illnesses were not considered as artworks anymore, as they did not match with the classic concept of beauty established in ancient Greece. As they were at best exhibited in cabinets of curiosities, their creators lost their status as fully recognised artists and were stigmatised as misfits by the society they lived in.10 This discussion about the small line between positive and negative or rather productive and destructive insanity which was led since antiquity experienced a first peak in the romantic era where the concept of the mad genius was common sense in scientific circles.11 The list of 19th-century artists mentioned at the beginning of this introduction has shown that extraordinary talent and the idea of the mad genius were present in every type of art in the romantic era. However, the exploration of the connections between insanity and creativity originates in art historical circles and focused on the artist as a person. Therefore, the topics art in psychiatries and the lifestyles of artists within asylums were part of an ongoing dialogue between art historians, psychiatrists and other medics since the 1800s. After the romantic painters had discovered the asylum as a new subject, the writers of the period reflected on the status of mental disorders for creative acts. They saw both the behaviour and the works of ’mad’ artists as natural expressions of emotions and thoughts which are unrestricted by boundaries or external influences12 but also not controllable by the artist himself.13 These ideas culminated in the debates of the first half of the 20th century under the influence of avant-garde art and the psychiatric renewal approaches around 1900. As treatment of and dealing with patients in closed institutions were criticised in a so-called anti-psychiatry movement, the psychiatry as a living and working space attracted more attention in socio- critical circles and debatting clubs.14 Besides that, due to the dropping of academic demands regarding a naturalistic depiction of subjects and an opening of the arts for alternative topics

8 Rainer Strobl, ’Wahn - Welt - Bild’, in Ingfried Brugger, Peter Gorsen, Klaus Albrecht Schröder (eds.), Kunst & Wahn, Exhib. Cat. Kunstforum Wien 1997 (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), pp. 266 – 269, p. 266. 9 Frederick Burwick, ’The Grotesque: Illusion vs. Delusion’, in Frederick Burwick, Walter Pape (eds.), Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches (Berlin / New York: De Gruyter, 1990), pp. 122 – 137, p. 126. 10 Kraft, Grenzgänger, pp. 29 / 48. 11 Robinson, Genius, p. 56. 12 John MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (Princeton: University Press, 1989), pp. 67 – 68. 13 Bettina Gockel, Die Pathologisierung des Künstlers: Künstlerlegenden der Moderne (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), p. 22 14 Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach, ’Eine „antipsychiatrische Bewegung“ um die Jahrhundertwende’, in Martin Dinges (ed.), Medizinkritische Bewegungen im Deutschen Reich (ca. 1870 - ca. 1933) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1996) (Medizin, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Beiheft 9), pp. 127 – 160, p. 127. 5 and materials from the 1910s onwards15 the traditional groups of artists expanded. New agents of all ranks, classes, economic, cultural and social backgrounds became the focus of attention. Art and its significance for the society was questioned and broadly discussed in public.16 The debate about the pathologisation of the artist was integrated in this field of discourse turning on the question whether ingenuity can cause physical and mental deterioration and illnesses or whether psychosises are conditional for the emergence of extraordinary creativity, accomplishments and the birth of the genius. While the psychiatries of the 19th century did not represent places of an institutionally supported art production because the mad artist was viewed as being controlled by his illness, the works of the insane genius of the 20th century were interpreted in more than one way. Some psychiatrists viewed the artist living in a psychiatry as a disciplined worker being not only a part of but also a role model within the society, 17 examined their works and valued them as diagnostic aids since the 1900s. In contrast, the Nazi physicians and scientists labelled the works of mentally affected people as degenerate art, while the thinkers and theorisers of the post-war era fought for the recognition of these products as full-value artworks. 18 Especially through the writings of the French painter, sculptor and performance artist Jean Dubuffet and his concept of the Art Brut, a raw, natural and untraditional form of art produced by laics and non-professionals, the psychiatry was considered and analysed as a new place of art production and merchandising.19 This transformation process occuring around 1900 raises issues concerning the organisation and purview of art production in psychiatries, possibilities of fruition and intentions of artists living and working in these gathering places as well as the significance and perception of their products from the outside. How can these questions be answered in concrete case examples of both professional and non-professional artists living in psychiatries in the 19th and 20th century such as Blalla W. Hallmann, Louis Soutter or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner?

1.2 State of Research: Art and Artists in Psychiatries - An Approach The relations between art and madness and the significance of artistry in psychiatries have been topics of scientific research within medical and psychiatric societies since the

15 Dietrich Scheunemann, ’On Photography an Painting: Prolegomena to a New Theory of the Avant-Garde’, in Dietrich Scheunemann (ed.), European Avantgarde - New Perspectives: Avantgarde, Avantgardekritik, Avantgardeforschung (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 15 – 48, pp. 19 – 21 / 23 – 24. 16 Jean-Louis Ferrier, Primitive des 20. Jahrhunderts: Art Brut und spontane Kunst der Geisteskranken, transl. by Inge Hanneforth (Paris: Terrail, 1998), pp. 12 / 14. 17 Gockel, Pathologisierung, pp. 22 – 23. 18 Angela Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie: Verklärt, verfolgt, vermarktet (Vienna: LIT-Verlag, 2012) (grazer edition 12), pp. 42 / 48 / 56. 19 Angelica Bäumer, ’Kunst von Innen: Von der Kraft des Unbewussten’, in Angelica Bäumer (ed.), Kunst von Innen (Vienna: Holzhausen, 2007), pp. 8 – 14, p. 11. 6 romanticists’ debate about the concept of the (mad) genius in the first half of the 19th century. As the amount of written ego-documents is low for both professional artists living in psychiatries and for mentally ill people who became first artistically active within these facilities after having diverging jobs before, important primary sources about their intentions are the artworks themselves. In contrast, the amount of published literature about artists living in psychiatries and especially about schizophrenia, depression and their influence on artworks is tremendously big.20 Therefore, a complete overview of the literature written about the topic area art and psychiatries, the connex of madness and creativity or the concept of the genius is not the aim of this insight into the state of research. It rather concentrates on general lines of development within the history of the researching about art in psychiatries and lays the focus on Austria, Germany and Switzerland. It herein discusses some main publications used in this master thesis regarding the lives of artists and art production in mental health facilities and samples of the literature written about the case examples this thesis draws on. A first scientific analysis of the lives and daily routine of mentally affected patients within psychiatries started in England in the first half of the 19th century for legal and diagnostic reasons, where medics tried to examine the psychiatry as a habitat. In 1810 John Haslam, who worked in London’s Bethlem hospital,21 wrote the essay ’Illustrations of Madness’22 about the life and illness of James Tilly Matthews in order to justify the patient’s forced internment against his own and his family’s will. In context with a description of Matthews’ hallucinations, which led to conversations with fictional characters and self-harm, Haslam mentioned that the patient was convinced that he was being tortured by a group of people operating on a machine.23 Although Haslam did not concentrate on the graphics Matthews produced during this hallucinations, he integrated an extensive and detailed description of the copper engravings the patient fabricated in order to depict the machine. He hereby laid the foundations for the examination of artworks emerging within psychiatric environments in Central Europe, as the engraving was later published in German medical magazines.24 Proceeding from that, the first publications concerning artworks of psychiatric patients were not written with the intention to examine the art piece, its style and materials itself. The authors rather used graphics, paintings or etchings to prove the patient’s insanity or to make diagnosises. Another example for this tradition is the French lawyer Auguste Ambroise

20 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 29. 21 Ibid., p. 48. 22 John Haslam, Illustrations of Madness: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity and a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinion (London: G. Hayden for Rivingtons, 1810). 23 Haslam, Illustrations of Madness, pp. 1 – 2 / 19 – 20. 24 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 49. 7 Tardieu’s writing ’Ètude Médico-Légale sur la Folie’25 published in 1872 and re-edited in 1880. In his book Tardieu recommended the use of written and pictorial documents of mentally affected people in trials in order to declare their legal reproach and to answer the question if they can be punished by the law for their actions. He set up the hypothesis that the paintings and drawings produced by mentally affected people differ from the artworks created by mentally healthy persons. Therefore, he was the first author who related the works of continuously mentally ill patients to the paintings or graphics of famous visual artists who suffered from temporary illnesses such as depression and melancholy. But in contrast to Italian psychiatrists of the same time period he did not consider the works of mentally ill patients as artworks and unlike the paintings of a melancholic artist he saw no trace of creativity within them, as he focused on the insane and ill element within the depictions.26 While the later third of the 19th century was shaped by the debate about the mad genius after the Italian forensic doctor and psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso published the monography ’Genio e follia’27 in 1864, the researchers of the first decades of the 20th century focused on the diagnostic aspects within their study of the artworks produced in psychiatries and by mentally affected individuals. Instead of the French and English psychiatrists, who have been the leading figures in the research about the lives of mentally ill patients until the turn-of-the- century, German medics and art historians mainly contributed to the exploration of the topic area art in psychiatries at the beginning of the 20th century. One of these research scientists was the German psychiatrist Fritz Mohr who gave a talk about the diagnostic use of the illustrations created by ’mad’ artists at the conference of the Psychiatric Society of the Rhine Province in 1906 by using case examples of psychotic art. The talk was published in the Journal for Psychology and Neurology28 in the same year. With regard to children’s drawings Mohr highlighted that the artworks produced by mentally ill people can be used as objective documents in order to define the illness the patient suffers from. Therfore, he categorised the drawings in subgroups and developed a methodical systematisation to filter intentions and comprehend desires of expression within the artwork. As Mohr still spoke of primitive and mentally deficient drawings and characterised mentally affected artists as ’idiots’,29 he saw their creations as means to an end and did not recognise their artistic value.

25 Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, Étude Médico-Légale sur la Folie, 2nd edition (Paris: J. B. Balliére et fils, 1880). 26 Tardieu, Étude, pp. 99 – 100 / 106 – 107.; Michael Günter, ’Zu den kunsttheoretischen Grundlagen heutiger gestaltungstherapeutischer Praxis’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 56:2 (1993), pp. 278 – 288, p. 278. 27 Cesare Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn in ihren Beziehungen zum Gesetz, zur Kritik und zur Geschichte, transl. by A. Courth (Leipsic: Phillip Reclam jun., 1887). 28 Fritz Mohr, ’Über Zeichnungen von Geisteskranken und ihre diagnostische Verwertbarkeit’, Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie 8:3-4 (1906), pp. 99 – 140, p. 99. 29 Mohr, Zeichnungen von Geisteskranken, pp. 101 – 107 / 123. 8 This step within the history of the research about the significance of art in psychiatries happened in the 1920s, where German and Swiss psychiatrists focused on stylistics and artistic particularities of the artworks which originated in mental health facilities. Therefore, they set up own collections of pieces created by mentally affected people for scientific matters. Based on the research results summarised in the French medic Marcel Réja’s book ’L’art chez les fous’,30 who upgraded the works of mentally affected people as full value artworks in 1907,31 Walter Morgenthaler published the first biography about a mentally ill patient and his artistic capabilities in 1921. In his monography ’Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler’ 32 the Swiss psychiatrist reconstructed Adolf Wölfli’s life and illness, types, periodicity, materials, topics and stylistic peculiarities of his works and tried to evaluate them psychologically. In a second step he compared them with the pieces produced by other schizophrenic patients and artists as well as with the artworks created by healthy colleagues. He even related them to modern or avant-garde artists, as he viewed Wölfli as a full-value artist which is already indicated within the title of his monography. Nevertheless, Morgenthaler’s research, especially the comparison between modern and mentally ill artists, which he introduced into the research about art in psychiatries, offered the Nazi elites a basis for misusing the works of psychiatric patients for their exhibition on degenerate art. A similar significance for the study of art in context of psychiatries is occupied by the German art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, who practised at the Heidelberger Universitätsklinikum where he built up one of the most extensive collections of artworks created by mentally affected artists. After he has received works of psychiatric patients preserved in several clinics in the German-speaking world in order to investigate and present them to the public,33 Prinzhorn put his insights into writing in his monography ’Bildnerei der Geisteskranken’,34 which was published in 1922. Unlike Morgenthaler he did not only focus on the art of schizophrenics or psychiatric patients but embedded his monography in the humanistic and art historical debates of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. He did not only refer to Lombroso’s books and the pathologisation of the artist but also reconstructed the history of the collection in Heidelberg and discussed the methodical difficulties occurring in context with the reappraisal of the collection’s holdings. Before he analysed case examples

30 Marcel Réja, L’art chez les fous: Le dessin, la prose, la poesie (Paris: P. m., 2000, repr. of edition Paris 1907). 31 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 57. 32 Walter Morgenthaler, Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (Bern / Leipsic: E. Bircher, 1921) (Arbeiten zur angewandten Psychiatrie 1). 33 Inge Jadi, ’Vergangenes Gegenwärtig: Anmerkungen zur Prinzhorn-Sammlung’, in Ingfried Brugger, Peter Gorsen, Klaus Albrecht Schröder (eds.), Kunst & Wahn, Exhib. Cat. Kunstforum Wien 1997 (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), pp. 175 – 181, p. 176. 34 Hans Prinzhorn, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken: Ein Beitrag zur Psychologie und Psychopathologie der Gestaltung (Berlin: Springer, 1922). 9 and summarised characteristics and stylistics of artworks produced by mentally ill people with a focus on schizophrenic art, he attached a chapter about gestalt psychology where he examined instincts like the ludic drive or the sense of order that lead to the fabrication of these artpieces. Like Morgenthaler and some predecessors of the 19th century he compared the works preserved in the collection with children’s drawings, contemporary art and the artistic commodities created by so-called ’primitive civilisations’ living in Africa and Asia. With his statement that the creations of mentally ill patients are individual and creative productions whose stylistic particularities cannot be used to define and describe their illnesses a priori and should only be completely interpreted by using ego-documents of their originators,35 he broke fresh ground in the history of the reception of psychotic art. As the subject matter art and psychiatries as well as the mentally ill but productive artist was one of the main topics researched in context with raciology by Nazi medics and physicians, the literature of the 1930s and 1940s is ideologically charged and did not focus on the psychiatry as a room to live and work in. It rather instrumentalised and demonised the artworks produced within this context and their originators in order to spread a national socialist mindset about degeneration and the healthy racial corpus.36 Therefore, the writings of the 1930s and 1940s like Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s ’Kunst und Rasse’37 cannot be used to reconstruct intentions or aims of artworks created by mentally ill patients in the second third of the 20th century. This time period represents years of discontinuity within the history of research because Prinzhorn’s and Morgenthaler’s insights, which contributed to the valorisation of psychotic art, were neglected and nullified.38 Proceeding from French thinkers like Jean Dubuffet and their concepts aiming at the rehabilitation of the artworks produced by mentally affected patients in the post-war era, a new anti-ideological interest in the topic started in the 1950s. Based on former historical discourses, the first publications released after the Second World War like Irene Jakab’s ’Zeichnungen und Gemälde der Geisteskranken’,39 written in 1956, still concentrated on the diagnostic value of artworks created in psychiatries. Jakab firstly examined stylistics, contentual characteristics and materials of artworks produced by schizophrenic, manic or hallucinatory patients who suffered from alcoholism in order to explain the appearance and the process of their disease before she concentrated on the question of spontaneity and

35 Prinzhorn, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, pp. 291 – 292 / 294. 36 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, pp. 237 – 238. 37 Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kunst und Rasse (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns, 1928). 38 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, p. 237. 39 Irene Jakab, Zeichnungen und Gemälde der Geisteskranken: Ihre psychiatrische und künstlerische Analyse (Budapest: Verlag der ungarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1956). 10 periodicity within these artpieces and their diagnostic significance. In order to locate this type of art within modern artistic developments she then related the drawings and paintings to children’s drawings and the artistic goods made by archaic or the so-called ’ethnographically primitive’ cultures. This also underlines the impact of Morgenthaler’s and Prinzhorn’s research for the history of research in the whole 20th century, as they both introduced these comparisons into the history of art appreciation within psychiatries. But unlike Prinzhorn Jakab did not see extraordinary artistic talent within the creations of mentally ill patients, as the symptoms of their disease would cause an unnaturalistic and uncontrolled depiction of the reality and therefore would be mentally unaccessable for healthy observers. In addition, the patients’ sudden interest in artistry would not be caused by talent but rather by boredom and lack of possibilities to express their thoughts and feelings through writing or talking. Therefore, Jakab did not view the artworks of mentally affected patients as individual creations but rather as meaningless repetitions of other mentally ill patients’ works.40 In contrast, the 1960s and 1970s were shaped by psychiatrists’ efforts to develop catalogues with stylistic criteria for the formal description of psychotic artworks41 which should not be used to define or categorise the illness itself but only to approach the artwork without interpreting it. They hereby referred to O.F.P. Maran’s essay ’Ein Urteil von Künstlern und Laien über moderne Malerei ohne Rücksicht auf den psychischen Zustand des Malers’,42 published in 1970. Maran found out that distinct stylistic features appearing in an artistic product cannot be absolutely and unconditionally related to a mental illness or the creator as a persona,43 so a distinction between ’healthy’ and ’psychotic’ art becomes irrelevant. Based on that, the paintings and drawings created by mentally ill artists were used more and more often from the 1970s onwards in the German-speaking world to examine the function of art as a form of therapy. Researchers then related these results to investigations about lives and daily routines of psychiatric patients instead of focusing on the artwork as a diagnostic aid. Especially the connex of art and therapy has been broadly discussed in English-language countries since the 1940s, so a bibliography on this topic made in 1974 already listed 1175

40 Jakab, Zeichnungen und Gemälde, pp. 161 / 163. 41 One of these catalogues compiled to describe the works of mentally ill artists was listed in the DDR psychiatrist Helmut Rennert’s monography ’Die Merkmale schizophrener Bildnerei’, who divided his critical art appreciations into two sections and filtered 31 formal and 54 contentual criteria in order to investigate the artworks of schizophrenic patients. As his register is based on the works of the Prinzhorn collection and the psychiatric developments of the 1930s with a restricted supply of therapeutic methods and medication, his criteria do not match with the stylistic particularities of many psychotic artworks today. They still are an often used basis for further analysis though according to Hartmut Kraft. For further information have a look at: Kraft, Grenzgänger, pp. 69 – 70. and Helmut Rennert, Die Merkmale schizophrener Bildnerei (Jena: Fischer, 1962). 42 O. F. P. Maran, ’Ein Urteil von Künstlern und Laien über moderne Malerei ohne Rücksicht auf den psychischen Zustand des Malers’, Confinia Psychiatrica 13 (1970), pp. 145 – 155. 43 Maran, Moderne Malerei, p. m., cited after: Kraft, Grenzgänger, pp. 70. 11 publications.44 One representative of this school of thought in German speaking countries was the Austrian psychiatrist Leo Navratil, who ran the Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Gugging and established the so-called Haus der Künstler where he supported the patients in becoming artistically active, exhibiting and selling their works. In order to expand the publicity of the patients and their creations Navratil did not only organise exhibitions in the Gallery nächst St. Stephan in Vienna and touring exhibitions in Switzerland, Austria and Germany where his patients’ artworks were presented to an international audience.45 He also published articles and books informing about the Haus der Künstler and their residents. One of these was written in 1983 on the occasion of the touring exhibition46 and introduced the reader to the concept of this mental health facility by presenting biographies, illnesses and artworks of some of its patients and by contextualising their products with the theory of Art Brut and other concepts about the connections between psychosises and visual art. Drawing on Prinzhorn’s and Morgenthaler’s research, Navratil chose a biographical way to approach psychotic art and questioned its use as a form of therapy as well as its significance for the society by discussing questions of promoting, exhibiting and selling these artworks. Proceeding from Navratil’s publications, the section of literature on Art Brut with a focus on its manifestation in Austria47 and art as a type of therapy shaped the research on the topic area art in psychiatries for the last 30 years. In their collection of essays called ’Von Chaos und Ordnung der Seele: Ein interdisziplinärer Dialog über Psychiatrie und moderne Kunst’,48 published in 1990, Peter Gorsen, Otto Benkert and their colleagues examined the connections between the artworks of mentally ill patients and the products of the avant-garde artists by commenting on the engagement of 20th-century artists like Klee, Kandinsky or Schönberg with psychotic art. In the light of the transformation process within the conceptual history of the term art, which was extended in the 20th century in respect of the completeness and the

44 Linda Gantt, Mariy Strauss Schmal, Art Therapy: A Bibliography - January 1940 - June 1973 (Rockville/Maryland: ERIC, 1974). 45 Johann Feilacher, ’Kunst aus Gugging: Von 1970 bis zur Gegenwart’, in Johann Feilacher, Nina Ansperger (eds.), gehirn gefühl.!. kunst aus gugging von 1970 bis zur gegenwart (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 2018), pp. 14 – 27, pp. 15 – 18. 46 Leo Navratil (ed.), Die Künstler aus Gugging, Exhib. Cat. Museum Moderner Kunst Wien, Salzburger Landessammlung Rupertinum, Kunstamt Wedding Berlin, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz, Wolfgang-Gurlitt-Museum, Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau, 2nd edition (Vienna: Medusa-Verlag, 1983). 47 One of the most recent collections of essays on Art Brut in Austria was edited in 2007 under the title ’Kunst von Innen’ by Angelica Bäumer. Together with 24 colleages coming from different disciplines with academic or artistic backgrounds she reconstructed the history of the Art Brut movement in and outside Austria and its connections to modern art. She also examined the importance of art therapy by dedicating a huge part of the catalogue to studios and workshops which promote mentally or physically affected people in becoming artistically active and selling their works as well as to museums which focus on exhibiting Art brut creations. For further information have a look at: Angelica Bäumer (ed.), Kunst von Innen (Vienna: Holzhausen, 2007). 48 Otto Benkert, Peter Gorsen (eds.), Von Chaos und Ordnung der Seele: Ein interdisziplinärer Dialog über Psychiatrie und moderne Kunst (Berlin-Heidelberg: Springer, 1990). 12 place of an artwork for the construction of identity, they asked about predecessors of psychotic art and ways to interpret the increased interest in this topic around 1900. While Hartmut Kraft offered a way of explanation for the artworks by describing psychoanalytical interpretive models in his essay ’Die Reise der Bilder durch den Kopf: Psychoanalytische Perspektiven zum Thema „Kunst und Psychiatrie“’,49 Otto Benkert studied the function of art as a form of therapy within his essay ’Therapeutische Dimensionen der Kunst’.50 Instead of focusing only on the perception of psychotic art on modern artists and the similarities of both groups within the creative process as it was already common in the 1920s, Benkert and his colleagues questioned role models and predecessors from the other way round. They also examined the influence of modern art on mentally ill patients by distinguishing depressed, schizophrenic and mentally healthy test persons. They hereby revealed new perspectives on the links between psychiatry and art, as they set up the hypothesis that a constant engagement of a mentally ill patient with modern art and conversations with a psychiatrist about these experiences afterwards could allow new insights into the disease and treatment process. One of the standard works reflecting on the interrelations of psychiatry and art is Hartmut Kraft’s monography ’Grenzgänger zwischen Kunst und Psychiatrie’, 51 published in 1998. Instead of focusing only on the interpretation of psychotic art he briefly dicussed the history of the psychiatry as an institution and dedicated an extensive chapter to the depiction of the history of research reflecting on the status of psychotic art in history. Following Navratil, he tried to analyse 20th-century artworks as borderline experiences by using a biographical, stylistic and iconographical approach in the second part of his book. Instead of only concentrating on schizophrenic and mentally ill patients he also looked at the artworks created by artists of the avant-garde movements and New Objectivity, children, mentally handicapped people, people who suffered from a congenital or acquired mental illness as well as elder patients and hereby widened the group of patients and the spectrum of examination. Unlike former researchers Kraft did not only aim at the full valorisation of the artwork. He also tried to broaden the reception of mental illnesses as creative mechanisms by pointing out that psychosises can function as means of stylistic change, innovation and renewal approaches within the oeuvres of professional artists who fell sick with a mental disease. Also in the first two decades of the 20th century the research on the discourse field art in

49 Hartmut Kraft, Die Reise der Bilder durch den Kopf. Psychoanalytische Perspektiven zum Thema „Kunst und Psychiatrie“, in Otto Benkert, Peter Gorsen (eds.), Von Chaos und Ordnung der Seele: Ein interdisziplinärer Dialog über Psychiatrie und moderne Kunst (Berlin-Heidelberg: Springer, 1990), pp. 129 – 148. 50 Otto Benkert, ’Therapeutische Dimensionen der Kunst’, in Otto Benkert, Peter Gorsen (eds.), Von Chaos und Ordnung der Seele: Ein interdisziplinärer Dialog über Psychiatrie und moderne Kunst (Berlin-Heidelberg: Springer, 1990), pp. 149 – 164. 51 Kraft, Grenzgänger, 1998. 13 psychiatries and the mentally affected artist did not tear off, as many master thesises, diploma projects and dissertations located within this topic area were published in the German- speaking world. One example is Angela Fink’s monography ’Kunst in der Psychiatrie: Verklärt – Verfolgt – Vermarktet’,52 which was released in 2012 and is based on her diploma project. After art historical reflections on the characteristics of an artwork, its alteration under the influence of psychosises and their treatment through therapy Fink analysed the history of the reception of psychotic art within the sociopolitical discourses on the mad artist in the 19th and 20th century. By dividing her examination into three parts focusing on the idealisation of ’mad’ art within the 19th century, its persecution in the Third Reich and its acceptance and appreciation after the Second World War Fink enabled the reader to gain insights into the way of living and being artistically active in psychiatries in the last 200 years. Like Kraft the author dedicated a huge part of her book to the history of research but did not content herself with making a historical review. Fink also tried to analyse lines of reasoning within the legitimation of the importance and value of psychotic art by discussing characteristics which were attributed to the artworks created by mentally ill people such as their emotionality and authenticity or by examining the relationship between psychotic and professional ’healthy’ art. By analysing myths about and marketing strategies for the promotion of psychotic art she pointed out that its reception has always been embedded in ideas of cultural criticism. She hereby posed questions about the purview of art produced in psychiatries. In order to contextualise the reception of this type of art within sociological debates the author examined its position as a means of identity for the concerned patients and reflected on artistry as an escape attempt within mental health facilities by using theories of Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor about identity and resistance in modern environments. Besides general literature on the lives of artists in psychiatries and the significance, perception and reception of the artworks created in these facilities there is a rather big amount of articles and monographies published about case examples of ’mad’ visual artists living and working in these institutions. One of the most popular, best investigated artists living in psychiatries is the Swiss schizophrenic Adolf Wölfli, whose life, illness and creations were covered in more than 100 essays and books since the 1920s according to data given by the Adolf Wölfli foundation.53 These shall be substitutionally represented by the first curator of the foundation Elka Spoerri’s series of publications like the exhibition catalogue ’Adolf Wölfli’,54 released in

52 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, 2012. 53 Daniel Baumann, ’Adolf Wölfli: Bibliography’, Adolf Wölfli Foundation, [http://adolfwoelfli.ch/index.php?c=e&level=9&sublevel=3, accessed: 03/08/2019]. 54 Elka Spoerri, Alfred Bader (eds.), Adolf Wölfli, Exhib. Cat. Kunstmuseum Bern 1976, 2nd edition (Bern: Verlag des Kunstmuseums, 1976). 14 1976. Herein, she and her colleagues analysed the creative process Wölfli experienced during his stay in the clinic Waldau in Switzerland. In their essays the authors did not only focus on the visual artworks Wölfli produced but also analysed his creative process as a whole. Therefore, they also integrated his compositions, poems as well as other prosa he has written and tried to pursue the possible influence of his illness on stylistics, materials and topics within these genres of artistic production. They then concentrated on Wölfli’s depiction and reflection of his surroundings and the architecture of the clinic within his artworks and hereby tried to answer the question to which extent Wölfli was aware of his illness and stay within a mental health facility. While the connection between Wölfli’s art and disease, especially the schizophrenic features within his creations, as well as his reception by 20th-century artists have been broadly discussed, the question of how and to which extent he used art as a form of therapy and treatment has not been adressed in Spoerri’s publications. It represents one of the ongoing research themes within the study of Wölfli’s life, illness and artworks. Besides patients who only became artistically active within the psychiatry but were occupied in different sectors before their illness forced them to seek treatment, professional artists, their mental health and possible healing within sanatoria or private mental health facilities has been an ongoing topic of research based on ideas about the pathologisation of the artist going back to the 19th century. Within this context more detailed studies were conducted about the representatives of the avant-garde, especially expressionism, who did not only witness political, social and economic revolutions but also suffered from severe depressions due to wartime experiences, racial or political discrimination. One of these artists was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a member of the artist group Die Brücke, who spent two years in sanatoria after serving as an artillery driver in the First World War. In order to convalesce from alcohol and drug addiction he also was in constant medical supervision for the rest of his life.55 Even though Kirchner’s life has been the subject of many monographies and part of all studies about German expressionism since the 1940s, his illness and its influence on his artworks have not been the sole research topics within many publications. Besides Albert Schoop’s study about Kirchner’s stay in sanatoria in Thurgau, 56 written in 1992, Bettina Gockel dedicated Kirchner and his mental health a chapter in her monography ’Die Pathologisierung des Künstlers: Künstlerlegenden der Moderne’,57 published in 2010. Based

55 Jeffrey K. Aronson, Manoj Ramachandran, ’The diagnosis of art: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s ’nervous breakdown’’, JRSM: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 103:3 (2010), pp. 112 – 113, p. 112, digitally available under: [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1258/jrsm.2010.10k008, accessed: 04/08/2019]. 56 Albert Schoop, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner im Thurgau: Die 10 Monate in Kreuzlingen 1917-1918 (Bern: Kornfeld, 1992). 57 Gockel, Pathologisierung, 2010. 15 on her same-titled habilitation dissertation she herein examined the position of the mentally ill artist within the sociohistorical debates of the 19th and 20th century by discussing the concept of the genius, the theories about the persona of the artist also within psychoanalytical debates about sex and creativity and laid one focus on schizophrenic artists. She then tried to reenact these insights on three case examples by examining the lives and illnesses of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Aby Warburg and Paul Klee. In her chapter about Kirchner Gockel investigated to which extent the intellectual and social millieu of the sanatories Kirchner lived in and his contact with the psychiatrist Binswanger influenced the artist’s vision of himself and his life as an autonomous individual as well as his ideas about the functions and aims of art. Instead of only explaining stylistics and motifs and connecting them with his illness she tried to relate his symptoms and creations to his visions of an ideal lifestyle and the political limits that hindered him from realising them. By referring to contemporary concepts about the position of the (mad) artist within the society with a focus on the ideas of his psychiatrist Binswanger she hereby wanted to elucidate the circumstances that led to Kirchner’s suicide in 1938. While Kirchner’s life and work was never only examined from the point of view of his psychosises, the publications about the German Art Brut representative Friedrich Schröder- Sonnenstern which were released until the early 2000’s always played with the interrelation of art and mental illnesses. This is represented by Alfred Bader’s monography ’Geistes- kranker oder Künstler?: Der Fall Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern’,58 written in 1971. Herein Bader diagnosed the illness of Schröder-Sonnenstern for the first time, analysed his works in relation with symptoms of schizophrenia and discussed the use of art as therapy within his oeuvre. He hereby remarked that Friedrich found a way to deal with his illness in his later life and could conduct some kind of self-healing. Therefore, according to Bader only the artworks showed signs of schizophrenic behaviour like ornamental stereotypes and disproportions, as Schröder-Sonnenstern would have reminded himself of the schizophrenic outbursts he experienced during his stay in the clinics while he was painting. Bader hereby attributed Schröder-Sonnenstern’s tendency to not follow academic or traditional rules in painting to his ability of reconnecting with his former state of mind and mental health condition.59 The research about Schröder-Sonnenstern continued until the 2000s, as the artist takes on as an important role within the Art Brut movement as Adolf Wölfli according to Peter Gorsen.60

58 Alfred Bader, Geisteskranker oder Künstler?: Der Fall Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (Bern-Stuttgart- Vienna: Huber, 1971). 59 Bader, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, pp. 98 – 99. 60 Peter Gorsen, ’Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, 1892-1982: Gefangen zwischen Welterlösung und gesellschaftlicher Ausgrenzung’, in Ingfried Brugger, Peter Gorsen, Klaus Albrecht Schröder (eds.), Kunst & Wahn, Exhib. Cat. Kunstforum Wien 1997 (Cologne : DuMont, 1997), pp. 361 – 369, p. 361. 16 Via comparisons between Wölfli and Schröder-Sonnenstern Gorsen tried to carry Bader’s investigations forward and agreed with his idea that Schröder-Sonnenstern used art as a form of therapy and means of expression while he was living in psychiatric clinics in the 1920s and 1930s. Nevertheless, he disagreed with Bader’s opinion that the artworks created in the 1960s and 1970s would show signs of schizophrenic manner and pointed out that he just wanted to confront traditional stereotypes and role patterns through unorthodox ways of creating instead. He hereby even rejected Schröder-Sonnenstern’s belonging to the Art Brut movement and raised questions about stylistic change and the importance of mental illnesses within creative processes.61 One of the more seldom considered representatives of the Art Brut movement is the German painter Blalla W. Hallmann, who suffered from schizophrenia after a stay in the United States and spent two years in German psychiatries after his return. 62 Most of the publications released about Hallmann were written by his friend, the psychiatrist Hartmut Kraft, who did not only provide an oeuvre catalogue63 in 2014 but also discussed Hallmann’s life and works in his monography ’Grenzgänger zwischen Kunst und Psychiatrie’. After biographical information and a short discussion of artworks created before Hallmann’s stay in America Kraft focused on the discription of the artist’s illness, its influence on his art and the question of stylistic change by analysing case examples of paintings and by using interviews Kraft conducted with the friend. Corresponding with his overall statement that psychosises should not only be considered as destructive mechanisms, he dicussed Blalla W. Hallmann’s life and works as a prime example for his idea of mental illnesses as positive transformative crises. He hereby also tried to offer new perspectives considering Hallmann’s topics and themes as well as new explanation attempts for socio-critical art in the second half of the 20th century. While the lifes and works of Wölfli, Kirchner, Hallmann and Schröder-Sonnenstern were mainly discussed by German and Swiss authors, the Swiss musician and painter Louis Soutter, whose life and creations have been permanently and extensively examined since the 1950s, was also a subject of French psychiatrists and researchers. One of these is the Art Brut specialist Michel Thévoz, who published a monography about the Swiss artist in 1990,64 in which he portrayed Soutter’s stages of life and works with regard to his autistic features and melancholy. He herein laid a focus on the drawings and paintings which were created during

61 Gorsen, Welterlösung und gesellschaftliche Ausgrenzung, p. 368. 62 Kraft, Grenzgänger, pp. 235 / 237 – 239. 63 Hartmut Kraft (ed.), Ecce Blalla!: Abstürze und Höhenflüge - Leben und Werk von Blalla W. Hallmann (1941 – 1997), Exhib. Cat. Museum für Sepulkralkultur Kassel, Krankenhaus-Museum Bremen, LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn, Sammlung Prinzhorn Heidelberg 2013/14 (Cologne: Salon, 2013). 64 Michel Thévoz, Louis Soutter (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1990) (Collection Poche Suisse 90). 17 his stay within a care home for elder mentally affected people and set up the hypothesis that the referral to this institution by his family and his association of the institution with rejection and betrayal has caused a ’choc révélateur’65 that led to the emergence of innovative topics and stylistic characteristics within Soutter’s oeuvre. Compared with Kraft’s ideas of psychosises as transformative crises Thévoz’ publication shows a process of rethinking within the reception of psychotic art at the end of the 20th century, as the works of mentally affected people and psychiatric patients were not only examined in concern of the way they reveal signs of a mental illness anymore. They were rather used as a form of interpreting the life artists led in these facilities and the intentions they could still express via the medium of art. The history of the reception and examination of psychotic art in Austria provides a different picture compared to the German and Swiss examples, as Austrian psychiatrists and art historians focused on the Art Brut movement and on the Haus der Künstler in Gugging and its residents in their research. One of these artists was the Viennese drawer Oswald Tschirtner, who is numbered among the most influential representatives of the Gugging artists next to August Walla and Johann Hauser and is mainly known for his drawings of the head-footers.66 Nevertheless, there has not been released one single publication dedicated exclusively to Tschirtner, so information about his life and works has to be filtered from articles and essays within collections about the Haus der Künstler or Art Brut in Austria. In her essay67 on Tschirtner Nina Ansperger examined stylistic characteristics, periodicity and materials of Oswald’s drawings and offered an insight into his biography. A deeper connex of topics or features of his works and his illness has not been thematised. A detailed statement on Tschirtner’s position within Austrian contemporary art has not been given as well by Ansperger and her colleagues. Her investigations were being restricted to a stylistic level, a process which is not uncommon for the examination of other Art Brut artists in Austria too.

1.3 Questions and Structure As this insight into the state of research has shown, the literature published about artists living and working in psychiatries either focused on the lives and works of one single representative such as Adolf Wölfli, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or Louis Soutter, looked at artist groups belonging together such as the Gugging artists but hereby concentrated on formal characteristics and stylistics or reflected on the history of reception without limiting the object

65 Thévoz, Soutter, p. 44. 66 Nina Ansperger, ’Oswald Tschirtner’, in Johann Feilacher, Nina Ansperger (eds.), gehirn gefühl.!. kunst aus gugging von 1970 bis zur gegenwart (Salzburg. Residenz Verlag, 2018), pp. 296 – 317, p. 297. 67 Ansperger, Tschirtner, 2018. 18 of study to an area or using a geographical focus. Besides that, the main questions in the history of the research conducted on psychotic art and artistry within psychiatric environments focused on the use of the artwork as a diagnostic aid, the pathologisation of artists in order to explain uncommon characteristics within their oeuvre or the use of artistry as a form of therapy also in comparison to other types of modern art. This master thesis tries to offer a wider perspective on the topic area art in mental health facilities by localising the examinations within one language area and by adopting a comparative view in the investigation of the case examples. It asks about the role of German, Swiss and Austrian psychiatries as places to live and work for mentally ill artists in the 19th and 20th century and focuses on the aspect of individual fruition via art. In doing so, this thesis does not only want to provide insights into the creative works emerging within psychiatric environments from an art-historical point of view but also concentrates on the question of how the psychiatry as a habitat shaped the lives of artistically active mentally ill patients. Within this context it works with the finding that the institution has experienced a process of transformation around 1900 through the change within the perception and reception of psychotic art and revolutionary movements on the dealing with and treatment of patients. This influenced the timespan chosen within this research. Although it gives an overview of the changes of the living conditions in psychiatries from the 19th to the 20th century by examining selected artworks of six artists and the degree of autonomy which was involved in their production, it focuses on the 20th century where art-historical and humanistic movements influenced the psychiatry and its residents most. Therefore, this paper is divided into two content-related parts which focus on lives and works of artists in psychiatries and three theoretical chapters which shall allow the linking of the thesis and the results of the content- related chapters to historical and social discourses. As an introduction which shall contextualise the following content-related parts the thesis examines the status and the significance of psychiatries as places to work and live for mentally ill artists in the 1800s and early 1900s. It looks at the reasons and ways the patients started to get artistically active and asks which materials they used and which topics they chose before it focuses on the first content-related chapter. This is dedicated to the patients who became artistically active in the psychiatry for the first time after having worked in different sectors and who might never have painted, sculpted or drawn before. It asks which reasons and motivations led to the emergence of a creative drive within these people and which needs they hereby pleased. In order to contextualise the results and to integrate them in the general examination of artistry in psychiatries it then questions whether and to which

19 extent the patients viewed art and designing as a way to heal and treat their psychosises and to experience some kind of therapy. In contrast, the second content-related chapter focuses on professional artists who have already been working within the artistic sector before they seeked treatment in mental health facilities for the purpose of offering comparative in-depth looks on the different perspectives of the topic art in psychiatries. The thesis herein asks how and to which extent the ambience of the psychiatry and the meanings inscribed in it impacted the artist, in other words to which extent the treatment and new living environment changed working habits and gave rise to new motifs, techniques or topics within the concerned artist’s oeuvre. Proceeding from that, the second content-related chapter asks if psychosises can cause stylistic change and function as mechanisms of creative renewal and regeneration. Both chapters are linked by some theoretical introductions into the connex of ingenuity and madness, which are rudimentarily looked at from the ancient era to the 20th century as well as into the attempts to upgrade psychotic art in the last 70 years. This historical part, whose focus lies on the investigation period of the study, is prepended before the contentual examinations and therefore represents chapter one and two of this thesis. The first chapter which focuses on the connex of creativity and illnesses locates the discussion about psychotic art within the historical debates about the concept of the genius, asks about the conditions which are necessary for its existence, its main character traits and tries to associate these ideas with the imaginations on the pathologisation of the artist. In the second theoretical part the aesthetic evaluation and the significance of art produced in psychiatries is in the focus of the examination with one art-historical and one sociological theory being presented. They serve as a basis in order to find out whether the works created by psychiatric patients can be seen as full-value artworks and if, how and to which extent the artwork contributes to giving the patient some form of autonomy within a restricted and other-directed environment. First of all, Jean Dubuffet’s concept of Art Brut is commented on in the second chapter of the thesis and represents the art-historical theory within this historical discourse. In a second step his concept shall be examined in practice by putting a special emphasis on three collections of mad art which could be preserved in the countries that were chosen as investigation areas within this paper. In place of an Austrian collection and institution the Haus der Künstler in Gugging as part of the Niederösterreichische Landesnervenklinik is discussed in combination with Leo Navratil’s ideas about psychotic art and art therapy by consulting his main publications. As a German example the Prinzhorn collection at the Universitätsklinikum in Heidelberg shall be looked at, while the collection Dammann, which was built up by the couple Karin and Gerhard Dammann in the 1990s, is highlighted as a Swiss sample of a

20 collection of Outsider Art with a special focus on the works of psychiatric patients.68 Following up these art-historical research, one sociological theory, the concept of total institutions by Erving Goffman, is presented in order to find out which role art and creative productioning can play within a patient’s life by asking if, how and to which extent creating artworks can be used as a medium to express self-determination and autonomy within the daily routine of psychiatries, which is restricted by therapies and medical treatment. At that point the thesis works with the hypothesis that art is an option for the patients to free themselves from restraints and orders within mental health facilities, as the patients can choose materials, topics and in many cases the timeframe in which they get artistically active without being controlled by clinical stuff on a massive level. With these questions the master thesis tries to distance itself from examinations of psychotic art which are bound to a stylistic or formal description and from pathologic studies focusing on explaining the artworks only by discussing the mental illness the creator suffers from. By using six case examples it does not intend to offer a complete overview of the topic area art in psychiatries in the 20th century. It does also not try to generate general statements but rather wants to widen the perspectives and make the range of artistry within mental health facilities visible to open up ideas about the connection between life, art production, self-definition and the position of the visual arts and unconventional groups of artists in the last 150 years.

1.4 Methodical Frame In order to answer the questions posed above this master thesis makes use of a mix of historical, art-historical as well as partly sociological methods and theories which characterise it as an interdisciplinary study. First of all, the paper draws on traditional approaches within the historical sciences such as Johann Gustav Droysen’s model of historic criticism and the comparative historical method in order to dicuss the concept of the genius, the pathologisation of the artist and the perception of psychotic art until the first half of the 20th century. As the extract of literature published on psychotic art and art in psychiatries has shown, the amount of ideas and concepts about these topics is so big that the theories which are presented have to be restricted to some selected writings in the first two theoretical chapters. Therefore, some texts of ancient philosophers and thinkers such as Socrates, Seneca or Aristotle are considered for the reconstruction of the history of the concept of the genius, while the pathologisation of the artist is thematised by using conceptions of Cesare Lombroso and Auguste Morel. In order

68 Karin Dammann, Gerhard Dammann, ’Collecting madness: Sammlung’, Collecting Madness: Outsider Art aus der Sammlung Dammann, [http://collectingmadness.com/sammlung/, accessed 07/08/2019].

21 to examine the essence of the pathologised artist within psychiatric environments the two books written by Walter Morgenthaler and Hans Prinzhorn, which were already discussed a bit in the chapter about the state of research, are looked at closely and will be compared with Michel Foucault’s writing Madness and Civilisation. In contrast, the content-related parts rely on image analysises by focusing on three case examples for each of the two groups of German, Swiss and Austrian artists living in psychiatries. In order to answer questions on the possible function of art as a form of therapy and the role of psychosises for stylistic progress a biographical and work-orientated point of view shall be chosen. Therefore, not only Erwin Panofsky’s iconographical-iconological method is used within this thesis to filter stylistic characteristics and contextualise them with symbols and the history of their origins. Also Wolfgang Kemp’s Aesthetic of Reception is adapted to answer questions about the reception and perception of the artwork both in the time of creation and now in the 21st century by concentrating on the relations between observer and creation. For the first content-related chapter the Swiss universal artist Adolf Wölfli, the German Art Brut representative Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern and the Austrian resident of the Haus der Künstler Oswald Tschirtner are selected. Three of each artist’s works are questioned on recurring motifs, stylistic characteristics and themes in order to find out whether they mirror certain aspects of their creators’ illnesses and lives within the psychiatry and if and to which extent they were used as a kind of therapy. In the next chapter three works of professional artists who suffered from mental illnesses are in the focus of the examination with one being created before their stay in a psychiatry, one during treatment and a third one afterwards if possible in order to find out if, how and to which extent topics, motifs or styles changed under the influence of an illness. The thesis hereby follows up stylistic change and tries to answer the question if the artists’ psychosises can be seen as factors of creative regeneration. In the sixth chapter anon, which draws on Goffman’s concept of total institutions, these results shall be linked by searching for similarities and differences within all works and by asking whether one, both or no group used art as a strategy to pursue self-determination as well as autonomy and by using comparative historical methods and comparative image analysises.

1.4.1 Historical Criticism by Johann Gustav Droysen and the Method of the Historical Comparison

The method which is immanent and typical in the historical sciences and spread over all humanistic neighbouring disciplines is the Historical Criticism or the Classical Historical Method, which was generated by the historiographers of the 19th century and focuses on the

22 acquisition and interpretation of written texts and papers 69 in order to produce historical knowledge.70 Proceeding from philosophical ideas about textual criticism, which were already framed in the Early Modern Period, it is part of the hermeneutic approaches within the historical sciences, which were developed further from the 1850s onwards. One of the first researchers who set up a theory in order to analyse and interpret written sources in a systematic way was the Prussian historiographer Johann Gustav Droysen, who published the study ’Grundriss der Historik’ in 1858. In his book he distinguished the process of historical knowledge acquisition in three analysing steps which are known as the heuristic, critical and interpretative approach to historical evidences.71 In the first step of his analysis Droysen advised the historian to search for source material that is suitable in order to discuss and answer the questions which are posed in a study. Within this so-called heuristic step he categorised the information by differing written from materialistic sources according to their type, function and grade of transmission and by comparing them with other written, verbal or pictorial data to find and fill blanks and gaps in the historical tradition. In order to find rewarding questions a study can either choose deductive or inductive approaches,72 whereas this master thesis used both ways of knowledge acquisition. After the major leading questions- how mentally ill artists lived and worked in psychiatries in the 19th and 20th century and how important art and designing were within their daily routine- were set up with the aid of analytical and deductive means, the artists were selected and a corpus of suitable artworks within their oeuvre was compiled. Following this step, the sub- categories within the questioning- art as a form of therapy and psychosises as motors of stylistic change- were created by drawing on inductive methods via examining the artistic products more intensively. In a second part Droysen placed special emphasis on the critique of the collected sources, where the historian needs to evaluate ’the material in regard to its character as evidence of historical reality’.73 Therefore, Droysen divided this step into two parts which are called the outer and the inner critique. Within the context of the outer critique the authenticity, completeness and correctness of the sources themselves and the information they offer as well as questions of authorship and local, temporal and institutional origins are examined. This

69 Volker Sellin, Einführung in die Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht, 2005), p. 85. 70 Gunilla Budde, Dagmar Freist, ’Verfahren, Methoden Praktiken’, in Gunilla Budde, Dagmar Freist, Hilke Günther-Arndt (eds.), Geschichte: Studium – Wissenschaft – Beruf (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008), pp. 158 – 177, p. 160. 71 Martin Lengwiler, Praxisbuch Geschichte: Einführung in die historischen Methoden (Zurich: Orell Füssli Verlag, 2011), pp. 77 – 78 / 82 – 83. 72 Lengwiler, Praxisbuch Geschichte, pp. 84 / 90 – 91 / 93. 73 Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831 – 1933, transl. by Eric Matthews (Cambridge: University Press, 1984), p. 122. 23 will not play a huge role in this master thesis, as most of the sources are edited in historiographical journals, catalogues and monographies and therefore have already been checked for adequacy. After the outer critique an inner one takes place, which will be central especially in the theoretical chapters of this thesis drawing on research literature. It will also play a role when written and verbal information which was passed on by the artists themselves will be looked at in order to analyse the case examples. This encompasses questions about the contentual validity and expressiveness of a text by looking at the author’s intentions, motifs and principles via the timeline which exists between the actual event and the time of the textualisation, the perspectives and valuations the author adopts as well as contradictions and the grade of integrity within his or her portrayal of an historical incident.74 After information could be extracted from the various written sources that are collected, categorised and critically looked at in terms of the questions posed within a study, the final interpretation of these findings takes place. According to Droysen this interpretation of the sources, which has already been partly present in the first two sections of the triad,75 serves for ’the reconstruction of a historical reality of a past context’.76 This differs from source to soucre and should therefore not be equated with a historical explanation.77 By connecting these interpretative analysises with each other a more or less definite result can be presented in a cohesive, critically scrutinised narration,78 which either focuses on individual actors, institutional settings or geographical and chronological conditions.79 In order to make the research public and useful to build upon for other researchers within their examinations the written depiction has to be hedged by integrating the text in the methodological and theoretical background of the historiographical or other sciences in a last step.80 In order to offer a view on historical events which is as accurate as possible the method of the historical comparison can be consulted after two or more sources have been analysed following Droysen’s model. With the term historical comparison Hartmut Kaelble described the juxtaposition of two or more historical entities such as places, individuals, nations, institutions, regions or others in order to not only describe but explain and interpret similarities and differences within their structures, intentions or actions. By looking for

74 Budde, Freist, Methoden, p. 160. 75 Ibid, pp. 160 – 161. 76 Thomas M. Seebohm, Hermeneutics. Method and Methodology (Drodrecht-Boston-London: Kluwera Academic Publishers, 2004), p. 71. 77 Ibid., p. 71. 78 Budde, Freist, Methoden, p. 161. 79 Jacques Bos, ’Nineteenth-Century Historicism and Its Predecessors: Historical Experience, Historical Ontology and Historical Method’, in Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, Thijs Weststeijn (eds.), The Making of Humanities, Vol. 2: From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines (Amsterdam: University Press, 2012), pp. 131 – 147, p. 143. 80 Budde, Freist, Methoden, p. 161. 24 convergent and divergent developments within one historical process81 this thesis hereby tries to make general and prevailing statements for the explanation of the historical conditions of lives and works of German, Swiss and Austrian artists in psychiatries.82 The first research on the character and use of historical comparisons was conducted at the same time when Droysen systemised the method of historical criticism, whereas the examinations of the British philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill have been fundamental for the utilisation of this approach within the historical sciences.83 Especially his two case-orientated comparative steps, the method of agreement and the method of difference, can be used to interpret historical processes across time, space and the persona. While the first one focuses on parallels and points of contact between two or more entities by eliminating variables which are not shared by all comparison units in order to find causes of a historical circumstance, the method of differene concentrates on contrasts and opposites of subjects by confronting the presence and absence of variables in case examples.84 In order to guarantee a valid comparison the units have to correspond with each other.85 Therefore, this master thesis focuses on one single language area by examining works of German speaking artists who all lived in the time period covering the last 130 years. Although not all of them spent a special period of their lifetime in a psychiatry, they still received some form of treatment for their mental condition and have been living at least two years in a more or less closed institution whether it was a mental health facility, a sanatorium or a care home for elder people. Another comparative aspect is the access to their works, as all of the case examples are available via exhibition catalogues or through collections of Outsider Art or Art Brut. This however characterises the comparison as a so-called Spezialvergleich.86

1.4.2 Erwin Panofsky’s Iconographical-Iconological Method Besides written texts graphics, paintings and other types of images can be used as primary sources within historical research since the so-called visual turn, as pictures can portray collective perceptions, memories or experiences of all economic and political ranks, classes and professions and hereby open up new perspectives on historical actors and the role of the individual within past processes. Especially within studies on the history of mentalities image

81 Hartmut Kaelble, ’Historischer Vergleich’, Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte: Begriffe, Methoden und Debatten in der zeithistorischen Forschung, [http://docupedia.de/zg/Historischer_Vergleich#cite_note-1, accessed 10/08/2019]. 82 Budde, Freist, Methoden, p. 172. 83 Kaelble, Vergleich, [http://docupedia.de/zg/Historischer_Vergleich#cite_note-1, accessed 10/08/2019]. 84 Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 36 – 37 / 39. 85 Budde, Freist, Methoden, pp. 173 – 174. 86 Hartmut Kaelble, Der historische Vergleich: Eine Einführung zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main-New York: Campus Verlag, 1999), p. 17. 25 analysises can familiarise the reader with groups, classes or individuals whose lives and roles are normally not as much dicussed in studies of political or military history and help to construct a ’history from below’.87 Mentally ill artists who lived and worked in a psychiatry, a place which has been stigmatised for centuries, can hereby enter the limelight if the artworks they produced are analysed. By not only looking at professional artists’ depictions of psychiatric patients or closed institutions but by analysing the patients’ works themselves the researchers give the creators a voice and the opportunity to express their personal perceptions and views on the world they live in for a bigger audience. In return, these strategies help to widen the awareness and perceptions of the psychiatry as a habitat in this thesis. In order to extract historical information from a visual trait accurate methods have to be used, whereas the German-American art historian Erwin Panofsky’s Iconographical-Iconological approach is the basis for historical and art-historical image analysises. In order to conduct work- and case-orientated studies, as this master thesis represents one, Panofsky’s method can be consulted to get a first access to the artwork, as it does not only describe and class the piece stylistically but also interprets it within its history of origins and partly locates it within a broader historical frame.88 In his essay ’Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the study of Renaissance art’89 Panofsky established three steps for analysing an artwork and initiated his step model with the so-called pre-iconographical description. Herein the analyst should start with tracing the forms, colours, the variations of light and shade, figures and stylistics of an artwork in order to identify its motifs and their relation to each other. After this determination of the natural or primary object, which is based on factual perception, the researcher shall try to highlight the emotions the artwork and its components prompt in an observer, a process Panofsky described as looking for the expressional primary object. Following this first stage, which is based on the history of styles and the daily experiences an observer can rely on when identifying the contents of an image, the (art) historians shall move on to the iconographical analysis. Here they have to combine the motifs and the relations between forms and figures with overall ideas, topics and themes but without interpreting them based on their history of origins by focusing on the so-called secondary or conventional subject matter. Therefore, consulting the traditional sources used by both the artists and the commissioners such as the Bible, the

87 Irmgard Wilharm, ’Einleitung: Geschichte, Bilder und die Bilder im Kopf, in Irmgard Wilharm (ed.), Geschichte in Bildern: Von der Miniatur bis zum Film als historische Quelle (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus Verlag & Media UG, 1995), (Geschichtsdidaktik 10), pp. 7 – 24, pp. 11 / 13.; Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Use of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), p. 12. 88 Lengwiler, Praxisbuch, p. 141. 89 Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University Press, 2004). 26 ancient mythological writings, historiographical sources or anecdotes and allegories in case of abstract terms is essential. As a corrective the history of art-historical types can be adduced but in order to identify the right types and to detect the intrinsic meaning or content of an image the historical background, its history of origins, intentions of artists and patrons as well as traditional and contemporary theological, philosophical, political and social concepts have to be examined and synthesised. This happens in a third step Panofsky called the iconological interpretation, which focuses both on compositional and iconographical characteristics. These are interpreted by using more written sources and other kinds of documents by the artist, the commissioner or the people they had contact with90 in order to view the artwork as a symbol of ’the basic atttude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion’.91 According to Panofsky this is also the point where historical and art-historical disciplines converge each other and where the artwork is established not only as a source for art historians but also for other humanities such as the historiography.92 Drawing on Panofsky’s model, historiographical research still often uses pictures only as special types of historical evidence and as visual documents which help to analyse a process or event in depth, more directly or from a different perspective because they offer insights into mentalities, attributions of meanings and perceptions of more individuals, groups or bigger entities. The artworks themselves are hereby instrumentalised and not entirely valued as independent sources from an art-historical point of view,93 as they are often only used to verify statements that have already been made with the aid of traditional written documents.94 Therefore, this thesis uses Panofsky’s iconographical-iconological method only to approach symbols, themes and stylistic change within the chosen artworks and to combine them with their historical background and history of origins by highlighting the artwork itself. This is based on the method’s focus on the image content as information medium and its distancing from other models of pictorial sciences that concentrate exclusively on stylistic aspects within an artwork. 95 In order to interpret the artworks of psychiatric patients as models of communication with their external environment and to ask about how they were perceived this thesis also relies on Wolfgang Kemp’s art-historical interpretation of Reader-Response Criticism, known as Aesthetic of Reception, which is described in the following chapter.

90 Panofsky, Meaning, pp. 38 – 43 / 45 – 46 / 49. 91 Ibid, p. 40. 92 Ibid, p. 49. 93 Franx X. Eder, Oliver Kühschelm, ’Bilder – Geschichtswissenschaft – Diskurse’, in Franz X. Eder, Oliver Kühschelm, Christina Linsboth (eds.), Bilder in historischen Diskursen (Wiesbaden : Springer, 2014), pp. 3 – 44, pp. 6 – 7. 94 Burke, Eyewitnessing, p. 10. 95 Franziska A. Irsigler, Die Ikonologie in der Kunstwissenschaft: Entwicklung, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen (Hamburg: Diplomica Verlag, 2014), p. 8. 27 1.4.3 Wolfgang Kemp’s Aesthetic of Reception The method of the Aesthetic of Reception was developed by the German art historian Wolfgang Kemp in the 1980s based on the 1960s British literary theories about the role of the reader within texts. 96 Proceeding from that, Kemp’s model focuses on the context of reception, ’the conditions of access and [...] appearance’ 97 of an artwork. By looking at investigation criteria such as sites, commissioners, time frames, connections to religious and socio-political discourses or the intentions of the artists his concept guarantees a complete interpretation taking not only the artist and his creation into account but the observer and his relationship with the object as well.98 Based on his statement that every artwork calls for a beholder, who is integrated from the start of the production process onwards,99 he set up a work-orientated method, which examines the strategies of communication between the artwork and its contemporary recipient and also assumes that there are general pictorial structures mediating between the observer and the creation across time and space.100 The Aesthetic of Reception does not follow fixed instructions and is an open concept based on two examination categories. Kemp suggested to start with the extrinsic conditions of access such as the surroundings and spatial environments, the original function and conditions of appearance of the artwork like size, format, direction or degree of completeness and to contextualise them within the history of reception by looking at the social rank of the beholder or the artwork’s use over time. Subsequently, the analysis of the intrinsic points of reception, which focus on the significance of the image’s elements for the observer, takes place by examining the beholder’s perception of mimes and gestures, the positioning and relations of the objects with each other as well as their interaction with the viewer. Within this step figures of identification within the picture and their way of communicating with the addressee are brought to question by looking at image sections and perspectives as well as gaps and how they are supplemented by the observer. 101 By using these categories new discoveries on the interaction of mentally ill artists with their environment with a special focus on art therapy can enrich the analysis of the perception of psychotic art in this thesis.

96 Sonja Pöppel, Das therapeutische Potenzial der Kunstrezeption: Studien zur rezeptionsästhetischen und bildwissenschaftlichen Grundlegung einer Rezeptiven Kunsttherapie (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2015), p. 25. 97 Anne D’Alleva, Methods and Theories of Art History (London: Laurence King, 2005), p. 115. 98 Sergiusz Michalski, Einführung in die Kunstgeschichte (Darmstadt: WBG, 2015), p. 78. 99 Wolfgang Kemp, ’Kunstwerk und Betrachter: Der rezeptionsästhetische Ansatz’, in Hans Belting, Heinrich Dilly, Wolfgang Kemp, Willibald Sauerländer, Martin Warnke (eds.), Kunstgeschichte. Eine Einführung, 7th edition (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 2008), pp. 247 – 265, p. 248 / 250. 100Peter Lodermeyer,Transformationen des Stillebens in der nachkubistischen Malerei Pablo Picassos (Münster: LIT, 1999) (Bonner Studien zur Kunstgeschichte 14), p. 20.; Kemp, Rezeptionsästhetischer Ansatz, p. 250. 101 Wolfgang Kemp, ’The Work of Art and Its Beholder: The Methodology of the Aesthetic of Reception’, in Mark Cheetham (ed.), The Subjects of Art History: Historical objects in contemporary perspectives (Cambridge: University Press, 1998), pp. 180 – 196, p. 183 – 187 28 2. The Pathologisation of the Artist - The Connex of Artistry and Mental Illnesses

Although the insane artist and his works have been immanent in all cultures, time periods, institutional, public as well as private contexts, the acceptance of the fact that mentally ill people’s creations are not ridiculous forms of pasttime amusements but are as competent to gain the status of full-value artworks as the pieces produced by traditional and well- recognised artists took until the late 1940s. Even though psychiatrists as well as art historians had occasionally acknowledged the quality of psychotic art before, they had still spoken of creations by lunatics. They had also seldomly looked at their works without taking their illnesses into account. Therefore, the art of mentally affected patients living in psychiatries has suffered from invisibility for a long time, as John MacGregor described it.102 One of the conditions for the growing public support for the actions undertaken by the writers of the 1940s in order to fully acknowledge psychotic art was the high amount of publications of 19th-century thinkers about the traits and status of the genius which prepared the public for a discussion about the topic art in psychiatries. Starting in the romantic era, the discourses on the concept of the mad genius, which was common in both artistic and scientific circles until the 1930s,103 led to a fundamental debate about the origins of talent and creativity. At the climax of these discussions the terms illness and ingenuity became exchangeable, so some writers like Thomas Mann even described mental illnesses as necessary conditions to avoid dilettantism. 104 In the following years the numbers of psychopathological studies about outstanding artists and geniuses in every creative field who suffered from mental disorders such as Camille Claudel, Robert Schumann, Friedrich Nietzsche or Vincent van Gogh reached their peak. Their authors tried to explain the artists’ achievements with their mental illness or psychosises that were transported within their families105 and hereby changed the perception of creative and artistically active psychiatric patients for the next 100 years.

2.1 The Concept of the Mad Artist - An Overview of Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Ideas about the Connex of Ingenuity and Madness

The idea of the connex of extraordinary capacities and pathological disorders originates in ancient times and draws on the topos of ingenuity as a fundamental characteristic of every human being of great importance, whether it is a politician, a philosopher or an artist.

102 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, pp. 4 – 5. 103 Gockel, Pathologisierung, pp. 25 / 29. 104 Astrid Roffmann, Keine freie Note mehr: Natur im Werk Thomas Manns (Würzburg: Königshausen &Neumann, 2003), pp. 60 – 61. 105 Peter K. Schneider, Wahnsinn und Kultur oder die heilige Krankheit: Die Entdeckung eines menschlichen Talents (Würzburg: Königshausen&Neumann, 2001), pp. 138 – 139. 29 Ingenuity is rather definitely defined as the outstanding, unique and extraordinarily distinct capability of getting creative and offering exceptional performances or creations especially within the fine arts and humanities.106 In contrast the ideas about the genius, which summarise the connex of ingenuity and madness, creativity and mental illnesses very well, have experienced many changes in meaning and conception. The characteristics and role of the genius have already been thematised in ancient Greece and in Rome, whereas both societies characterised the genius as an anthropomorphic creature that influences people’s life positively by guarding them in case of the Latin genius or by supporting them in getting creative in case of the Greek daimon or Roman ingenium. Even though not all three terms had connections to creativity or artistic productions, the concepts intermingled over time and were passed on to early modern debates about the nature and significance of the genius.107 The most direct linguistic derivation of the word genius leads to the Latin concept of the genius, an originally non-personal but later anthropomorphic tutelary deity that stood by every Roman citizen’s side from the day they were born until the day they died and functioned like a good spirit who accompanied them. Although the genius also cared for institutions’, places’ and other facilities’ wellbeing, it is reminiscent of Christian imaginations of the personal guardian angel, as it was part of the Roman pagan religion. Even though the genius did not necessarily encourage creative or artistic productions,108 it could still shape the personality and character traits of the guided subject, as its spheres of influence widened over time. It had originally only been responsible for the stimulation of sexual potency and the promotion of male power, as it was a rather nebulous creature sitting behind every human being’s forehead but could later also affect the ward’s behaviour and individual fate.109 The development of the genius from a non-personal anima to an anthropomorphic figure can be ascribed to the influence of the Greek ideas about the daimon, an equivalent to the Latin genius.110 Often used in exchange for the term God, the daimon, where the modern term ’demon’ derives from,111 acts as a mediator between the heavens and the earth and therefore does not appertain to every human being. Unlike the genius, the daimon is only immanent in very few chosen people who can receive supernatural messages from the Gods and transmit them to their fellow human beings, as they are not only blessed with an extraordinary

106 Viktor Sarris, Genie und Psychopathologie: Drei psychohistorische Fälle (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2018), p. 2. 107 Christian Baier, Zwischen höllischem Feuer und doppeltem Segen. Geniekonzepte in Thomas Manns Romanen Lotte in Weimar, Joseph und seine Brüder und Doktor Faustus (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2011), pp. 65 – 66. 108 Robinson, Genius, p. 2. 109 Baier, Geniekonzepte, pp. 69 – 71. 110 Ibid., p. 71. 111 Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, transl. by John Raffan (Cambridge/Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 181. 30 personality but also have outstanding intellectual abilities, which enable them to see through the surfaces of things and perceive their deeper meaning or use.112 Therefore, the daimon, which can also be interpreted as the divine part of the human soul that has been separated from its godly ancestor after the War in Heaven,113 is a gift by or a remnant of the Gods given to priests or philosophers. The daimon hereby supported these people in receiving and understanding the messages but their possibility to deal with the knowledge and to transfer its meaning into artworks, prosa, poems or political debates presupposed the aid of the ingenium, as the Romans called hereditary, inborn, not learnable and rare intellectual talents and abilities as well as positive character traits. Through a person’s ingenium the contact and the interaction with the daimon could take place.114 Although the visual artist was not seen as a divine creator in antiquity,115 as he would only imitate objects that were produced by other sciences but could not manufacture things himself,116 these characteristics and traits were later and especially in the Renaissance era reattributed to him by referring to the Greek concept. Within this context, the visual and performing artist gained a special status, as he could sense, absorb and convert the Gods’ ideas into his artwork by combining the divine knowledge with his technical and artisanal skills. He hereby took the role of a creative genius.117 Although the concepts of the genius, the daimon and the ingenium contain the idea of not only an intervening divine creature but also an incentive demon that leads to the emergence of a creative action and suggests a connection to a mental abnormity, the Roman and Greek ideas about the genius and the daimon have never been interpreted in combination with insanity. The first imaginations about a connection between extraordinary talent, creativity and madness can be found in the writings of Plato, who spoke about a divine insanity when he characterised the origins of inspiration. Like Seneca, who explained that extraordinary achievements can only be accomplished if a certain degree of madness is involved, Plato stated in his theory about the manía that the most outstanding acquisitions and goods are being created because madness coming from the Gods is involved in the intellectual or physical production process. Based on that, he distinguished a negative and destructive form of madness, that is caused by an illness or disorder, from a positive and productive type,

112 Baier, Geniekonzepte, pp. 71 – 73. 113 W. K. C. Guthrie, William Keith Chamgers Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. 1: The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans (Cambridge: University Press, 1962), p. 482. 114 Baier, Geniekonzepte, pp. 67 – 69 / 72 – 73. 115 Alice Maniaci, ’Il Ruolo Sociale dell’Artista’, Arte in Costruzione, [http://arteincostruzione.blogspot.com/2015/04/il-ruolo-sociale-dellartista.html, accessed 16/08/2019]. 116 Christoph Hubig, ’>Genie< - Typus oder Original?: Vom Paradigma der Kreativität zum Kult des Individuums’, in Erika Wischer (ed.), Aufklärung und Romantik: 1700 – 1830 (Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1983), (Propyläen Geschichte der Literatur 4), pp. 187 – 210, p. 188. 117 Wolf-Dietrich Löhr, ’Genie’, in Ulrich Pfisterer (ed.), Metzler Lexikon Kunstwissenschaft: Ideen, Methoden, Begriffe, 2nd edition (Stuttgart-Weimar : Springer 2011), pp. 144 – 149, p. 146. 31 which is given to a human being by the Gods, who hereby suspended a normal state of mind. Whether a person is chosen by the Gods to get this divine manía or the furor divinus depends on their character and their soul’s approachability for the creative arts, so Plato hereby referred to a similar subject like the concepts of the Latin ingenium. At the same time he also emphasised that only the divine influence leads the hand of the creator not his knowledge, faculty of reason or learned skills. Instead of making their own decisions the Gods are speaking and acting through them, so the artist, the priest and the philosopher become a medium for godly intervention. Therefore, their statements and products obtain a priviledged and sacred status, as the Gods cannot fail or be wrong. This also influences the whole creation process, as the irrational and spontaneous element gains in importance because the act itself cannot be controlled by the poet or the philosopher.118 Plato then subdivided the divine madness in four categories and identified a type which can be foretelling in case of a good connection to the God Apollo, a poetical one which exists because of the help of the Muses, the amorous madness if Venus and Cupid are involved or the mysterious one if Dionysus is leading the concerned person.119 With his idea that the poet is influenced by a divine madness and his mentioning of the Muses, who support him in receiving this kind of godly inspiration, Plato laid the foundations for the idea of the mad artist. As poetry and visual art have been sister arts since the ancient ut pictura poesis- discourses120 and Simonides of Keos’ idea that ’painting is silent poetry and poetry is painting that speaks’,121 the conditions for a transmission of Plato’s idea of a poetical mania on the visual arts and especially on painting were given. Another concept which is as essential for the development of the concept of the genius as Plato’s inspiration theory is the idea that physical conditions could cause extraordinary talents and stimulate creativity. Proceeding from Aristotle’s and Theophrastus’ ideas about the homo melancholicus, 122 whose sickness is caused by an excess of black bile, the actions and mentality of the genius are therefore explained by drawing on the concept of the four humours that constitute the human body. 123 Within the hippocratic humoral pathology black bile, whose temperature fluctuations can cause either depression and anxiety attacks if coldness

118 Baier, Geniekonzepte, pp. 178 – 180. 119 Plato, Phaidros, Chapter 7 Verse 265, digitally available under: [https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/platons- werke-2430/8, accessed 16/08/2019]. 120 Barbara Russano Henning, ’Music and the Arts’, in Tim Carter, John Butt (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music (Cambridge: University Press, 2005), pp. 111 – 131, p. 111. 121 Martin M. Winkler, Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo’s New Light (Cambridge: University Press, 2009), p. 22. 122 Gockel, Pathologisierung, p. 25. 123 Thorsten Valk, Melancholie im Werk Goethes: Genese – Symptomatik – Therapie (Tübingen: Springer, 2002) (Studien zur deutschen Literatur 168), p. 20. 32 dominates or manic seizures if its too hot,124 is together with blood, yellow bile and phlegm one of the four humours, which should be in balance in order to guarantee physical and mental health.125 While Hippocrates and contemporary physicians focused on the medical effects of an excess or dehydration of the black bile that caused physical and mental imbalances in order to explain the rise of illnesses, Aristotle and his students used the humour and its changes in appearance and substance to outline a characterology. Instead of only focusing on the state of the black bile as an indicator for physical illnesses, they interpreted it as a temperament and character type,126 which should be immanent in ’all men of philosophy, politics, poetry or the arts’.127 Based on the apparent observation that a great amount of black bile can be deposited near the brain and mind of a melancholic, Aristotle and his followers emphasised that men who suffer from too much black bile can accomplish extraordinary achievements. They also have to walk a tightrope permanently in order to raise themselves over physical and mental impairments and to direct this state into creative channels.128 Even though they did not view insanity as a characteristical aspect of the melancholic, they hereby constituted that finding oneself in a preternatural state, as the melancholic does due to his lugubrious vision of the world and his anxieties, could open up different channels of inspiration and ideation. This contrast between Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies on the origins of talent and creativity shaped the discussions about the concept of the genius for the next centuries and were crucial for the further development of the debate in the Renaissance and romantic era. They can be subsumed by setting up the antagonism of natural or scientific and theological or transcendent explanations for the nature and character of the genius, as they either referred to God or the more abstract concept of nature as a reason for its existence.129 The essential preconditions for the set-up of the concept of the genius were the centering of the individual and its partly liberation from the ’divine almightiness and the universality of the nature’,130 which limited its scopes and possibilities of fruition in antiquity and even more in the

124 Baier, Geniekonzepte, p. 185. 125 Jean Starobinski, ’Die Tinte der Melancholie’, in Jean Clair (ed.), Melancholie: Genie und Wahnsinn in der Kunst, Exhib. Cat. Galeries nationales du Grand Palais Paris and Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin 2006 (Ostfilder- Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005), pp. 24 – 33, p. 24. 126 Paul Demont, ’Der antike Melancholiebegriff: Von der Krankheit zum Temperament’, in Jean Clair (ed.), Melancholie: Genie und Wahnsinn in der Kunst, Exhib. Cat. Galeries nationales du Grand Palais Paris and Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin 2006 (Ostfilder-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005), pp. 34 – 37, p. 35. 127 David E. J. Linden, ’The Natural and the Supernatural in Melancholic Genius: A Debate in Sixteenth-Century Spanish Medicine and its Antecedents’, Medizin Historisches Journal 34 (1999), pp. 227 – 243, p. 227. 128 Demont, Melancholiebegriff, p. 36. 129 Noel L. Brann, The Debate Over the Origin of Genius During the Italian Renaissance: The Theories of Supernatural Frenzy and Natural Melancholy in Accord and in Confict on the Threshold of Scientific Revolution (Leiden-Boston-Cologne 2002), pp. 2 – 3. 130 Hubig, Genie, p. 190. 33 medieval era. As the thinkers of the middle ages did not focus on the human being as an individual and could not imagine God speaking through a poet, a philosopher or even an artist, who only had the status of a better artisan, the debate about the characteristics and role of the genius for creative productions was not further pursued until the early 1400s. 131 Although demigods and similar guardian spirits like saints or theologists who mediated between God and his human wards existed, they were not interpreted as anthropomorphic figures who could stimulate artistic or creative drives or even had connections to melancholy or insanity. Therefore, they form a contrast to the Latein genius or the Greek daimon.132 With the new human-oriented conception of the world in the Renaissance era and the ideas about men being a reflection of God and having similar character traits133 the concept of the genius gained new importance. Starting from Italy, humanism and the rediscovery of ancient philosophy, politics and art took place, which caused a culmination of the discussions about the status of sciences, the role of the artist and the origins of creativity.134 In the upcoming centuries questions about the existence and nature of the genius or daimon as a motor for the individual to get creative came to the foreground and raised issues whether this genius could be a furor daemonicus or a furor divinus. Thinkers asked themselves whether the sources of creativity had a positive and godly origin or whether they came from the devil and were despicable.135 One of the most influential Renaissance writers on the concept of ingenuity was the Italian humanist, philosopher and physician Marsilio Ficino, who suggested that there was a demonic and a divine genius following Plato’s idea of the manía, which he connected with the Hippocratic and Artistotelian concepts of melancholy.136 In his tractate De vita libri tres he stated that the furor divinus is given to all personae who are born at the sign of Saturn. The god selects chosen people to influence them in getting creative and artistically or intellectually active by making them receptive for transcendent messages and by giving them enough contemplative energy to perceive divine ideas. Only by combining these two skills an artist, poet or philosopher could reach the state of brilliancy and ingenuity within his works.137 Ficino’s concept did not only categorise the furor as a positive force again. It also influenced

131 Hubig, Genie, pp. 189 – 190. ; Leslie Ross, Artists of the Middle Ages: Artists of an Era (Westport/Connecticut- London: Greenwood Press, 2003), p. 8. 132 Sarah-Sophie Gruber, Genie. Natürlich Künstlich!: Über die Geschichte einer personifizierten (De)Konstruktion, unpublished Dipl. Proj. (Vienna, 2016), p. 12. 133 Hubig, Genie, p. 190. 134 Peter Burke, ’The Spread of Italian Humanism’, in Anthony Goodman, Angus Mackay (eds.), The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe During the Renaissance (London-New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1-22, p. 1. 135 Brann, Origin of Genius, pp. 7 / 11. 136 Ibid., pp. 82 – 84. 137 Valk, Melancholie im Werk Goethes, pp. 33 / 108. 34 the perception of the Renaissance artist, who slowly lost his artisanal status and became a courtier and a man of science, as the divine ingenium reached him with the aid of Saturn and made him approachable for new conceptions and ideas. With the further development of Renaissance art the imaginations about ingenuity diverged more and more from the original function and antiquity’s version of the genius. Although the ancient thinkers did not assign a sex to this state of mind, the genius was now more and more often attributed to the male and white artist, whose richness of ideas fully relied on the influence of the ingenium, as it was identified with the ability to create as mimetically accurate as possible, to imitate nature as the highest role model and to work as fast and ambitiously as possible. This emphasis on the male genius lasted until the late 20th century and is also noticeable when looking at the numbers of research and catalogue entries of female artists living and working in psychiatries, which are nearly non-existent. On the other hand the Renaissance writers and biographers, with Vasari leading the way, also mentioned the negative side effects the ingenium could cause for an artist’s life such as social dissociation and isolation, perfectionism and dissatisfaction with one’s own achievements or apathy towards daily routines and necessities such as hygiene, alimentation or moral behaviour. These topoi then influenced the discussion about the (mad) genius in the romantic era and offered the ideal role model for artists’ pathographies, as ingenuity and emotional as well as physical suffering got connected based on Platonic and Aristotelian ideas.138 Following Early Modern concepts about the genius and its origins, the modern term and its connotations were shaped in the 1770s. When the name genius had appeared in French dictionaries and encyclopaedias in the 17th century it had more and more replaced the Roman ingenium by describing on the one hand a good spirit supporting people in their lives or a passionate, inborn force that can lead to artistic success or a better emotional understanding on the other hand. Based on this, the modern idea about ingenuity was shaped by British 18th- century thinkers such as Shaftesbury or Addison.139 Especially in the Sturm und Drang period the term genius was used as a synonym for godlike talent, extraordinary gifts and abilities. But instead of referring to a person mediating between the heavens and the earth and instead of focusing on God being the one who functioned as a drive motor within the artistic process and the artist being only his medium, the creators themselves became the geniuses. This did

138 Löhr, Genie, p. 146.; Jonathan Appel, Dohee Kim-Appel, Erin Snap, Claire Whiteman, Mary Cassidy, Rebecca Stanic, ’Creativity and ’Madness’: Myths, Constructions and Realities’, in Monika dos Santos, Jean- François Pelletier (eds.), The Social Constructions and Experiences of Madness (Leiden-Boston: Brill Rodolpi, 2018), (At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries 96), pp. 95 – 117, p. 96. ; Hans Börg, Zum Geniebegriff : quellen, Marginalien, Probleme (Ratingen-Kastellaun-Düsseldorf: Aloys Henn Verlag, 1973) (Schriften zur Theorie und Praxis der Kunstpädagogik), pp. 32 – 33. 139 Löhr, Genie, p. 147 35 not only concern intellectual thinkers, all kinds of artists or other representatives of the humanities but spread to natural scientists as well, with Isaac Newton being the prime example. The authors hereby distinguished between the so-called Bildungsgenie and the Naturgenie and introduced gradations of creativity and ingenuity, so a bigger and a smaller genius could exist side by side. On the other hand the Enlighteners such as Immanuel Kant exclusively related the term to artists whose ingenium, whose natural, inborn talent, could not be learned and who created intuitively by following their natural openness for the demands and guidelines of nature, one of the merits psychotic art had for the thinkers of the first half of the 20th century. While these artists could rely on their ability to combine the impressions nature gave them, every other scholar had to labouriously train him- or herself and study. As in case of the Renaissance artists, whose fame depended on the degree of their inventiveness, not discoveries or findings counted in order to define a person as a genius but their dealing with ideas, the so-called invention. Originality and the wild drive to get artistically creative characterised the genius of the Sturm and Drang period now, whose life and traits could not be separated from his works anymore.140 As studying the old masters’ works and being an ambitious lifelong learner were subordinated under ingenuity as the primary reason for the decision whether an artist and his creations were great or not, the artists’ subject and his biography acquired an increased importance in order to describe and judge their work.141 Following this tradition, the creative individual gained new attention especially within the romantic era, where the genius was characterised as a mysterious power coming from an unkown origin or as a fundamental force of nature.142 By emphasising that every real genius is able to resolve the most difficult and contradictory situations, since they are able to portray the invisibile and unkown because of their uncertain roots, the romanticists separated the genius from simple talent.143 In their opinion the genius had supernatural abilities close to insanity and represented the solitarily living individual who relies on his or her high-strung senses in order to create extraordinary things. As this concept was influenced by the romanticists’ openness for prenatural phenomena and reflections on the role and status of nature in general and within creative processes,144 the debate about the

140 Silke Jakobs, „Selbst wenn ich Schiller sein könnte, wäre ich lieber Einstein“: Naturwissenschaftler und ihre Wahrnehmung der zwei Kulturen (Frankfurt-New York: Campus Verlag, 2006), pp. 40 – 41.; Löhr, Genie, pp. 147 – 148.; Börg, Geniebegriff, pp. 35 / 43. 141 Ulrich Karthaus, Sturm und Drang: Epoche-Werke-Wirkung, 2nd edition (München: C. H. Beck, 2007), p. 224. 142 Gockel, Pathologisierung, p. 26. 143 Bruno Markwardt, Geschichte der Deutschen Poetik, Vol. 3: Klassik und Romantik, 2nd edition (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gryter, 1971), pp. 226 – 227. 144 Robyn Faith Walsh, ’The Influence of Romantic Genius in Early Christian Studies’, Studies in Religion and Reception 5:1 (2015), pp. 31 – 60, pp. 36 – 37.; MacGregor, Art of the Insane, pp. 71 – 72. 36 character and role of the genius met their imaginations of the ideal lifestyle for a society and the artist as well. They hereby also characterised the status and life of the artist in contrast to the bourgeoisie within the class conflicts of the early 19th century, whose members got creatively active in their free time and hereby dilettantely competed with the professional artist. Therefore, attributing ingenuity to an artist guaranteed the uniqueness which was necessary in order to start and maintain a successful career and supported the artist in avoiding crises of identity and of their right to exist.145

2.2 Art and Madness in the 19th and 20th Century - From Demonisation to Acceptance The perception of the genius, which was unseparately intertwined with creativity, intuition and the extraordinary in the first half of the 19th century, experienced a semantic change and shift in meaning after the 1850s. Following the romantic era’s new interest in biographies and the individual as well as the scientific and empiric analysis and circularisation of selection mechanisms and the survival of the fittest recorded in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, the mentally and physically ill as well as the ’insane’ elements became new characteristics of the concept of the genius. After the establishment of Auguste Comte’s positivism, 146 who emphasised the importance of facts, general assumptions and empiric methods for the gain of knowledge, 147 degeneration and abnormity, which function as superstructure for insane characteristics within the concept of the genius, attracted new interest for explanations wanting to be as objective as possible within all sciences concerning human and faunal development.148 Starting with the writings of Gerard and Perrault, who first reflected on the origins of ingenuity and manic creative passions as being dependent on psychological and biological conditions such as the interaction of the organs or the consistency of a person’s blood, the imagination that there was a mad and a sane genius became popular. They also laid the foundations for the ongoing wish to demystify the concept of the genius by looking for natural physical or neurological reasons and roots instead of theological explanations. Therefore, psychiatrists and neurologists joined the researchers on the character and role of ingenuity and constructed the draft of the passionately mad artist from the 1850s onwards.149 Proceeding from French clinics, whose psychiatrists such as Louis-Francisque Lélut or Jacques-Joseph Moreau studied insanity by setting up a general hypothesis for its essence and

145 Tanja Gabriele Baudson, ’„Genie und Wahnsinn“: Sind Hochbegabte so anders?’, MinD Magazin 64 (2008), pp. 39 – 41, p. 40. 146 Gockel, Pathologisierung, pp. 26 – 27. 147 Paulina Pawlikowski, Nina Rico, Sharon L. Van Sell, ’Positivism: A Concept Analysis’, International Journal of Nursing & Clinical Practices 5:284 (2018), pp. 1-5, p. 1. 148 Gockel, Pathologisierung, p. 26. 149 Börg, Geniebegriff, pp. 36 – 38 / 44. 37 comparing it with case examples, strategies of pathologisation drawing on biographical information led to the identification of nearly every great philosopher, visual or performing artist as a lunatic and to the interpretation of their works as evidences against their sanity. This research, whose most famous representatives has been the French psychiatrist Bénédicte- Auguste Morel and the Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, have been basic for the examination of the topic area psychotic art until the 1930s.150

2.2.1 Lombroso’s and Morel’s Theories and the Perception of the Insane Artist in the Second Half of the 19th Century

The degenerate genius is a topos which is publically known for its misuse during national socialism, where it has been part of a racist theory about the origins and biological categories of mankind. However, its roots date from the second half of the 19th century, when Bénédict- Auguste Morel reflected about biological forms of degeneration by using theological ideas going back to the Fall of Mankind. In his book Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine, written in 1857, he analysed illnesses which are connected with nervosity by looking for various deformities which were inherited or passed on over the centuries and caused an enormous rise of mentally and physically unhealthy people in his opinion. Drawing on his idea of an ideal stock character of a human being, who has lived in the Garden of Eden before Eve’s betrayal and who he called the type primitif, he characterised every person who differed significantly from this original creation as a character who lost their human traits in a process of degeneration and brutalisation.151 Within his book he conceptualised a six-part scheme dicussing the reasons that could lead to in his words abnormal behaviour and looks within a family. After mentioning alcohol and drug abuse, low hygienic conditions and malnutrition as a first category and the social environment including labour conditions and housing as a second one he described various inherited forms of degeneration such as epilepsy, hysteria or hypochondria, which were all classified as illnesses of nervosity in the 19th century. Morel then discussed the influence of immoral behaviour and the rejection of sexual ethics on mental illnesses such as masturbation or other deviances and moved on to congenital and hereditary physical and mental illnesses as a fourth, fifth and sixth category. As he was convinced that degeneration would develop further and further and infect more and more people in a constant progress of destruction, he ranked the chances of individuals not suffering from mental illnesses or physical

150 Gockel, Pathologisierung, p. 27. 151 Gockel, Pathologisierung, p. 27.; Marc Föcking, Pathologia litteralis: Erzählte Wissenschaft und wissenschaftliches Erzählen im französischen 19. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2002), p. 281. 38 abnormalities as very low.152 With this classification, especially with the third type, Morel laid the foundations for the interpretation of the genius as an epileptic personality,153 which seemed provable by looking at the number of anomalous artists in the late 1800s such as van Gogh. Within Morel’s and his followers’ paradigm of degeneration insanity lost the positive connotation it had during antiquity and the Renaissance, as abnorm behaviour was more and more often associated with hereditary, nearly always unpreventable criminal acts that endangered a society morally and physically, as they had no hope of curing the diseases.154 Based on Morel’s theory of progressive degeneration, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso set up atavistic ideas about the connections between ingenuity, creativity and madness, which combined anthropometric, scientific approaches with cultural criticism and research about psychiatric patients and environments. Within all his works published between the 1860s and 1890s such as ’Genio e follia’155 Lombroso held the opinion that anatomical particularities, creativity, talents and mental illnesses were connected by emphasising the similarities between insanity and ingenuity such as physical attributes and characteristics or social misbehaviour. By looking at the paintings and drawings of mad artists, the compositions of mad musicians or the findings of mad natural scientists Lombroso tried to constitute that mental and physical illnesses as well as injuries caused by accidents or violence could trigger creative processes depending on the season, temperature, astronomic conditions and race.156 Therefore, in his opinion the genius represented a special form of insanity,157 who resembled a fool, as he was not only able to see the invisible and perceive the unknown but also suffered from what is today classified as paranoia and depression.158 But unlike mentally ill patients the genius could be classified as an acceptable type of degeneration, as the consequences of his illness do not harm society and rather cause extraordinary accomplishmens, so they would be positive in their essence.159 Because of Lombroso’s idea that insanity as well as mental illnesses can accompany ingenuity, his writings represent a new trend within the history of psychotic art, which

152 Kristin Ruggiero, Modernity in the Flesh: Modernity, Law and Society in Turn-of-the-century Argentina (Stanford/California: University Press, 2004), pp. 115 – 116. 153 Anne Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: University Press, 2012), p. 128. 154 Jonas Menne, “Lombroso redivivus?“: Biowissenschaften, Kriminologie und Kriminalpolitik von 1876 bis in die Gegenwart (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), p. 23. 155 Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, 1882. 156 Gockel, Pathologisierung, pp. 27 – 28 / 30 – 33. 157 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, p. 102. 158 Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, pp. 15 / 26. 159 Tobias Dahlkvist, ’Genie, Entartung, Wahnsinn’, in Renate Reschke, Marco Brusotti (eds.), “Einige werden posthum geboren“: Friedrich Nietzsches Wirkungen (Berlin-Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), pp. 173 – 182, p. 179. 39 manifests itself in the rising interest in the works of psychiatric patients after the 1850s. Lombroso and his followers researched now whether there were extraordinary but underestimated artists hidden in psychiatries, whether there were ’unrecognized geniuses concealed in the asylum’,160 as they interpreted psychosises as core elements within creative processes and realised that mental illnesses could not only be responsible for destruction but also for extraordinary creativity. Therefore, the Italian criminologist built up a collection of psychotic art, which consisted of works of his own and other Italian and European patients he could use to examine the connections between ingenuity and insanity. 161 Although he classified the works of the patients whose lives he investigated as positive prime examples for his theories and acknowledged their uniqueness, spontaneity and originality, he still viewed the paintings and drawings created by mentally affected people as means to an end and did not realise their artistic value.162 Lombroso also answered questions on the differences between insanity and ingenuity, as he noticed that unlike the mental illnesses his patients suffered from, ingenuity and extraordinary talent could not be inherited and would only appear in male artists. As they would be infertile, they could not pass on their outstanding state of mind in his opinion. This made the idea of a female genius impossible in artistic circles and resulted in high numbers of male pathographies. Within this statement Lombroso also declared that mental illnesses would be inborn and could cause criminal acts and hereby laid the foundations for an ongoing negative perception of mental diseases and the psychiatry as an institution. In this classification another fundamental difference between psychotic and ingenuine art can be found, because as geniuses had to be male, the female patients who got creatively active in psychiatries could never represent full-value artists or reach the rank of the extraordinary. They only drew or painted as a pasttime occupation163 in Lombroso’s and his colleagues’ opinion, who stated that many patients only drew because of boredom and under the supervision of a psychiatrist but not because of an inner creative urge. In contrast, the male patients who started to paint, drew or sculpt were meant to be sexual offenders, small-time criminals or moral infringers, which also supported a negative view on psychotic art, which was present until the 1920s.164 Although Lombroso’s study has already been interpreted as based on non-scientific generalisations by his contemporaries,165 his chapter about the artworks produced by mentally

160 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, p. 91. 161 Ibid., pp. 91 / 93. 162 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, pp. 33 – 34. 163 Gockel, Pathologisierung, pp. 33 – 34.; MacGregor, Art of the Insane, p. 94. 164 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, pp. 92 / 102. 165 Gockel, Pathologisierung, p. 27. 40 ill patients influenced all later researchers. Within his set-up of 13 categories for the description of mad art he could prove that the patients’ experience of their own mental illness caused choices of style, motifs and materials, as the illnesses freed their sense of originality, imagination and fantasy. As also other contemporary researchers on the stylistics of psychotic art did, Lombroso interpreted the composition of lines and figures, the usage of space and scope as well as the patients’ tendency to use ornaments, deformations and multiple symbols in their work as a sign of their psychosis and hereby tried to diagnose their illness. He also laid the groundworks for the comparison of psychotic art with styles and other schools of painting as the researchers of the early 20th century did on a regular basis. But instead of focusing on the art of the so-called primitive civilisations, whose creative products just entered the history of research in the 1880s, he interrelated the paintings and drawings of mentally affected patients with Japanese, Egyptian and Indian art.166 The insights Lombroso laid down in ’Genio e follia’ defined the direction of research for the following 50 years and did not only affect psyciatric and medical but also art-historical points of view. But instead of focusing on Lombroso’s idea of the epileptic or melancholic degenerate artist researchers examined the neurotic, who suffered under the influences of a modern world full of technology, the anonymity of the city and new working conditions from the 1900s onwards. Although being a neurotic was still considered as an advantage, as psychoanalytics thought this state of mind would ennoble the creative process,167 the connex between creativity and illness, ingenuity and insanity was more and more critically observed at the beginning of the 20th century. Instead of concentrating on working out the similarities between ingenuity and madness, the differences were emphasised such as the degree of control within the creative process.168 Therefore, researchers started to separate the mad, psychotic artist from the suffering genius and tried to view him as an individual creative subject whose right to exist and be recognised was as high as every other professional artist’s. This ongoing debate about the connex of melancholy, insanity, talents, illnesses and artistic drives influenced the perception of psychiatric patients and made their caretakers open for the more or less impartial examination of their works.

2.2.2 How Psychiatrists Viewed the Works of Mentally Ill People – Réja’s, Morgenthaler’s and Prinzhorn’s Concepts in Comparison with Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation

Drawing on the end-of-the-19th-century debate about the concept of the genius, the foundations for the recognition of psychiatric patients as full-value artists were laid in the first

166 Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, pp. 191 – 194 / 206 / 209 – 210. 167 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, p. 32. 168 Philip Bean, Madness and Crime, 2nd edition (Abingdon: Willan Publishing, 2013), pp. 51 – 52. 41 three decades of the 20th century and is a merit of writers, art critics and professional artists mainly ccoming from expressionist backgrounds on the one hand and of Swiss, German and French psychiatrists on the other hand, who interpreted mental illnesses as types of creative psychosises. Starting with Paul Meunier, who published a monography called ’L’art chez les fous’ 169 under the pseudonym Marcel Réja in 1907, in which he discussed drawings, paintings, three-dimensional creations, compositions, dance and every type of writing made by psychiatric patients, their works were perceived as artworks for the first time.170 Within his work Réja could prove that the artistic drives existing in psychiatric patients and in professional artists are the same and hereby provided the conditions for the enhancement of the works created by both psychiatric patients and non-professional artists. By using the concept of intuition from an art-critical perspective he declared that both types of artists would be shifted into a mental and physical exceptional state and driven by an inner force during the creative process. But in contrast to the psychotics, who are bound to endure these borderline experiences, professional artists can leave this state based on their own will and in every moment they wish to.171 As the psychotic loses every kind of control mechanism, original and deep artistic wishes can become present, more vital and stronger. They are more or less surpressed by the professional artist though whose will to create is justified in a completely different way, as he has to produce art in order to live and survive, while the psychiatric patient is not bound to getting creative for a living.172 Although Réja’s book is based on a misunderstanding of the relation between psychotic and ingenuine art, which he thought was just a more complex and constructed form of the previous, his studies served as a preparation for the researchers of the 1940s and 1950s. Drawing on Réja’s statement that outstanding artworks are not only produced by one category of artists but can appear proportionally as often within both groups, they tried to lay the foundations for a complete removal of the term lunatic or mad art. By emphasising that no artist is bound to get training he pointed out that there is no difference between both classes and that the idea of the insane artist is only a concept. Réja entirely distanced himself from Lombroso’s opinions, as he did not classify psychotic art by using catalogues of characteristics and stated that not every psychiatric patient has to become artistically active or is forced to express desires, thoughts or wishes within his works. They can also just use art in order to follow an inner urge to design ornaments instead. But as Lombroso he suggested to

169 Réja, L’art chez les fous, 2000. 170 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, pp. 41 – 42.; MacGregor, Art of the Insane, p. 173. 171 Alfred Bader, ’Kunst und Psychopathologie?: Ein Gegensatz’, in Luc Chiompi, Hans Heimann (eds.), Psychiatrie am Scheideweg: Was bleibt? Was kommt? (Berlin-Heidelberg: Springer, 1991), pp. 57 – 68, p. 60. 172 Kraft, Grenzgänger, pp. 57 – 58.; MacGregor, Art of the Insane, pp. 161 / 172 / 174. 42 compare the works created by psychiatric patients with other artistic productions like drawings made by children or the creations produced by the so-called primitive civilisations, a notion which was also used by his successors Morgenthaler and Prinzhorn.173 Based on Réja’s book, the Swiss psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler wrote the biography ’Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler’174 in 1921, where he analysed the life, works and illness of Adolf Wölfli, who he met during an internship in the Waldau asylum, where the schizophrenic was stationed since 1895. Having published his monography a year earlier than Hans Prinzhorn, Morgenthaler broke new ground within the history of research of psychotic art, as he did not write his book for a medical audience but tried to transmit Wölfli’s works to the public. The psychiatrist interpreted Wölfli’s paintings, drawings, compositions and writings as products of enormous talent by adapting an art-historical and art critical point of view175 and did not conceal his subject’s identity by using only initials or a pseudonym. By adressing Wölfli with his real name he suggested a change of thinking within the perception of the insane artist, who was now seen as artistically as valuable as a professional or mentally healthy artist. 176 Therefore, Morgenthaler refrained from classifying Wölfli’s art as simply schizophrenic and emphasised that his urge to draw might be typical for a patient suffering from schizophrenia but the quality and talent that stands behind the works is not, as not every schizophrenic he had asked to draw or paint produced high-quality artworks.177 Like Réja, who had already classified the creations of mentally affected people as artworks but focused on the works themselves instead of on their creators unlike Morgenthaler,178 the Swiss psychiatrist did not see a big difference between psychotic and professional artworks. In his opinion the origins of creative drives could just appear more distinctly under the influence of a mental illness.179 With these ideas he was the first psychiatrist who did not only interpret drawings or paintings created by patients such as Wölfli but also talked to and worked with them to figure out their intentions and the perceptions of their own creations. By doing that, he could also get a deeper read of the production process than Lombroso did.180

173 Kraft, Grenzgänger, pp. 57 – 58.; MacGegor, Art of the Insane, pp. 174 / 177 – 178. 174 Morgenthaler, Geisteskranker als Künstler, 1921. 175 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, pp. 208 – 209. 176 Sander Gilman, ’The Mad Man as Artist: Medicine, History and Degenerate Art’, in Journal of Contemporary History 20:4: Medicine, History and Society (1985), pp. 575 – 597, p. 587. 177 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, p. 216. 178 Thomas Röske, ’Zwischen Krankheitssymptom und Kunst: Werke von Psychiatrie-Erfahrenen’, in Stavros Mentzos (ed.), Das Schöpferische in der Psychose (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012) (Forum der Psychoanalytischen Psychosentherapie 28), pp. 107 – 126, p. 112. 179 Allan Beveridge, ’A disquieting feeling of strangeness? : The Art of the Mentally Ill’, JRSM: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 94:11 (2001), pp. 595 – 599, digitally available under: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1282252/, accessed 20/08/2019]. 180 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, pp. 208 – 210 / 213 – 214. 43 Within his two-part analysis consisting of a biographical and a work-oriented approach based on a division of Wölfli’s creative process in three phases, Morgenthaler combined mixed theories of psychoanalysis such as the ones set up by Emil Kraepelin or Eugen Bleuler,181 who named and characterised schizophrenia as an illness at the beginning of the 20th century by distinguishing it from other mental disorders such as melancholy or paranoia.182 In his introduction Morgenthaler mentioned that besides the psychiatric theories of Kraepelin and Bleuler he also drew on psychological concepts such as the ideas of Hermann Ebbinghaus,183 who characterised psychology as a natural science based on quantification and empirical evidence and was responsible for the examination of the origins of memory and the so-called nonsense syllables.184 Although Morgenthaler was not trained as an art historian, he based his discussion of Wölfli’s works on art-historical points of view by integrating the studies of Wilhelm Worringer, 185 who is known for a ’psychology of style’ laid down in his monography ’Abstraction and Empathy’, written in 1908. Herein he discussed the influence of abstract lines and geometry as means to ’comfort [...] [a] primitive humanity [by excluding] [...] all traces of organic life’,186 which functions as the basis for Morgenthaler’s gestalt psychological interpretations of Wölfli’s tendency for abstraction and stylistic characteristics. In addition, the psychiatrist could have multiple conversations about Wölfli’s creations with his brother Ernst, who is known as one of the main figures of Swiss contemporary art. Ernst must have influenced Morgenthaler’s art historiographical form of depiction and parts of the methodical range he adapted. These enabled the reader to link the insights with the historiographical, sociological and art-historical discourses of the early 20th century in turn.187 This emerges even clearer when looking at Morgenthaler’s conclusion, in which he stated that Wölfli’s illness could liberate a general human will to create geometric forms and to abstract,188 which reminds the reader of the Expressionist’s demands in the 1910s and early 1920s. Although Morgenthaler was careful with catgeorising Wölfli within the artistic trends of the early 20th century, he hereby awaked associations to the avant-garde movements, which contributes to a further upgrading of the artworks produced by mentally ill people.

181 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, p. 210. 182 Gilman, Mad Man as Artist, p. 583. 183 Morgenthaler, Geisteskranker als Künstler, p. VII. 184 David Shakow, ’Hermann Ebbinghaus’, in The American Journal of Psychology 41:4 (1930), pp. 505 – 518, pp. 507 / 510. 185 Morgenthaler, Geisteskranker als Künstler, p. VII. 186 David Morgan, ’The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to Expressionism’, in Journal of the History of Ideas 57:2 (1996), pp. 317 – 341, p. 322. 187 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, p. 209. 188 Morgenthaler, Geisteskranker als Künstler, pp. 91 – 92. 44 A similar significance for the valorisation of the artworks produced by psychotic patients can be attributed to the German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn, who operated at the Heidelberger Universitätsklinikum when he published the monography ’Bildnerei der Geisteskranken’189 in 1922. Written for both art historians and theorists of aesthetics as well as psychiatrists and other medics, he herein tried to strike new paths concerning the perception of the works created by mentally ill people by working with the collection set up in Heidelberg since the 1890s. By drawing on contemporary artistic movements and their representatives’ openness for the works of the mentally insane, with expressionism leading the way,190 Prinzhorn tried to liberate the examination of psychotic art from its solely medical purposes and interpreted the creations from an aesthetical point of view.191 Proceeding from that, the works of psychotic patients got part of anthropological discourses for the first time, as they were considered as cultural goods and their reception within non-academic circles could start. In Prinzhorn’s opinion not only medics and psychiatrists should get access to the works of the mentally insane but they should be made available for the public as well.192 In the preface of his book Prinzhorn stated that his writing pursued two intentions. He wanted to offer a catalogue of works by describing ten case examples of schizophrenic artistically active patients193 based on scientific and empiric categories and by examining their clinical value on the one hand, although he always warned his readers of using an artwork to diagnose the type of the illness.194 On the other hand he tried to investigate the artworks from a gestalt psychological and phenomenological basis by interpreting them as a way to express a general need to configurate, which is immanent in all human beings and can be compared to basic impulses and instincts. According to Prinzhorn, all of us would be able to communicate our deepest emotions via some kind of art, so there was absolutely ’no difference’195 in value between the works of mentally affected or mentally healthy people. He also did not distinguish the natural wish of a mentally ill patient to get artistically active from the wish to create within a mentally healthy person,196 as the basic drives of the human being are not pathological or psychotic.197 As the comparison between psychotic and modern art has been common during the time

189 Prinzhorn, Bildnerei der Geisterkranken, 1922. 190 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, pp. 193 – 195. 191 Thomas Röske, ’Inspiration und unerreichtes Vorbild: L’art des fous und Surrealismus’, in Thomas Röske, Ingrid van Beyme (eds.), Surrealismus und Wahnsinn, Exhib. Cat. Sammlung Prinzhorn Heidelberg 2009/2010 (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2009), pp. 9 – 19, p. 9. 192 Jadi, Prinzhorn-Sammlung, p. 177. 193 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, pp. 193 – 196. 194 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, p. 46. 195 Prinzhorn, Bildnerei der Geistesrkanken, p. IV. 196 Ibid., pp. III – IV. 197 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, p. 197. 45 Prinzhorn wrote his book, he also discussed the relations between these groups of artists and stated that the similarities can be explained by looking at the intentions expressionists, surrealists, cubists and psychiatric patients had during creative processes. Prinzhorn emphasised that his reason for comparing their work was that the schizophrenic ’world feeling’198 and the emotions modern artists endured and integrated in their works resemble each other, a justification which was later widely ignored within racist and national socialistic interpretations.199 In his statement he even went so far to explain that the works of mentally unhealthy patients would express a deeper, more intuitive urge to design than the ones of professional artists, as they lost some of their urge to express their feelings and thoughts due to a process of civilisation. Since they would create by following mainly intellectual standards, their works would not be as authentical as the ones created by psychotic artists. Proceeding from that, Prinzhorn’s work can be interpreted in context with cultural pessimism and criticism, which was common in the first part of the 20th century, especially after the political, military and economical disaster caused by the First World War.200 Therefore, instead of following Réja’s and Morgenthaler’s classification of the paintings, drawings and sculptures of psychiatric patients as artworks Prinzhorn avoided to even use the term art in general, as it is based on juxtapositions implicating that there was some kind of professional art and non-art. He rather characterised the works he examined as forms of image-making, as so-called ’Bildnereien’. After giving an introduction into earlier research and gestalt psychological basics in general, Prinzhorn listed six drives and desires within human beings that motivate them to get artistically active and asked what their psychological origins were. As they would not be bound to psychosises and existed equally in children, the so-called ’primitive cultures’ as well as in healthy artists, Prinzhorn repeated what Réja and Morgenthaler had already declared: Insane art is a concept and not existing. With this thought Prinzhorn rejected ideas like Cesare Lombroso’s imagination of the mad genius, who was bound to endure psychosises in order to create extraordinary works. Instead of drawing on these old topoi Prinzhorn tried to look for the connections between inspiration and psychotics’ perceptions and worldviews by setting up the hypothesis that their illnesses would influence the form and content of their works, as some somatic functions could not work the same as they do in a physically and mentally healthy person. In context with this point it needs to be emphasised again that according to Prinzhorn the quality of the works does not stand in any

198 Prinzhorn, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, p. 350. 199 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, p. 45. 200 Röske, Inspiration und Vorbild, p. 11.; Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, pp. 45 – 46. 46 connection with the type, degree or effects of the illnesses though.201 Another concept which influenced the perception and definition of the artworks produced by mentally affected people is Michel Foucault’s idea that insanity and reason should not be considered as opposites which determine whether a person is mentally healthy or not and whether they have to be psychologically treated or not. In order to allow an ongoing dialogue and discourse about the essence, meaning and positions of terms like sanity and insanity, mentally healthy and mentally ill, normal or abnormal Foucault rather suggested to distance oneself from an absolute concept of truth and reason and to leave the gap open between both extremes instead.202 Within this context he wanted to initialise opportunities for the ’modern man’ to communicate with the ’mad man’, as they have drifted apart after the mutual roots of insanity and reason have been erased over time.203 This separation got even stronger with the establisment of the psychiatry as an institution in the 18th century, which took in all kinds of people who differed from the norms made by the bourgeoise society such as mentally affected people, the work-shys or criminals. He hereby drew on the concept of the connections between madness and criminality which have already been discussed in the early publications on the topic area art in psychiatries.204 By classifying the psychiatry as a facility of power, which introduced not only a physical but also a linguistic border between both groups, Foucault tried to make the reader question concepts about madness, the treatment of the people suffering from it and their relationship with mentally healthy people.205 He wanted to make them become aware of the fact that insanity is a social construct relying on people or institutions who misused their power by detaching others from the rest of society. As these people hidden from outside life represented the world’s real truth, Foucault pleaded for their reintegration into society in order to change it for the better.206 These statements he laid down in his monography ’Madness and Civilisation’,207 which was published in Great Britain in 1967,208 must not be interpreted in a direct line with Réja’s,

201 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, pp. 196 – 198.; Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, p. 44. 202 Thomas Barth, ’Michel Foucault: Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft – Eine Geschichte des Wahns im Zeitalter der Vernunft’, in Alfred Pritz (ed.), Einhundert Meisterwerke der Psychotherapie: Ein Literaturführer (Wien-New York: Springer, 2008), pp. 59 – 62, pp. 59 – 60. 203 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, ed. by Richard Howard (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. XII. 204 Christof Goddemeier, ’Geschichte der Psychiatrie: Wahnsinn ist keine Krankheit’, aerzteblatt.de, [https://www.aerzteblatt.de/archiv/102595/Geschichte-der-Psychiatrie-Wahnsinn-ist-keine-Krankheit, accessed 30/08/2019]. 205 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, pp. XII – XIV. 206 Annkristin,’Rezension: Foucault “Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft“’, Blog Mental Illness: Vor- und Darstellungen des Wahnsinns im historischen Wandel, [https://wahnsinn.hypotheses.org/2279, accessed 30/08/2019]. 207 This Master thesis uses one of the latest translations by Richard Howard, published in 1993: Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 1993. 208 Barth, Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft, p. 59. 47 Morgenthaler’s or Prinzhorn’s research, as Foucault only marginally focused on art production within psychiatries. Instead he claimed that insanity is mainly characterised by the absence of any type of work. Instead of defining madness as an illness, as all his predecessors did, he did not interpret insanity as a disorder at all, since it could not exist on its own but relied on the contrasts between reason and non-reason, reason and irrationality.209 Following that, Foucault emphasised that the idea that mental illnesses could increase art production or trigger hidden creative drives was a false conclusion, as ’work and [...] madness were incompatible’.210 As soon as madness was involved within the production process of an artwork, the language of their creators proceeded forward to another sphere where there was no communication between them and the beholders possible anymore and this affected the understanding and interpretation of the artwork as well. So instead of making the mental illness responsible for mismatches or differences in looks, styles or topics, Foucault drew on his idea of the language barrier between the ’mad man’ and the ’(pre)modern man’, which made any interpretation of an artwork, text or musical piece created under the influence of a disease difficult and demanded psychiatric or at least psychological training. But as Foucault characterised madness as ’the dissolution of thought [...] which opens out onto the modern world [...] and provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself’,211 the artwork and its creator can function as means to restore the world’s original truth.212 Therefore, ’where there is a work of art there is no madness, and yet madness is contemporary with the work of art’213 according to Foucualt. Additionally, his statements about leaving the antagonism of madness and reason behind, about opening a dialectical discourse between both forms of knowledge and about questioning long used terms can be compared especially with Prinzhorn’s findings, as both of them rejected fixed projections attributed to the personalities and artworks of psychiatric patients. Following that, Foucault’s demand to avoid simplifications and dualism also within definitions214 is especially interesting when interpreting the works of professional artists who fell mentally ill but recovered and therefore cannot be simply categorised as psychotic artists. Hereby Foucault did not only liberate madness from ist pejorative meaning but also opened discussions about its essence and about longly supported conceptualities which make it harder for academic and non-academic circles to look at the subject from an objective point of view.

209 Goddemeier, Wahnsinn ist keine Krankheit, [https://www.aerzteblatt.de/archiv/102595/Geschichte-der- Psychiatrie-Wahnsinn-ist-keine-Krankheit, accessed 30/08/2019]. 210 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 287. 211 Ibid., p. 288. 212 Ibid., pp. 286 – 288. 213 Ibid., pp. 288 – 289. 214 Barth, Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft, p. 61. 48 3. Art Brut, Outsider Art and the Institutionalisation of the Artworks of Mentally Affected People

3.1 The Reception of Madness’ Products - Perspectives and Views on Artworks Created by Mentally Affected People in the 1930s and 1940s

After Réja, Morgenthaler and Prinzhorn had supported the upgrading of psychotic artworks by promoting their aesthetic value and by liberating their examination from a solely medical point of view in the 1910s and 1920s, the remaining decades of the first half of the 20th century were shaped by a major backfall within the history of reception of the artworks created by psychiatric patients. Based on biological theories such as Morel’s paradigm of degeneration the artworks produced by mentally affected people were integrated in National Socialist dicourses about health, race hygiene and the ideal German. In context with the enactment of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in 1933, which categorised mentally ill people not only as an obstacle for winning the war but also as a danger to maintain a healthy nation, any person who differed from the racial norm was seen as ’unworthy to live’. Following the implementation of the law, within the Aktion T4 more than 70 000 patients of mental health facilities were gased to death on German and Austrian territory between 1940 and 1941 in the zenith of the discussions about race hygiene and the impacts of mental and physical ’degenerations’ on a functioning Third Reich.215 Based on the withering assessment about the existence of mentally affected people the artworks they created within mental health facilities were only considered under the aspect of their illness. Being an evidence for their creators’ mental disorders their aesthetic value was not recognised. They were only used in a counterproductive way to degrade modern art instead,216 whose stylistic principles were compared with the ones immanent in psychotic art. Following Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s statement that an artwork allows the observer to draw conclusions about its creator’s biological and physical conditions, modern as well as pychotic art were associated with mad, ill or even Jewish art. Within this context he set up the hypothesis that artworks which were based on these structures could only be attributed to mentally affected people, who mirrored their own racial type in their depictions of human beings, partly on purpose and partly unconsciously. According to Schultze-Naumburg this also counted the other way round, so a mentally unhealthy person was only able to create ’ill’ art, which could additionally only be valued by mentally unhealthy observers. As he was convinced that the amount of artworks which showed a similar type of person was the

215 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, pp. 48 – 49. 216 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, p. 237. 49 decisive factor in hierarchical fights for power and authority and would determine which ’race’ was currently ruling, Schultze-Naumburg explained that the rising numbers of deformed bodies in expressionist and psychotic artworks were signs for a takeover by a degenerate, mad race. As the representatives of the avant-garde rejected naturalistic depictions and hereby distanced themselves from antique and Renaissance ideals, which preferred a light-skinned, well-built and often blue-eyed type, the theorist warned his readers of a repression and obliteration of the Aryan race. Therefore, being impressed by the artworks created by mentally ill people, psychiatric patients, the so-called ’primitive cultures’ or the avant-garde was considered as a betrayal towards the Aryan genetic constitution.217 In order to visualise his statements Schultze-Naumburg compared avant-garde artworks with photographs taken of psychiatric patients and with their works themselves, which laid the foundations for the exhibition on degenerate art taking place in 1937/38. This exposition introduced large parts of the population to the artworks created by psychiatric patients for the first time but also reinforced negative perceptions which have already been common in the 19th century, as it only presented them as worthless, immoral and mad,218 as synonyms for degeneration, the destruction of the Aryan race and the downfall of German ideals. 219 Procceding from that, art and especially the artworks produced by mentally affected people were turned into mediums for exercising social and political power. As they were instrumentalised as means to reveal the in the eyes of the Nazis destructive and failing art policy of the Weimar Republic by using the subtitle ’Official Art in Germany 1918 and 1933’, it was on the one hand a first way to repress other political tendencies before the first violent measures such as deportations took place. By comparing mad and Jewish art the exhibition was on the other hand also integrated into the antisemitic debates of the 1930s and shows to which extent the artworks of mentally affected people did not only play a role for medical and artistic circles but entered the political and social sector after the 1930s as well.220

3.2 Jean Dubuffet’s Concept of Art Brut, its Validity for the Works of Mentally Ill People and the Influence of Prinzhorn and his Collection on the French Writer

Under the impression of the National Socialist struggle of annihilation towards the artworks created by psychiatric patients and the pejorative view on their stylistic characteristics the

217 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, pp. 49 – 53. 218 Ibid., pp. 65 – 66 / 71 / 76 – 77. 219 Thomas Schramme, ’The Quest to Understand the Afflicted Mind: Hans Prinzhorn and the Artistry of the Mentally Ill’, in Victoria Tischler (ed.), Mental Health, Psychiatry and the Arts: A Teaching Handbook (Oxford- New York: Redcliffe Publishing, 2010), pp. 33 – 42, p. 35. 220 Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany, 1890 – 1937: Utopia and Despair (Manchester: University Press, 1988), p. 189. 50 French collector, painter and art theorist Jean Dubuffet developed a new and deliberately polarising concept at the end of the 1940s, which is known under the name of Art brut.221 As an originally rather traditionally trained artist, who recognised the significance of art within social and economic contexts but rejected academic standards and restricted concepts towards the essence of art in the first half of the 20th century,222 Dubuffet discovered his interest in psychotic art during his studies in Paris in the 1920s. As especially French psychiatric circles had an open mind for the artworks produced by patients and since Paris was one of the modern metropoles and prominent centers of avant-garde art with surrealism and dadaism leading the way, he found the right conditions for his ideas of a free, independent and non- restricted artistry there.223 The members of the surrealist and dadaist movement were well known for their appreciation of psychotic art, as they were looking for alternative forms of expression which were original, individual, authentic, irrational and most noteably free of academic, social, political or other restrictions made by the bourgeoisie. Like the surrealists and dadaists, who he socialised with in Paris, Dubuffet was interested in the possibilities of mentally affected people to get access to the subconscious 224 via some kind of automatism. He as well as the thinkers of the movement were convinced that unlike the avant-garde artists, who had to artificially provoke this state via drugs, alcohol, medication or an enormous sleep deficit, the ’lunatic artists’ were naturally able to get in this position due to inborn drives. Therefore, both Dubuffet’s and the surrealists’ interpretations circulated around some type of cultural criticism. But unlike them, who classified the works of mentally ill people as a counterpart to traditional art or art created by healthy people by drawing on its ’abnormal’ mysterious character,225 Dubuffet focused on the influence of the room an artist lived in. Within this context he drafted his concept around the idea of social isolation and hereby widened the approaches to psychotic art.226 Inspired by both the surrealists’ engagement for the survival of psychotic art during the Nazi era, who organised exhibitions of artworks produced by both professional and mentally ill

221 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, p. 82. 222 Michel Thévoz, ’L’Art Brut: Vom Untergrund zur öffentlichen Anerkennung’, in Ingfried Brugger, Peter Gorsen, Klaus Albrecht Schröder (eds.), Kunst & Wahn, Exhib. Cat. Kunstforum Wien 1997 (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), pp. 383 – 388, p. 383. 223 Claudia Dichter, ’Art Brut – gestern und heute, ein Überblick’, in Ingfried Brugger, Peter Gorsen, Klaus Albrecht Schröder (eds.), Kunst & Wahn, Exhib. Cat. Kunstforum Wien 1997 (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), pp. 58 – 67, p. 64. 224 Beveridge, Art of the Mentally Ill, [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1282252/, accessed 31/08/2019]. 225 Karen Jones a. o., Framing Marginalised Art: Developing an Ethical Multidimensional Framework for Exhibiting the Creative Works by People Who Experienced Mental Illness and/or Psychological Trauma (Parkville: Cunningham Dax Collection, 2010), pp. 19 – 20. 226 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, p. 82. 51 artists in exile and collected their works, and by travels during Switzerland which led him into psychiatries and their art studios, Dubuffet started to term and classify these artworks in a new and distinct way.227 Based on the experiences he gathered due to the encounters with both surrealist and psychotic art and thinking Dubuffet coined the expression ’Art Brut’ in 1945, which can be translated as raw, unhewn, original and unworked art. He herein included all artworks created by people who are not part of the leading cultural movements228 and are practising without referring to artistic rules, role models or demands made by the public or institutions. According to Dubuffet they get artistically creative due to an inner urge, based on their own creativity and without training or instructions instead.229 As they do not organise the creative process and do not analyse their products, they would rather let the unconscious and spontaneous element within them speak, 230 whether it would be about deciding which materials or mediums they should select or whether they would choose topics and motifs.231 Even though the concerned artists are therefore quite autonomous towards artistic trends, the Art Brut movement does not represent a type of sub- or counterculture against the academic artistic directions but rather a parallel development, which stands on its own.232 Although psychiatric patients and mentally ill artists have always been considered as the largest and most important group in his concept, Dubuffet included other kinds of non- professional artists and minorities as well such as elder people, prisoners, spiritists, solitaries, people living at or below the poverty line and other autodidacts and classified them as Art Brut representatives. 233 In addition, the numbers and kinds of people belonging to the movement must be permanently extended, as the term is not exclusive in its meaning and is rather based on methods of elimination than on stylistic attributions. Therefore, it must remain open what other types of artists are integrated within the concept, as nearly everyone who uses unconventional modes of creation can belong to the Art Brut group.234 What connects the different factions are their self-defintion and their perception of the works they create within

227 Dichter, Art Brut – gestern und heute, p. 64. 228 Leo Navratil, ’Einleitung: Art Brut und Psychiatrie’, in Leo Navratil (ed.), Die Künstler aus Gugging, Exhib. Cat. Museum Moderner Kunst Wien, Salzburger Landessammlung Rupertinum, Kunstamt Wedding Berlin, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz, Wolfgang-Gurlitt-Museum, Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau, 2nd edition (Vienna: Medusa-Verlag, 1983), pp. 25 – 48, p. 28. 229 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, pp. 82 – 83. 230 Bäumer, Kunst von Innen, p. 14. 231 Peter Gorsen, ’Das Prinzip der Art Brut’, in Ingfried Brugger, Peter Gorsen, Klaus Albrecht Schröder (eds.), Kunst & Wahn, Exhib. Cat. Kunstforum Wien 1997 (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), pp. 26 – 33, p. 30. 232 Navratil, Einleitung, p. 29. 233 Ibid., p. 82 – 83.; Ian Chilvers, John Glaves-Smith, Oxford Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2nd edition (Oxford: University Press, 2009), p. 35. 234 Bäumer, Kunst von Innen, p. 11.; Johann Feilacher, ’Vorwort’, in Johann Feilacher, Nina Ansperger (eds.), gehirn gefühl.!. kunst aus gugging von 1970 bis zur gegenwart (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 2018), pp. 6 – 13, p. 8. 52 socially isolated places, where they do not have any or only very limited contact with the outside world, which is one of the main characteristics of every Art Brut member. According to Dubuffet’s theory, they do not consider themselves as artists in contrast to professionals, since they do not intend to present, exhibit, sell or merchandise their works to a public audience but just create for themselves235 and often do not even classify their activities as creative occupations. They would rather interpret them as playful means of distraction or caricatures236 which emanate from a deep, inner need and are normally not promoted from the outside, for example by a psychiatrist, a caretaker or a manager.237 Their creations are highly individual statements of personal experience instead.238 As the decisive factor for their identification as Art Brut artists is not a mental or physical illness but the environment they live in and the similar approach they adopt during the production process, Dubuffet spoke against terms like lunatic or mad art.239 Based on that, he also rejected ideas about a connex between ingenuity and madness and emphasised that ’the artistic function [in mentally healthy and mentally ill artists] is identical in all cases, and there is no more an art of the insane than there is an art of dyseptics or those with knee problems’.240 He viewed the urgent drive to get artistically creative, which has always been attributed to insanity, as an extension of ’normal’ impulses which are immanent in both mentally healthy and mentally ill people instead.241 He idealised the art of mentally insane people as a result of their liberation from Western pathological structures and as the real form of ’primitive’ art and advocated the use of the term art for their creations rather than image- making in order to free them from their psychiatric context. 242 Dubuffet’s concept remained an idealised draft in many points, for example when looking at the statements that Art Brut artists would not be interested in fame and publicity, would not consider other contemporary artistic movements at all when they choose their motifs or stylistics 243 or would only create art in a raw and unrefined way, which should not be recognised or upgraded by academics.244 Nevertheless, Dubuffet hereby managed to put the examination of psychotic art on a different level. According to the theorist, not only an artist’s

235 Navratil, Einleitung, p. 29. 236 Michel Thévoz, Art Brut. Kunst jenseits der Kunst (Aarau: AT-Verlag, 1990), p. 11. 237 Navratil, Einleitung, p. 28. 238 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, p. 303. 239 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, pp. 82 – 83. 240 Kaira M. Cabañas, Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art (Chicago- London: University of Chicago Press, 2018), p. 47. 241 Navratil, Einleitung, p. 28. 242 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, pp. 300 / 303. 243 Viola Luz, Wenn Kunst behindert wird: Zur Rezeption von Werken geistig behinderter Künstlerinnen und Künstler in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012), p. 356. 244 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, p. 300. 53 mental illness but also his emotional state did not influence the creative process at all. Instead of focusing on the psychosis as a means to explain the appearance of an artwork, which was seen as vital by the Surrealists, Prinzhorn and Morgenthaler, he highlighted the status of the patients within society and their role as outsiders and emphasised the quality which was speaking through their works.245 Inspired by the artpieces he saw in the Waldau asylum and other Swiss psychiatries Dubuffet also started to collect and document works which met the requirements of his concept and repeatedly presented them to the public under the name Compagnie de l’Art Brut in Lausanne.246 He hereby laid the foundations for the developments of the 1960s, where the artworks created by psychiatric patients and mentally ill people were not only officially sold on the art market but also exhibited in art galleries or museums in order to demonstrate their significance to the public. Expositions conceptualised by using the keywords art and madness, schizophrenic art or art and psychosises like the documenta contributed to a further diffusion of this sector.247 One of his main role models not only for the setup of his own collection but also for his examination of alternative art in general was Hans Prinzhorn’s book ’Bildnerei der Geisteskranken’,248 which was introduced into French artistic circles in the 1920s by the expressionist Max Ernst, when Dubuffet had just started to study art in Paris.249 Following the reading of Prinzhorn’s monography, Dubuffet did not only question the status and nature of the artist and his own position at the market but also dived deeper into psychotic art as well. Although he could never visit the Prinzhorn collection himself, his theory and examination of alternative forms of art were greatly influenced by the artworks which were exhibited within this compilation, as he was only able to extract information from the visual depictions of the collection samples Prinzhorn integrated within his book due to language problems.250 The Prinzhorn collection in Heidelberg whose origins date from the late 1890’s is world- famous, although Lausanne and similar facilities outstrip it due to larger holdings. In contrast to the collection situated in the Waldau asylum it was intentionally built up as a basis for a later museum in order to familiarise the public with psychotic art. In addition, some of the collection samples should be presented and documented in a book in order to make them available for academic research, so the head of the university medical centre Karl Wilmanns

245 Bäumer, Kunst von innen, p. 11. 246 Dichter, Art Brut – gestern und heute, p. 64. 247 Bäumer, Kunst von Innen, p. 10. 248 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, p. 292. 249 Thomas Röske, ’Max Ernst entdeckt Prinzhorns Bildnerei der Geisteskranken’, in Thomas Röske, Ingrid van Beyme (eds.), Surrealismus und Wahnsinn, Exhib. Cat. Sammlung Prinzhorn Heidelberg 2009/2010 (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2009), pp. 53 – 67, p. 53. 250 MacGregor, Art of the Insane, p. 292. 54 employed Prinzhorn and entrusted him with this task in 1919. To draw as representative conclusions as possible the collection’s holdings had to be enlarged by other material sent from German, Swiss and Austrian psychiatries, which demarcate the Prinzhorn collection from other compilations preserved in asylums such as the Waldau or Gugging and increase its academic and art-historical range and scope. With more than 5000 pieces and additional information such as clinical records about more than 500 patients and mainly schizophrenics, gathered until 1921 the Heidelberg collection gained much attention in medical and artistic circles, so it could be permanently expanded until 1933. In 1933 the inflow of artworks stopped due to the takeover of the Nazis, who instrumentalised some of the works Prinzhorn collected for their racial discourses and presented them within the exhibition on degenerate art in 1937/38. After the holdings had been poorly stored during the Second World War and in the 1950s the collection was rediscovered due to the new interest in psychotic art rising at the beginning of the 1960s. This led to alternative forms of preservation, regular nationwide presentations of the collection’s holdings also in cooperation with established museums and galleries and eventually to its transformation into an exhibition centre.251 Today the Prinzhorn collection does not only represent one of the most important research centres on the topic area art in psychiatries and creativity within mentally affected people but also continually inspires theorists, art historians and psychiatrists to build up their own collections such as the Austrian Leo Navratil. With his foundation of the later so-called Haus der Künstler in Gugging he launched the most important clinic, museum and research centre for art production within psychiatries in Austria252 and hereby helped the concept of Art Brut to gain a foothold outside French, Swiss and German borders.

3.3 Leo Navratil’s Haus der Künstler in Gugging and the Promotion of Mentally Affected Artists

The growing interest in psychotic art and artworks created by psychiatric patients in the 1960s did not only lead to an institutionalisation and the launching of museums, galleries and reserach centres but also attracted professional artists to dive deeper into the imageries of

251 Jadi, Prinzhorn-Sammlung, pp. 176 / 178 – 179.; Inge Jarchov, ’Die Prinzhorn-Sammlung’, in Hans Gercke, Inge Jarchov (eds.), Die Prinzhorn-Sammlung: Bilder, Skulpturen, Texte aus Psychiatrischen Anstalten (ca. 1890 – 1920), Exhib. Cat. Heidelberger Kunstverein e. V., Kunstverein in Hamburg, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Kunsthalle Basel, Haus am Waldsee Berlin, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München 1980 (Königstein/Taunus: Athenäum, 1980), pp. 15 – 27, p. 19.; Gerlind Ulm Sanford, ’Outsiders’, in Herbert Arlt, Donald G. Daviau (eds.), Literature and the Fine Arts: Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (Oxford: Eolss Publishers, 2009), pp. 84 – 95, p. 86. 252 Hannah Rieger, ’Art Brut’, Leben in Art Brut, [https://livinginartbrut.com/index.php/de/home-de-at/art-brut, accessed 02/09/2019].

55 mentally affected people. Especially in Austria, which has been shaped by traditional, conservative and very restrictive views on the essence of art, its significance as a cultural factor and the status of the artist in the post-war-era, Jean Dubuffet’s concept was welcomed within artistic circles who wanted to create, present and sell their works without being limited by institutions, politics or morals. Artists like Arnulf Rainer or Peter Pongratz collected and exhibited their works along with the artworks created by psychiatric patients and tried to anchor them within the Austrian arts scene. Herein they were influenced by the anti- psychiatry movement of the 1960s, which highlighted the often disastrous physical and spatial circumstances patients endured during their stay in a clinic and drew attention to the influence of the reception order into a mental health facility on the patients’ social status and the advancing of their illness. Based on these developments within the history of the psychiatry as an institution artists and medics started to collaborate in order to research reasons, motifs, stylistics and the connex between artistry, the social environment of the mental health facility and the illness itself for the first time.253 One example for this procedure was the Austrian psychiatrist Leo Navratil, who ran the psychiatric hospital Maria Gugging in Lower Austria between 1946 and 1989, where he started to conduct experiences with patients on the use of art and language as a medium to diagnose and treat illnesses in 1954. After he had realised that some of his patients’ texts and paintings must be considered as works with an enormous aesthetic value he provided their creators with a house separated from the rest of the clinic where they could explicitely act out their artistic wishes. Within this building, which is known as the Haus der Künstler today, they could not only dedicate themselves to their creative drives but were also able to receive visitors amongst whom were popular writers such as Ernst Jandl or Friedericke Mayröcker254 as well as visual artists like Arnulf Rainer or the psychiatrist’s son Walter Navratil. Especially the encounter with Rainer led Leo Navratil to an examination of the use of art as a form of therapy in psychiatric environments, whereas the conversations with these professional artists provided him with the necessary theoretical and practical foundations he needed to look at the topic not only from a medical but also from an art-historical and aesthetic point of view.255 For Navratil art could be interpreted as a form of therapy, as it enables patients to consider their works as accomplishments and hereby increases their self-confidence, sense of self- worth and self esteem. As it would trigger some kind of self-healing mechanisms, it would

253 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, pp. 84 - 254 Melissa S. Etzler, ’Peripheral Writing: Psychosis and Prose from Ernst Herbeck to W. G. Sebald, in Önder Çakirtaş (ed.), Literature and Psychology: Writing, Trauma and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing Limited, 2019), pp. 18 – 48, 19 – 20. 255 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, p. 87. 56 not only calm down the patient but also makes communication and interaction with other people easier and less complicated for all concerned persons. Drawing on these basics, Navratil did not only challenge his patients to live out their artistic drives but also to sell and merchandise their works by installing a room for purchasing the artworks in the new residence, which he characterised as a home for living and working at the same time. Although he clearly rejected to derive any profit from the selling of psychotic art or some form of extensive commercialisation, he saw the merchandising and distribution of the artworks as an essential matter for the self esteem of their creators and as one of the main factors which contributed to their perception as artists and their equalisation in value to professionals. In addition, Navratil organised regular meetings with both professional artists and private confidants in order to represent and exhibit the created artworks not only within official institutions like galleries and museums but also within their natural envirnonment and asked the residents to design the walls of their new home as well.256 Therefore, the collection in Gugging, which is preserved in an own gallery with salesrooms since 2005 and in a museum dedicated to its representatives and their works since 2006,257 differs fundamentally from the Prinzhorn collection. As it does not only present the preserved artworks as research material separated from their context and formation conditions but integrates them into the lives of the artists, the former psychiatric clinic in Gugging could develop into an internationally accepted and well-recognised cultural and art-historical centre. Unlike Réja, Morgenthaler or Prinzhorn who examined artworks which were seldomly motivated from the outside but originated because of a patient’s own and distinct will, Navratil deliberately requested his patients to draw or paint by suggesting topics and materials and sometimes by even giving them concrete sketches or prototypes they should imitate or at least use as a stimulus. Although Navratil tried to avoid influencing the patients aesthetically according to his own words, he was later criticised for this procedure with respect to the requirements for the Art Brut concept, which demands that a patient gets creative by following only his inner drives and needs but not by external factors. Therefore, Navratil tried to put his own ideas about the connex between creativity and psychosis into writing.258 Even though he based his ideas on Dubuffet’s vision of Art Brut, the psychiatrist introduced a new term within the history of the reception of psychotic art and spoke about so-called ’zustandsgebundene Kunst’. Like his predecessors Navratil was convinced that not every

256 Navratil, Einleitung, pp. 33 / 46 / 48. 257 Feilacher, Vorwort, p. 10. 258 Cornelia Offergeld, ’Was aber ist Gugging?’, in Ingfried Brugger, Peter Gorsen, Klaus Albrecht Schröder (eds.), Kunst & Wahn, Exhib. Cat. Kunstforum Wien 1997 (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), pp. 393 – 405, p. 394.; Navratil, Einleitung, p. 47. 57 mentally affected person can call their work art and did not automatically view all of his patients as artists just because they suffered from a mental disorder. Therefore, he rejected terms like mad or psychotic art as much as Dubuffet did and emphasised that there is no difference between the art a psychiatric patient or a mentally healthy professional artist produces, so an artwork could never be used as an evidence to define or describe its creator’s illness. But similar to Prinzhorn and Réja he thought that the human consciousness and soul can enter a special state of mind which liberates them from the borders of a daily routine by triggering hidden artistic drives. He interpreted the psychosis and especially schizophrenia or mania as one of the forces which can provoke this condition but did not want to interpret an artwork created within a mental health facility as an exclusively aesthetic product only originating from the borders of a mental disorder. He rather advocated its historical and social meaning and wanted to see it as a document of its time period.259 Navratil’s successor Johann Feilacher tried to take one step forward by not only focusing on the state of the psychosis as an eminent factor for the interpretation of the works of psychiatric patients as artworks. He rather stated that a mentally affected person’s ability to get artistically creative does not necessarily decline in case their mental health improves but that they could also create extraordinary works with a distinct aesthetic value in times of regeneration or even in case of a full recovery.260 He also tried to widen both Dubuffet’s and Navratil’s concept and coined the term ’ars amabile’, which can be applied to people suffering from mental or physical illnesses who do get artistically creative but do not produce unique works full of extraordinary value and meaning. He hereby wanted to integrate all those creative people whose works might not be considered as artworks when applying the Art brut ideas to them and those whose evaluation is influenced by psychiatrists or managers who do not concentrate on the artistic value in the first place but look and interpret the works by relating the creator’s illness to them.261 With these ideas Feilacher did not only widen the scope of artists who are part of the Gugging art scene but tried to further remove exclusive attributions and ascriptions within the Art Brut movement.

3.4 The Swiss Reception of the Works Produced by Mentally Affected People – The Collection Dammann

After Navratil had already theoretically widened the concept of Art brut in the 1960s Roger Cardinal ensured its transmission into English-speaking countries by coining the term

259 Navratil, Einleitung, pp. 29 – 30 / 42 / 48. 260 Bäumer, Kunst von Innen, p. 11. 261 Johann Feilacher, ’Art Brut & Co’, in Angelica Bäumer (ed.), Kunst von Innen (Vienna: Holzhausen, 2007), pp. 134 – 137, p. 136. 58 Outsider Art in his same-titled book in 1972. Even though Outsider Art is often seen as a synonym for Art Brut and has similar intentions, it includes a wider range of artists such as representatives of naïve and folk art and all kinds of autodidacts and self-taughts. Proceeding from Navratil’s idea of art being dependent on an exceptional psychological or physical state and Dubuffet’s vision of an ahistorical art,262 he shaped a concept which does not contain the idea of uniqueness and creating without any role models at all. Unlike Art brut-artists, whose works need to emanate from an own inner need but should not be stimulated by other art movements or any external factors, the concept of Outsider Art focuses more on the status of the creators within the society. Although Cardinal highlighted that a real Outsider artist should never be consciously influenced within his choice of topics or materials for example in ateliers or art studios for mentally and physically affected people, he explained that principally there could be representatives of Outsider Art in every class or social context.263 Therefore, every person who lives, works and creates ’on the margins of society and who [...] find[s] themselves unable to fit into the conventional requirements- social and psychological, as well as artistic- of the culture they inhabit’264 can be addressed as an Outsider artist. One collection whose trustees explicitely refer to its holdings as items of Outsider Art is the collection Dammann in Basel, which is one of the currently expanding and most rewarding collections of non-academic art in Switzerland. The couple Karin and Gerhard Dammann started to collect paintings, sculptures, three-dimensional objects and installations created by the Gugging artists, mentally affected people who spent parts of their lives in psychiatries, naif artists or eccentrics like Albert Louden or Michel Nedjar in the late 1990s. Unlike the gallerie and the museum gugging or the Prinzhorn collection the collection Dammann is a private one, which was originally built up only for personal pleasure but whose 350 holdings could be presented in exhibitions from the 2000’s onwards.265 By looking at this example of an alternative art collection it becomes clear that Art Brut, Outsider Art or any type of pyschotic art have been so widely accepted in the last decades that they did not only reach official institutions but could also enter private households and reach the ordinary beholder.

262 Luz, Wenn Kunst behindert wird, p. 51.; Thomas Röske, ’Wahnsinn sammeln’, in Thomas Röske, Bettina Brand-Claussen, Gerhard Dammann (eds.), Wahnsinn sammeln: Outsider Art aus der Sammlung Dammann, Exhib. Cat. Sammlung Prinzhorn Heidelberg 2006, (Heidelberg: Das Wunderhorn, 2006), pp. 10 – 21, p. 12. 263 Roger Cardinal, ’Die Eigenartigkeit der Outsider-Kunst’, in Angelica Bäumer (ed.), Kunst von Innen (Vienna: Holzhausen, 2007), pp. 16- 25, pp. 20 – 21 264 David Maclagan, Outsider Art: From the Margins to the Marketplace (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), p. 7. 265 Thomas Röske, ’Vorsicht Walla! oder: Ist Sammeln männlich?: Karin und Gerhard Dammann im Interview mit Thomas Röske’, in Thomas Röske, Bettina Brand-Claussen, Gerhard Dammann (eds.), Wahnsinn sammeln: Outsider Art aus der Sammlung Dammann, Exhib. Cat. Sammlung Prinzhorn Heidelberg 2006 (Heidelberg: Das Wunderhorn, 2006), pp. 22 – 37, p. 22; Dammann, Collecting Madness, [http://collectingmadness.com/ sammlung/, accessed 05/09/2019].

59 4. Lives and Works of Artists in German, Swiss and Austrian Psychiatries - Art as a Form of Therapy and Medium of Expression

4.1 Artistry within the Mental Hospital in the 19th and Early 20th Century - Types, Motivations and Materials

Proceeding from Prinzhorn’s and Morgenthaler’s writings in the 1920s and promoted by Jean Dubuffet’s concept of Art brut, the psychiatry developed into an environment to live and work for the artists and into a new place for professional art production in the second half of the 20th century. Although the recognition and approval of the works created by mentally affected people as artworks took until the 1920s, the beginnings of a non-institutional artistry within mental health facilities started in the 19th century or earlier, whereas the first evidences date from the 1800s. As the psychiatry was still in the early stages of development in terms of determination and treatment of illnesses, most of the patients have been diagnosed with dementia praecox, which can be classified as hebephrenia, or other types of schizophrenia today. They spent tens of years in institutions,266 whether it was an infirmary, an orphanage or a poor house in the first half of the 19th century or a more or less professional sanatorium after the 1850s.267 Since the range of treatment options has been limited to coercive measures such as prolonged bath treatment, solitary confinement in padded cells, utilisation of straitjackets or fixation to beds, which have been combined with administration of tranquillisers or sleeping pills the chances for total healing and reintegration into the society were low.268 For the patients whose illnesses were not categorised as very grave or dangerous psychiatrists developed different forms of occupational therapy both in the house and in the neighbouring green areas in order to treat their disorders. Although the chances for a full recovery were considered low within these environments, their staff saw both mental and physical activities as well as outdoor exercises and a distinct amount of tranquillity as fundamental for a successful therapy. The chances to enjoy treatment and the numbers of different possibilities herein depended on the type of asylum a patient was accomodated and treated in, whether it was a university hospital which often provided accomodation for a short time after the employed psychiatrists have conducted examinations or whether it was a municipal or state- run asylum where long-stay patients were more or less permanently treated.269 Both in urban and rural psychiatries men were more often deployed for agricultural and technical or

266 Thomas Röske, ’Eruptionen des Unbewussten?: Künstlerisches Schaffen in der Psychiarie um 1900’, in Karin Dannecker, Uwe Herrmann (eds.), Warum Kunst?: Über das Bedürfnis Kunst zu schaffen (Berlin: Medizinisch Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 2017), pp. 23 – 31, p. 24. 267 Luz, Wenn Kunst behindert wird, p. 60. 268 Röske, Künstlerisches Schaffen in der Psychiatrie, p. 24. 269 Ingrid von Beyme, Sabine Hohnholz, Vergissmeinnicht-Psychiatriepatienten und Anstaltsleben um 1900: Aus Werken der Sammlung Prinzhorn (Berlin: Springer, 2018), pp. 2 – 3 / 135. 60 artisanal activities both in the house and at the manors of the psychiatry, while women engaged in needlework, different types of handcraft or domestic work.270 Within this variety of employment opportunities the first artworks arose, whereas in some cases special buildings or living areas were separated from the clinical parts of the psychiatries and were provided for art production or handcrafting with sometimes even professional instructors offering some kinds of lessons to the patients. The attempts to cure mentally affected people within these separate facilities were very low though, so psychiatrists rather used art as a way to calm their patients down or to organise their free time in these workshops. 271 As painting, drawing, carving or any kind of handcrafting were deliberately utilised as disciplinary measures and for educational purposes, the works which emanated in this context were not interpreted as artworks and therefore not collected. Both medical and paramedical staff only desisted from throwing the works away when they considered them as necessary for the process of diagnosis and treatment and as aids to draw conclusions on the type and progression of the mental illness or when they found them fascinating enough to keep them for amusement or entertainment reasons like the objects in premodern cabinets of curiosities.272 The reasons for psychiatric patients to get artistically active in these institutions were manifold and diverse. While some of the patients used art as a mechanism to deal with and document their reception order and the loss of family connections, legal status, rights and freedom as well as their free will to organise their lives following their own principles, others tried to reflect on their illness, its reasons, progression and treatment.273 Some of the residents did not only mirror their new daily routine and environments or saw their creations as pasttime activities but also perceived and defined themselves as artists. By exchanging their works with food, clothing or in some cases little amounts of money they tried to realise their ideas of a normal life with less boundaries where they could practise a respected profession and contribute to the achievements of the society that abandoned them. Some of the internees tried to provide evidences for their unlawful reception order, their innocence in case they were hospitalised after crimes or to underline their sanity and accountability and yet others wanted to deliver religious or political visions to posterity and had to use creative methods for that reason due to a lack of other opportunities such as photographic or written documentation. Furthermore, there have been cases of patients who used drawings or

270 Monika Ankele, Alltag und Aneignung in Psychiatrien um 1900: Selbstzeugnisse von Frauen aus der Sammlung Prinzhorn (Wien-Köln-Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2009), p. 126. 271 Luz, Wenn Kunst behindert wird, p. 62. 272 Röske, Künstlerisches Schaffen in der Psychiatrie, p. 24. 273 Beyme, Hohnholz, Vergissmeinnicht, p. 247. 61 paintings as means to demonstrate their interest in morals, compliance with discipline and cleanliness in order to convince their doctors and caretakers to discharge them from the clinic and to encourage their reintegration into society. In cases where this was not considered due to an apparently strong advancement of the mental illness the patients could also design their clothing, the furniture or the walls of the psychiatry274 in order to obtain a certain degree of self-determination and self esteem to reassure themselves of their own self-worth and identity and in order to liberate themselves from restricting clinical orders and hierarchies. In contrast to these there are records of artists who did not intend to create but saw themselves as instruments of a higher power who used them as its medium during the creation process or as a means to prevent them and their fellow human beings from evil.275 Nevertheless, what connects the artistically creative patients is the importance of art within their lives, which was as essential as daily needs and served as a means to reassure them of their own existence and significance within the clinical borders.276 However, professional artists who created within the mental health facility were a rather rare phenonomen and often are not considered within these reflections on motivations, topics and materials used by patients in psychiatries. As artistic leanings were not deliberately promoted within 19th- and early 20th-century- psychiatries, the patients used a variety of materials which were often not given to them for creative reasons but were part of the daily routine within the clinic. Depending on their social status and the type of mental health facility they lived in some of them had the possibility to purchase material a professional artist used such as different types of pencils and brushes, small- and large-sized canvas or more or less expensive colours. Others who could not afford to buy image carriers and other material themselves had to laboriously request singular pieces from their families or the staff members and often adapted material that should be and was originally used in other contexts such as toilet paper, pieces of newspapers, clinical documents or bills of fairs, food or calendar sheets and especially different types of textiles.277 With these materials the patients produced paintings, drawings, three-dimensional objects or artworks which would be classified as installations according to modern art-historical terminology. They hereby addressed topics concerning both their lives before and during the stay in the psychiatry such as their disorders, the contact with medical and paramedical staff or their longing for their families, professions or tasks they had to leave behind. While some of them tried to explain their illnesses and defend themselves against accusations of being

274 Röske, Eruptionen des Unbewussten, pp. 25 – 26 / 28 – 30. 275 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, pp. 13 – 14 / 16 – 17. 276 Röske, Eruptionen des Ubewussten, p. 30. 277 Luz, Wenn Kunst behindert wird, p. 63.; Beyme, Hohnholz, Vergissmeinnicht, p. X. 62 mentally ill by drawing forces that would influence them negatively and cause their mad behaviour, others developed scientific theories on paper which seem to represent memories of their former professional life. Yet others described the different phases of their lives and provided the beholder with some type of autobiography by using both pictorial and written means or created full-size objects which should replace social contacts they lost due to the illness and stay within a mental health facility such as partners, family members or friends.278 Besides these visualisations of the other life the patients led before their stay the representation of the treatment they received took an important role in their artistic occupations. Especially within the Prinzhorn collection and in other early compilations such as the collection of the Waldau asylum paintings and drawings could be preserved in which patients reflected on prolonged bath treatments, forced injections or on being wrapped up in straithjackets within the padded cell and added written comments about the coercion used by medics or about the duration and type of the regime. Others portrayed themselves, their fellow resident patients or their doctors, psychiatrists and caretakers by concentrating on status and hierarchies within the clinic or focused on the architecture of the psychiatric hospital and painted the rooms they lived and worked in. Besides these often highly depressive artworks some of the patients dealt with the new situation in an ironic and humoristic way by cartooning their doctors and caretakers or by representing their commitment to the treatment of themselves and their fellow residents in a sarcastic way.279 Considering the topics of art production in mental health facilities of the 19th and early 20th century the assumption that art had an essential significance for surviving and accepting the stay within the clinic which has already been stated when discussing the reasons for creative productions has to be repeated again. Proceeding from these examples, art can be classified as a means to document, understand, prove, condemn and come to terms with illnesses, methods and relations within mental hospitals or facilitate the stay for the patients and for the beholder. The next chapter tries to provide an overview of one of these functions of art and focuses on its significance within the healing process: Art as a form of therapy based on case examples.

4.2 Life, Work and Illness of the Schizophrenic Artist Adolf Wölfli

One of the most popular artists of the Art Brut movement and prime example for the idea that creative inspiration can result from schizophrenia is the Swiss drawer, composer and writer Adolf Wölfli. He represents the first type of artistically active artists living in a psychiatry, who started to create within the mental health facility but had worked in a different sector

278 Röske, Eruptionen des Unbewussten, pp. 25 – 29. 279 Beyme, Hohnholz, Vergissmeinnicht, pp. 65 – 69 / 103 – 104 / 173 / 287 – 288. 63 before his detention. Although Wölfli’s works have been fully recognised already during his lifetime, he started to create due to an inner need and urge but was not motivated or even promoted by external factors. Art as a form of therapy has not been considered during the time of his stay in the Waldau asylum, so Wölfli’s creative drives were only tolerated but not deliberately supported.280 His biography and analysises of his works though encourage the beholder to question to which extent the schizophrenic used art and designing as a way to cope with his past, mental disorder and hospitalisation and whether he tried to hereby relieve himself from the traumata he endured during his childhood.

4.2.1 Adolf Wölfli’s Biography, Anamnesis and Artistry Adolf Wölfli was born in 1864 in the Canton of Berne in Switzerland as the son of a dipsomaniac stone carver and a laundress, who tried to increase the family’s income by occasionally working as a prostitute during the regular imprisonments of her husband. After his father had left the family when Wölfli was six years old and his mother had died in 1873, Adolf was entrusted to the canton’s administration’s care, whose heads organised accomodation for him in several farmsteads in Berne and its environs, where he had to work for food and shelter as a so-called Verdingkind.281 The following years were shaped by hard physical work on the manors of his foster home and physical abuse on a daily basis by dipsomaniac and violent employers, who did not offer him the opportunity to go to school regularly which was a striking factor within the development and progression of his mental illness. Proceeding from these childhood traumata, Wöfli’s psychosis was finally triggered by the neglection of a marriage proposal he had given to the daughter of a financially well-off farmer, who completely forbade him any contact afterwards.282 Although Wölfli had found a job in the agricultural sector at the age of 18, these experiences upset his mental balance in such a huge way that he did not only get into verbal and physical fights with colleagues and employers but later also directed his interests to underaged girls, who he approached to receive the love he missed as a child. After he was repeatedly caught during forceful sexual

280 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, pp. 14 – 15. 281 The term Verdingkind refers to a special type of child labour in Switzerland, which was especially common in the Canton of Berne from the 19th century onwards until the late 1970s. Children, mostly orphans who were not sent to asylums and offspring whose parents could not afford their upbringing, were consigned to the municipal or communal administration whose heads had to provide board and lodging in foster families who could more or less exploit them as unpaid workers in their house and other properties, mainly agricultural manors, in return. Besides hard physical work their lives were shaped by a retraction of their legal rights, restricted possibilities of formal education as well as physical and mental abuse. For more information have a look at: Marco Leuenberger, ’Verdingkinder – ein schweizerischer Sonderfall?’, in Gisela Hauss, Susanne Maurer (eds.), Migration, Flucht und Exil im Spiegel der Sozialen Arbeit (Bern-Stuttgart-Wien: Haupt Verlag, 2010), pp. 17 – 33, pp. 17 – 18 / 25 – 26 / 29. 282 Manuela Dobler, Die Bedeutung der Kunst Adolf Wölflis aus kunsthistorischer und psychologischer Perspektive, unpublished Dipl. Proj. (Innsbruck 2004), p. 33. 64 interactions with a fourteen-, a five- and in 1895 even with a three-year-old girl and therefore spent several years in prison, he was brought into the Waldau asylum in order to get tested on his mental sanity and accountability. As he was diagnosed with schizophrenia283 combined with a severe form of paranoia, hallucinations and violent behaviour, he was kept in the asylum for the next 35 years, where he lived until his death in 1930.284 Due to his detention in a solitary confinement cell for more than 20 years which made contacts with other patients very rare and restricted Wölfli to communicate with his psychiatrists in case he wanted to interact with other human beings, he was inspired to draw, text prosa and poems, write an autobiography, compose and perform self-written pieces on wind instruments he built himself.285 Therefore, Wölfli’s motivation to start drawing was caused by boredom and few possibilities to communicate on the one hand, as according to Morgenthaler’s descriptions he even mentioned himself that his actions were some kind of game and time killer.286 On the other hand it was also formented due to an inner need to express his feelings and thoughts about his life and environment when looking at his autobiographical works and at the fact that he was not urged from the outside at all. Wölfli’s interest in getting creatively active must be entirely credited to himself, as he was never promoted by his caretakers or psychiatrists and in the beginning even struggled to get more material from them.287 His drawn oeuvre can be divided into two parts which contain works Wölfli made for his personal use such as single sheets and connected series of drawings 288 and the so-called ’Brotkunst’ which consisted of works he made explicitely for vendition and merchandising and he produced from 1916 onwards on a regular basis according to Morgenthaler. 289 Although there are records that Wölfli has already started to draw in 1899, the first graphic works date from 1904, first black and white ones and from 1907 onwards coloured ones,290 when caretakers and psychiatrists realised Wölfli’s seriousness and talent and regularly provided him with drawing materials.291 The features that shape and characterise Wölfli’s work can already be found in the first preserved drawings from the early 1910s. These are often arranged in series who stand out

283 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 203. 284 Thévoz, Art Brut, p. 132. 285 Ibid., p. 132. 286 Morgenthaler, Geisteskranker als Künstler, p. 74. 287 Thévoz, Art Brut, p. 132. 288 Ibid., p. 132.; Daniel Baumann, ’Adolf Wölfli: Selbstermächtigung und Weltentwurf’, in Angelica Bäumer (ed.), Kunst von Innen (Vienna: Holzhausen, 2007), pp. 42 – 50, p. 42. 289 Elka Spoerri, ’Adolf Wölfli, 1864 – 1970’, in Ingfried Brugger, Peter Gorsen, Klaus Albrecht Schröder (eds.), Kunst & Wahn, Exhib. Cat. Kunstforum Wien 1997 (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), pp. 159 – 168, p. 165. 290 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 204. 291 Thévoz, Art Brut, p. 132. 65 due to their intermedia approach and the interaction of text, image and writing both poesy and prosa, array of figures and list-like structures which contain a special amount of rhythm and therefore resemble Wölfli’s musical pieces. Although most of them rely on the ornament and a combination of repetitive, often centralised symmetrical, circular or oval patterns, they are regularly interrupted by small figurative scenes. These represent a counterpoise to the decorative structures which are subject to only few changes and are often combined with explanatory descriptions, appellations or poems within the picture or on the back side of the page, which provide the depicted persons with a story and individualise them.292 Besides ornaments Wölfli also used geometric and astrological signs, arranged them throughout the whole sheet and contrasted them with people, both private acquaintances and public figures such as politicians or people occupied in the cultural sector, animals, interiors and landscapes. The topics he wanted to depict in his single-sheet works by using this stylistic catalogue were on the one side very abstract and concentrated on themes of transformation and rebirth.293 On the other side they were representational, as Wölfli also produced portraits of family members, of godlike and saintly figures or of himself.294 In addition, he created extensive series of narrative works in which he tried to come to terms with his childhood, designed so- called geographic booklets where he laid down his visions of a better world and his place in it, described fictional travels he experienced and laid a special focus on architecture or picked up on contemporary social and political topics such as sport, technology, urban and rural life.295 Essential for Wölfli’s artistic development as well as his long afterlife in both art-historical and psychological circles was his encounter with the psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler, who practised at the Waldau asylum from 1907 to 1919. Morgenthaler did not only continually provide Wölfli with material and hereby supported him in getting artistically creative on a regular basis but also made a huge contribution towards his recognition as an artist by publishing the biography ’Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler’, which embedded Wölfli and his works in art history.296 Morgenthaler was also the first theorist who tried to interpret stylistics and topics the Swiss used as signs of his schizophrenic behaviour and hereby laid the foundations for the exploration of a so-called schizophrenic art.

292 Baumann, Selbstermächtigung und Weltentwurf, p. 44.; Elka Spoerri, Adolf Wölfli (1864 – 1930): Werke aus einer Privatsammlung, Exhib. Cat. Campagne Rosenberg 1984 (Bern: Galerie Jürg Stuker, 1984), p. 7.; Marianne Wackernagel, Adolf Wölfli: Die Schenkung Ernst und Maria Elisabeth Mumenthaler-Fischer, Exhib. Cat. Kunstmuseum Basel 1998, (Basel: Schwabe & Co.AG, 1998), pp. 11 – 14. 293 Elka Spoerri, ’Adolf Wölfli, Artist/Builder: A Consideration of His Life and Works’, in Tanya Heinrich (ed.), The Art of Adolf Wölfli: St. Adolf-Giant-Creation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 15 – 27, p. 17 – 18. 294 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, p. 15. 295 Spoerri, Adolf Wölfli, pp. 159 – 165. 296 Ibid., p. 16. 66 4.2.2 The Influence of Adolf Wölfli’s Schizophrenia on Style, Topics and Stylistics of his Artworks - Art as a Form of Therapy: Wölfli’s Idea of the Female and the Asylum

The idea that stylistic features, topics or motifs within an artwork can be used and examined to diagnose a mental illness and that a mental disorder can provide an explanation for distinct characteristics within an artwork dates from the end of the 19th century. Within art- and medical-historical research it is a common but controversial procedure,297 as artists who do not suffer from a mental illness can use the same stylistic devices as well and based on their free will,298 so not every motif or stylistic element should be a priori connected with a mental disorder or interpreted as an evidence for a special schizophrenic type of designing. Since the illness influences the perception of both internal and external actions done by the concerned artists or by their fellow human beings as well as their view of the world and the social environment they live in, the schizophrenia still has to be taken into account when interpreting these artworks, although not from a diagnostic point of view but rather from a social-scientific one. In case of Adolf Wölfli the process of interpreting his works in connex with his schizophrenia started with the publication of Morgenthaler’s biography, who tried to especially explain the ornaments the artist used as a result of his mental state and schizophrenic worldview. Proceeding from Morgenthaler’s categories, some of Wölfli’s stylistic tendencies can be looked at from the perspective of art as a form of therapy, so the question arises to which extent the schizophrenic used distinct patterns and structural elements in order to deal with his mental health issues and their consequences. Morgenthaler explained Wölfli’s propensity for a geometric and ornamental style which is based on repetitions and rhythmic patterns as a way to calm himself down and to structure his daily routine.299 This was especially important when he was living in the solitary cell where his options to interact were limited and where he could not participate in the different forms of occupational therapy the institution offered, so he had to find other ways to organise himself and to deal with a restricted life. On the other hand Morgenthaler interpreted this procedure as an attempt to live and act out impulses, especially when Wölfli filled whole pages with these patterns without restricting himself to measures, space and time limits or considering academic demands for a naturalistic depiction. These motivations do not only count for drawings the Swiss produced but also for his musical pieces and poems where he increased the amount of symbols, numbers and patterns to such a huge extent that the compositions developed into ornamental drawings themselves and could

297 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 67. 298 Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination (Berkeley- Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), p. 122. 299 Morgenthaler, Geisteskranker als Künstler, pp. 77 – 78. 67 be used to structure on the one hand but also to divide and segment on the other hand.300 Manuela Dobler interpreted this interest in ornamenting and synchronising the sheet as one of Wölfli’s necessary aids to work against attacks of paranoia, as the ornaments would graphically drown out hallucinatory voices. So it was a means in his fight against the mental illness on the one hand but also a sign for the gradual loss of cognitive abilities on the other hand. Although she hereby underlined the function of art as a medium of sublimation, she explained the emergence of more or less grotesque neologisms, unprecedented symbols and a complete purposeless use of proportions as a consequence of a mental affliction such as thought disorder or overstimulation.301 But even though there is a medical and psychological explanation for the extent and shaping of Wölfli’s art, solely reducing his forms of creative designing to his illness would miss the point. As art-historical interpretations have to be considered as well, Wölfli’s tendency to use both symbols and patterns on a massive level and to dive into ornamental ways of designing also fulfilled other functions and should embroider and vivify the artworks.302 Besides stylistic features a close look at Wölfli’s topics and motifs makes the question to which extent he used his drawings as an alternative art therapy even more prominent. As Morgenthaler has already pointed out sexuality, the archetype of the woman and highly sexualised symbols whether they were figurative or ornamental played a huge role within Wölfli’s works.303 Therefore, an examination of the status and significance of the female within the artist’s drawings can provide further information on the topic area art in psychiatries and art as a medium to heal and treat. One of the early black and white drawings entitled as ’Die Assiisen des Mittellandes’ (Fig. 1) that could be preserved in the Waldau asylum dates from 1904, consists of two sheets which are over and over decorated with ornaments and is today exhibited in the art museum of Berne. In this drawing with the measurements 99,5 x 74,5 cm Wölfli tried to deal with the sexual crimes304 that led to his lifelong imprisonment in the asylum and the isolation from the society he grew up in. In the right upper corner a woman surrounded by a halo (Fig. 2) is standing on a plateau wearing leather boots and a high-necked dress which is decorated with small black elements. As she is putting her hand on her stomach, she is lifting up her clothing in order to reveal her genitals. With an open gesture she turns to the figure of the devil (Fig. 3) who is diametrically positioned at the lower corner of the sheet and faces the observer with

300 Morgenthaler, Geisteskranker als Künstler, pp. 77 – 78 / 80. 301 Dobler, Kunst Adolf Wölflis, pp. 93 – 96. 302 Morgenthaler, Geisteskranker als Künstler, p. 78. 303 Ibid., p. 78. 304 Spoerri, Adolf Wölfli, p. 446. 68 a slightly foolish grin. On his head he is wearing a prominent coxcomb with bells, while his whole body is covered by a furry coating, which only skips his highly erected penis. While the devil is a distinct and special figure within the drawing, the female, who is surrounded by glorioles, returns regularly in slightly different shapes. She faces the beholder in the lower left part of the right sheet where she is kept behind bars and has to watch two wild animals fighting and the stronger one pouncing on and overpowering the weaker creature. The same female archetype is also embraced by a ribbon in the lower left side of the right sheet who sits next to a man dressed in black clothing. In front of them Wölfli inserted the Latin word ’Mori’, whose literal meaning must be associated with death and downfall but in this case means condemnation, as it focuses on Wölfli’s deads.305 The man sets his eyes on the seven colleagues who are also dressed in black robes, have taken a seat at a long white bank which spreads across the upper left part of the left sheet and observe the events. Their function can be detected by looking at the title the artist added in the lower part of the two sheets. They represent judges whose associates spread over the whole drawing, as the German term Assisen refers to a Swiss type of a court306 which focuses on the conviction and punishment of highly dangerous criminals.307 That the hour of judgement has come is also evident when looking at the man who is pulling at the strings of a tower clock (Fig. 4) while another female who is kept in a frame is watching him. At first sight Wölfli’s drawing seems to consist only of ornaments but it is full of symbols of death, guilt, sex and crime, which are both figurative and abstract. By inserting the same female archetype three times in his pictures and hereby adapting repetitive structures Wölfli did not only try to organise and calm himself down but also provided figures of identification for the beholder, as the females turn to the observer facing him every time and hereby guide him along and incorporate him in the drawing. Therefore, Wölfli’s picture is clearly geared to interact with its audience, who plays a part within the drawing itself. The first person of reference who structures the picture is the rather revealing woman in the right upper part of the drawing, who confronts the beholder with her bare sexuality by lifting up her dress. She represents one of Wölfli’s victims,308 whose testimonies led to his incarceration. By making the observer aware of her genitals Wölfli could have tried to gain sympathy and understanding for his actions by provoking sexual desire in the (male) beholder, who could hereby relate his feelings to the drives that caused the artist’s actions. With this figure he

305 Dobler, Kunst Adolf Wölflis, p. 41. 306 Ibid., p. 41. 307 Karl Schäfer, Die Strafprozessordnung und das Gerichtsverfassungsgesetz, Vol. 3, 22nd edition (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gryter, 1974), p. 2803 – 2804. 308 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 205. 69 viewed the female as a medium of seduction as well as self-determination, as she deliberately lifted her dress without being forced from the outside and hereby attracted (male) attention. He then put her into contrast with the woman locked behind bars, who is at the mercy of the two fighting animals that could attack her in every moment. On the one hand she embodies Wölfli’s idea of the silent, vulnerable female but on the other hand she also represents one of the eye witnesses that caught the Swiss red-handed in all of his three assault attempts. As she has to watch one of the animals visibly succumbing to the stronger one, the act resembles Wölfli’s crimes, as he as a strong adult tried to molest little, defenseless girls. While the first woman functions in an introducing way and leads the observer’s attention to the main events, Wölfli also tried to integrate figures that represent the perspectives of his opponents, whether they were expert witnesses or the public. This becomes especially clear when looking at the female who is sitting next to the single judge in the gloriole and whose eyes are directly set onto the observer. According to Morgenthaler she can be identified as the witness who recognised Wölfli as a perpetrator 309 and tries to not only side with the prosecutor sitting next to her but also with the observer by making him realise the consequences of the crimes Wölfli committed. She is the mediating figure of the drawing’s left and right sheet, as her testimony supported the assises, who are according to the title counseling in the Swiss region Mittelland, in convicting the artist. As they pass judgement on Wölfli’s actions, he portrayed himself as the devil,310 a figure which has been associated with evil for centuries. In periods of mental improvement Wölfli was aware of the moral and legal condemnations his actions deserved as well as the emotional and physical harm they caused following his interrogation protocols, which state that he could not explain why he committed these crimes. As he underlined that he was suffering from mental problems and declared that his tendency to masturbate was one of the key factors for its occurence,311 he provided the devil with a coxcomb and hereby connected him to the fool, who is the embodiment of the social misfit within Western culture. On the other hand the fool has always enjoyed immunity from persecution. 312 Therefore, Wölfli did not depict the punishment itself unlike in other artworks where he portrayed himself while he is cut into pieces, crucified or plunging to the ground.313 He dealt with his mental illness, the connected crimes and his isolation from society in the asylum by consciously addressing the issues and

309 Morgenthaler, Geisteskranker als Künstler, p. 44. 310 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 205 – 206. 311 For further information have a closer look at the chapter on Wölfli’s sexual behaviour in Morgenthaler’s biography: Morgenthaler, Geisteskranker als Künstler, pp. 57 – 62, especially pp. 59 – 60. 312 Christoph Wetzel, Das große Lexikon der Symbole, 2nd edition (Darmstadt: WBG, 2011), p. 206. 313 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 208. 70 by confronting himself with his self-perception and introspection instead. Besides highly sexualised figures Wölfli also used abstract objects and patterns as means to depict the tensions his sexual drives caused in him at the time he committed sex crimes, before and during his stay in the asylum. Besides unambiguous phallic symbols like the devil’s erected penis, which is a symbol for the criminal sexual intercourse Wölfli planned, he inserted ovoid shapes in the corners and blankspaces of his drawing, which mirror death and regeneration, transformation, birth, fertility and potency.314 Also ornaments like little white slugs which are arranged in pairs and spread over the whole sheet must be interpreted within this context. They consist of a flat circular segment which is marked with a point and a line that represent the animal’s eyes and ears and represent the precursors of the so-called Vögeli ornament. This pattern is an extension of the slugs but consist of an additional tale according to Wölfli’s descriptions.315 As the Vögeli are often positioned near the female sexual organs or in a child’s hands, they can be interpreted as an emblem for Wölfli’s sexual crimes and as the language root of the term also resembles vulgar expressions for sexual intercourse,316 already Morgenthaler saw the accumulation of these elements as a sign for pansexualisation,317 a spreading of sexual needs onto every part of a human being’s life. Highly sexualised motifs and ornaments were also part of Wölfli’s depictions of the exterior of the Waldau asylum, for example in the coloured drawing he made in 1921, whose measurements and storage place are not known and in which he addressed the reconstruction of the clinic (Fig. 5). Within an ornamental colourful frame Wölfli depicted the three-axle main building of the asylum which is covered by gabled roofs and structured by balconies, arched and casement windows. Every part of the drawing is suffused by slug and Vögeli ornaments in different sizes, which surround the architecture, shape the frame or are arranged in pairs kissing and holding each other’s hands, so their sexual meaning becomes even more evident. Untouched by the Vögeli the artist integrated four male whiskery faces into the frame of the drawing who look at each other or aside, encircle the asylum building and whose eyes are covered by masks, a motif the artist has regularly used since the early 1900s.318 Although Wölfli was interned in the Waldau asylum for 35 years and constantly commented on unfair treatment by his psychiatrists and believed they conspired against him319 with other

314 Wetzel, Lexikon der Symbole, p. 72. 315 Elka Spoerri, ’Formeninventar und Bildtypen im bildnerischen Werk Adolf Wölfli’, in Elka Spoerri, Alfred Bader (eds.), Adolf Wölfli, Exhib. Cat. Kunstmuseum Bern 1976, 2nd edition (Bern: Verlag des Kunstmuseums, 1976), pp. 9 – 33, p. 15. 316 Dobler, Kunst Adolf Wölflis, p. 44. 317 Morgenthaler, Geisteskranker als Künstler, p. 48. 318 Spoerri, Adolf Wölfli, p. 25. 319 Gorsen, Welterlösung und gesellschaftliche Ausgrenzung, p. 361. 71 patients, his drawing does not show signs of a harsh aversion towards the clinic routine or the building itself, as he designed an open and light institution and combined architecture with the distinct ornaments and symbols that characterise his style. Nevertheless, the depiction of the Waldau asylum can be interpreted as an analysis of his stay within a mental health facility and due to the integration of sexualised elements also as a reconsideration of the reasons that led to his incarceration including the sex crimes the artist committed. As he associated the stay in the asylum with the solitary confinement in a padded cell, the male faces can also be interpreted as menaces that haunt the artist during hallucinations, so he could have reflected on the type and extent of his mental illness by depicting the asylum as well. Therfore, by adding personal elements and ornaments to the building Wölfli demonstrated that he could shape the institution as a habitat and that he was able to adjust the building to his physical and mental needs as much as the new environment did with him in return. Even though the figure of the female is often combined with Wölfli’s sex crimes and sexual desire, her appearance within his oeuvre is not solely bound to this function. Another issue the artist addressed as well is the loss of his mother at a young age and the lack of love he therefore had to experience, as she was his only attachment figure in the first years of his life. This becomes particularly clear when looking at the coloured drawing ’Der hohe und nidrige Adel v. der englisch-grossbrittanischen Union Kanada’ (Fig. 6) which was made in 1911320 and whose measurements and provenance are not known. A tall woman who wears a long red fully inscribed dress and blue shoes is standing on a bridge consisting of musical tones and notes while she is reining an old horse. Tired after a long journey the horse which is covered with a green blanket drops his head while it trots through fields of texture and is observed by a man wearing a cross on his head. His face is multiplied five times in the picture and he is either wearing the cross on his head or going without it but never notices the little child which sits in the crook of the female’s arm holding onto her thumb with fear in its eyes. According to Wölfli’s notes and his autobiography which discusses a rather fictional idea of the first eight years of his life321 the artist often portrayed himself as the little child Doufi, which is a nickname for Adolf.322 Therefore, he clearly identified with the creature sitting on the woman’s arm, who could represent Wölfli’s mother. As they are portrayed in movement, he could have depicted one of the most incisive experiences in his life: the transmigration from his birthplace Berne to the home town of his mother Schangenau,323 which changed the

320 Spoerri, Formeninventar, p. 21. 321 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 204. 322 Spoerri, Formeninventar, p. 20.; Spoerri, Adolf Wölfli, p. 20. 323 Spoerri, Adolf Wölfli, p. 15. 72 artist’s life drastically, an impression he could have wanted to transport via the facial expression of the child. Wölfli interpreted this event as the beginning of the end of a happy childhood, as he was separated from his family and had to work as a Verdingbub from now on. He associated Schangnau with the death of his mother as well, so the drawing which depicts a former time period can be ascribed to his longing after comfort and love, which he had lost so early and that increased after his failed engagement, which might have motivated him even more to portray this scene. The artist hereby transferred himself into a phantasy world where he was not only united with his mother but also with his later lover and could experience the intimacy which he wished for during his time as a servant and while he was staying in the asylum, a feeling that haunted him during his lifetime. In addition, the drawing could have supported him in processing his fears of loss after the early separation from his father at the age of five,324 who could be depicted within the male head which is placed next to the woman. Compared to the other men’s faces who are self portraits typically for Wölfli’s oeuvre in the 1910s,325 he turns his head away from the scene and does not notice the anxieties of the little child or the drastic situation it has to endure. As well as in the Assisen des Mittellandes the artist did not only address the issue of lonliness and lack of love in this drawing but also provided a universal figure of identification. As the little child communicates with the beholder, it provokes the audience’s sympathy for the artist and hereby also for his crimes, as he encouraged the observer to use Wölfli’s childhood traumata as an explanation for the development of his mental illness. Proceeding from these image analysises, the result of the examination of Wölfli’s stylistic features and their importance as art-therapeutic and subliming means can be reacknowledged. As Dobler explained, the mental illness promoted Adolf Wölfli’s isolation and dissociation from the outside world as well as a split of his identity which caused him so much anxiety, anger and helplessness that he tried to find peace and order by depicting themes about origin and regeneration such as a mother’s love or female sexuality, which were more or less obviously present in all three case examples of images. Art vitalised Wölfli’s self-regulating forces, supported him in overcoming childhood as well as adult traumata and functioned as a means for sensemaking by giving him not only a pasttime occupation but also the possibility to market his works, as he sold some of them from the late 1910s onwards and hereby was able to establish the activity of producing artworks as a type of profession.326 Proceeding from that, he could reach the point where art developed into a medium of fruition making the

324 Dobler, Kunst Adolf Wölflis, p. 32. 325 Spoerri, Formeninventar, p. 53. 326 Dobler, Kunst Adolf Wölflis, pp. 95 – 96. 73 contact with a mentally healthy audience possible and the producer aware of his own value.327 By addressing the topics he dealt with and reflected on and by expressing the urges he felt both verbally and pictorially Wölfli also shaped the Waldau asylum not only as a new place for systematic art production and merchandising but also as a habitat.

4.3 Life, Work and Illness of Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern

One of the artists who started to get artistically active for the first time in the asylum but could later reintegrate himself into society and establish as a rather mentally healthy professional artist was the German Art Brut representative Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern. Having initially dealt with a similar diagnosis as Wölfli Schröder-Sonnenstern discovered his artistic abilities in the mental health facility but could more or less separate them from his illness and rather used it as a marketing strategy in order to promote his works than really suffered from its consequences. 328 Unlike in Wölfli’s case Schröder-Sonnenstern’s biography and art production was examined under the aspect of art as a form of therapy from the start,329 which shall be further impelled within this chapter.

4.3.1 Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern’s Biography, Anamnesis and Artistry

Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern was born in 1892 in the Prussian settlement of Kaukehmen near Tilsit, which is today’s Jasnoje in Russia, under the name Emil Friedrich Schröder as the son of a dipsomaniac newspaper deliverer and a peasant woman.330 After having problems to deal with authoritarian settings in school, emotional neglection at home as well as an early developed alcohol addiction Schröder-Sonnenstern left home at the age of fourteen relying on the savings he had stolen from his mother. As he was convicted of vagabondage, robbery and actual bodily harm, he was hospitalised in a house of correction where he had to work for food and shelter on the institution’s lands and fields. Although he was granted training opportunities during his quadrennial stay within the establishment, he did not accomplish an apprenticeship to become a gardener and also ended his training as a dairy farmer after his discharge from the institution in 1910. While repeatedly vagabonding and breaking the law Schröder-Sonnenstern regularly changed jobs and finally worked in other dairy farms, when he showed first signs of a mental disorder. While working in his second position as a dairy

327 Benkert, Therapeutische Dimensionen, p. 157. 328 Gorsen, Welterlösung und gesellschaftliche Ausgrenzung, p. 361. 329 For further information have a look at Alfred Bader’s monography ’Geisteskranker oder Künstler?: Der Fall Friedric Schröder-Sonnenstern’ or Peter Gorsen’s essay ’Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, 1892 – 1982: Gefangen zwischen Welterlösung und gesellschaftlicher Ausgrenzung’: Bader, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, 1973.; Gorsen, Welterlösung und gesellschaftliche Ausgrenzung, 1997. 330 Klaus Ferentschik, Peter Gorsen, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern und sein Kosmos (Berlin: Parthas, 2013), pp. 15 – 17. 74 farmer he claimed to take over the business to operate it on his own and became more and more delusional so he was transmitted to the asylum in Allenberg where doctors doubted his mental sanity for the first time.331 Although his mental health issuses were treated for about half a year in the facility,332 the Prussian started to readopt his vagrant life, refused to work and was caught regularly begging in the streets, robbing his fellow human beings or approaching them with indecent, often sexual ulterior motives. In 1915 Schröder-Sonnenstern was forced to serve in the military but had to be demobilised within the same year after he showed extreme forms of deviant behaviour and started to engage in criminal acts such as fraud and theft again. After his mental sanity and accountability were questioned in prison he was sent to the asylum in Allenberg again to get tested on his mental state where he was diagnosed with dementia praecox, which is today classified as hebephrenia, deprived of the right of decision and brought to the mental hospital in Tapiau.333 After he had been released from the institution in 1919 Schröder-Sonnenstern, who had now changed his name by adding an affix, moved to Berlin where he led a religious cult and earned money by prophesying and offering alternative healing methods, which made him fall foul of the law again. Following a short imprisonment Friedrich was admitted to the Landesheilanstalt Neustadt in Holstein in 1933, where his illness was not classified as schizophrenic anymore but he was declared an antisocial psychopath who suffered from pathological lying instead. In the institution Schröder-Sonnenstern started to draw for the first time334 and claimed that ’a mentally ill artist’ motivated him to get artistically active and paint on a regular basis. Although there are no records about the identity of this painter and if he even existed, there is the asumption that the professionally trained artist Hans Christian Ralfs, who has spent long time periods between 1922 and 1934 in the asylums in Kiel and in Neustadt where he had his own art studio in the same clinic Schröder-Sonnenstern lived in, was Friedrich’s role model.335 Although Schröder-Sonnenstern might have motivated himself to start drawing after he observed this colleague in action, his works demonstrate that he has never designed by adjusting to any art-historical standards and was entirely self-educated. Therefore, most of the eighteen pencil drawings that date from this stage of his life consist of geometrical ornaments,

331 Bader, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, p. 17.; Pamela Kort, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Exhib. Cat. Gallery Michael Werner New York 2011 (New York: Werner, 2011), p. m. 332 Kort, Friedrich Schröder, p. m. 333 Bader, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, p. 17. 334 Kraft, Grenzgänger, pp. 212 – 213. 335 Ferentschik, Gorsen, Schröder-Sonnenstern und sein Kosmos, pp. 52 – 53. 75 especially stars and suns, numbers as well as little figures which are structured with metaphysical symbols such as eyes, hearts, crosses or anchors. They are arranged around brief explanatory extracts with whom Schröder-Sonnenstern tried to introduce the observer into his symbolic world.336 Although he later considered these drawings as highly unique and valuable and was sure that they must be sold for millions of Deutschmarks,337 these first attempts to get artistically active cannot be considered as a form of organised art production in the asylum. They were part of the different forms of occupational therapy a resident could get involved in the mental health facility in the 1930s instead.338 Unlike other Art Brut representatives who fully dedicated their lives to art and art production after they discovered their talent in the mental health facility Schröder-Sonnenstern took a break lasting for nearly 16 years as soon as he was released from the hospital in 1934. After he had survived the Second World War living on the breadline he decided to work and live as a professional artist in 1949 and could establish himself in the contemporary exhibition scene.339 The reasons that led to his decision to suddenly draw again and even choose this as a professional career after not engaging in any artistic production for more than a decade, if there were any direct experiences of awakening and why he started to paint in this particular year are not known. In his autobiographical notes dating from 1959 Schröder-Sonnenstern mentioned that he suffered from edema at the end of the 1940s and was not able to leave the house. According to the artist he related this physical state to his memories of the insane painter he met in the asylum where he was as restricted as in 1949 and therefore started to create within this process.340 A detailed explanation why he suddenly drew on these old memories is not included in his records. As he had developed his own personal style in the following years by having recourse on the features he developed in the drawings of the 1930s, Schröder-Sonnenstern attracted so much attention by gallerists, art dealers and the media that he could not produce all the commissioned pieces on his own. Therefore, he employed assistants who constructed parts of the paintings he created from the early 1950s onwards following his requirements. When they used Schröder-Sonnenstern’s penchant for a drink by letting him sign a high amount of paintings which were not produced in his studio art-dealers discovered this art forgery and commissions and customers lost interest in supporting him. Until his death in 1982 he spent the last years of his life in isolation and poverty before he was finally rehabilitated as one of

336 Ibid., p. 52.; Kort, Friedrich Schröder, p. m.; Bader, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, p. 43. 337 Ferentschik, Gorsen, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern und sein Kosmos, p. 54. 338 Bader, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, p. 42. 339 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 213. 340 Bader, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, p. 30. 76 the most striking artists of the second half of the 20th century in the 1980s.341 Schröder-Sonnenstern’s paintings which represent the major part of his oeuvre can be characterised by a strong tendency for symbols which are not interpretable in the first instance and are often influenced by his former occupation as a faith healer and his interest in metaphysics. Within this context he shows a preference for round, circular and spiral forms which he linked with each other without restricting himself to a naturalistic depiction, whether this concerned the form or the colour of an object and rather used strategies of deformation. As the artist thought in contrasts and antagonisms, he avoided to paint cornered, angular, straight or slim elements and replaced them with organic, big and curvy forms which should mirror the circle of life and philosophical ideas about origin and primal principles.342 By using strategies of sequencing and duplicating he constructed colourful fantasy creatures which face each other, as he symmetrically set them opposite one another. In order to provoke shocking experiences in the beholder and to snub him he employed mechanisms of grotesque linking by exchanging limbs and body parts of animals such as swans, snakes or donkeys as well as human beings. Within this context he equalised animals and mankind and stripped the human being more and more off of their humane characteristics by using methods of stylisation and brutalisation and hereby introduced mechanisms of metamorphosis and assimilation into the rather abstract art scene of the 1950s and 1960s. Therefore, within his paintings breasts develop into feet, beaks turn into hands, genitalia form faces, which render the artworks a demonic touch that comes to light even more when looking at the amount of diabolic figures, skulls or obscene elements that are part of Schröder-Sonnenstern’s works.343 With these stylistic features the artist committed topics like sexual interaction and approach, the performance of bodily functions such as excretion and various types of intercourse, the differences between males and females, good and evil or life and death as well as hierarchies and hegemonic structures to paper in order to discuss basic themes every human being has to deal with throughout his or her life.344 As well as the stylistic devices all these topics are integrated in the bigger context of Schröder-Sonnenstern’s discussion of origins, the relations of culture and nature or the dispute between ruling and serving, whose inner contradictions and dichotomies shall be raised by using strategies of assimilation and transformation. The result has been a public evaluation of Schröder-Sonnenstern’s art as disconcerting and

341 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 213. 342 Ferentschik, Gorsen, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern und sein Kosmos, p. 181.; Gorsen, Welterlösung und gesellschaftliche Ausgrenzung, p. 363. 343 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 217.; Ferentschik, Gorsen, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern und sein Kosmos, pp. 183 / 185. 344 Bader, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, pp. 100 – 101.; Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 216. 77 obscene for decades, as his works were interpreted as either pornographic or mad.345 As the influence of a mental disorder is considered as rather small after Schröder-Sonnenstern has been released from the hospital, the influence of his schizophrenic experiences shall be put in quotation marks when analysing three of his works in the next chapter.

4.3.2 The Influence of Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern’s ’Schizophrenia’ on Style, Topics and Stylistics of his Artworks - Art as a Form of Therapy: Schröder-Sonnenstern’s Depiction of Sex and Violence

Unlike Wölfli who considered himself as an artist but did not connect his mental illness with his artworks Schröder-Sonnenstern used the concept of the insane artist who creates only by following inner drives and automatic mechanisms as a marketing strategy. He deliberately compared his drawings with the works produced by so-called ’lunatic artists’ living in psychiatries. By insinuating on the diagnosis he received when he lived in the Allenberg asylum in the 1920s he drew on the old concept of creativity and innovation being completely liberated from external pressures and forces if the people using them find themselves in a state of mental disorder. This becomes especially clear when looking at the awakening experience he described as necessary for his later operation as a professional artist: the encounter with an ’insane painter’. 346 Proceeding from this point of view, the question whether and to which extent Schröder-Sonnenstern used art as a form of therapy reaches a new level and makes an examination of his stylistics, topics and themes, which shall be restricted to the depiction of sex and violence, under this aspect even more necessary. As already the introduction into Schröder-Sonnenstern’s artistry has shown, the stylistic correlation between the artworks he produced in the asylum and the later works he created under the perception of being a professional artist is small. The early works which are structured by geometry, symmetry and an often ornamental way of designing can be interpreted as means to structure Schröder-Sonnenstern’s days in the asylum and to stabilise his mental state. However, he was at the time not affected by schizophrenic outbursts anymore but rather by an antisocial way of thinking which complicated social interaction with colleagues, fellow residents or psychiatrists. This might be the reason why the artist refrained from covering whole sheets with a horror vacui of ornaments, texture or figurative scenes as Wölfli did. Schröder-Sonnenstern was able to leave spaces completely blank instead by concentrating on designing fewer forms which were contoured in a more detailed way in exchange, as he did not need to calm himself down or fight against paranoia. Neologisms or

345 Ferentschik, Gorsen, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern und sein Kosmos, pp. 194 – 195.; Bader, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, p. 100. 346 Kort, Friedrich Schröder, p. m. 78 neomorphisms both on a visual and on a textual level as Wölfli used them as a means of expression did not appear in this early stage of artistic action, as Schröder-Sonnenstern generally limited the usage of texture and focused on everyday language in case he integrated it at all. If Schröder-Sonnenstern used stylistic devices as means to fight against the abysms of his mental state is therefore rather questionable. The artworks created in the 1950s and 1960s on the contrary do not contain any texts and completely rely on the effects of visual elements as well as on an application of highly contrasting colours. Even though the titles Schröder-Sonnenstern gave the artworks were fantastical and in many cases newly generated, they were born out of his metaphysical experiences and the influence of his time as a faith healer. Therefore, they cannot be interpreted as evidences for a reshaping of means of expressions as it is typical for other schizophrenic artists who hereby address and sometimes also heal their inner splitting. Therefore, an interpretation of this stylistic device as an art-therapeutic means is rather unlikely. However, Schröder-Sonnenstern’s tendency to use grotesque linking seems to be an example for this reshaping on the one hand. On the other hand it must always be interpreted under thematic aspects and related to the topics Schröder-Sonnenstern wanted to address. Proceeding from that, Alfred Bader’s idea that Friedrich Schröder’s artworks have to be definitely classified as psychopathological art, as he used strategies of deformation, brutalisation and mechanisms of determent and therefore drew and painted to support himself in overcoming his illness,347 have to be questioned and contextualised content-wise. One of the earliest black-and-white drawings that could be preserved from the time Schröder- Sonnenstern spent in Neustadt is called ’Gefangener Nr. 28 von einem Eisbären zerrissen? Am 13.1. begraben... und das alles mit lächelnder Miene!’ (Fig. 7). The artist must have created it during the winter months of the years 1933 and 1934,348 whereas the measurements and provenance are not known. In front of an indefinite background a man composed of an eight-shaped torso and two hearts representing his upper and lower body is lying on his right side in a glass coffin facing the beholder while the bells of a little church tower behind him are ringing. The bell rope, which conceals a tablet in the fashion of an epitaph that identifies the buried man, leads directly to the man’s heart which is replaced by a black cross. Through his rather curvy body and head, which is not included in the coffin, serpentine lines are passing through, which could represent nerves but also remind of electric shocks, as the man is widely opening his eyes to fixate the observer as if he was in pain. This impression is intensified when looking at his torso which is cut through by a rod that sticks out of the box.

347 Bader, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, pp. 94 / 98 / 120 – 121. 348 Ibid., p. 44 – 45. 79 On top of the coffin the artist placed a cheese dome which covers a miniature of another man who turns to the observer as well but the other way round. From a reader-response critical perspective the man in the coffin does not only function as a means to introduce the beholder to the content of the drawing but also as a figure of identification, as he directly communicates his pain to the observer. With his widely opened eyes which engross the beholder he reminds the audience of people buried alive who blamed individuals or institutions for their treatment whether it was a religious or a state one. Direct conflicts between the artist with the Christian church or one of its representatives are not known, so interpreting the artwork as a declaration of war against this institution is rather implausible. Nevertheless, Schröder-Sonnenstern could have replaced the heart with a cross in order to criticise the Christian church which he did not consider as the only redeeming facility when he founded his religious cult and which he wanted to counter with his own ideology. On the other hand it is remarkable that Schröder-Sonnenstern integrated two symbols representing judicial paragraphs in the figure’s genital region, so he could have also wanted to demonstrate his scorn for the law and its more or less necessary restraints, which he permanently broke during his whole lifetime. 349 Within this context it is interesting that Schröder-Sonnenstern characterised the figure as a prisoner who he stripped off of his identity and personality by addressing him as prisoner number 28. Proceeding from that, it is likely that the artist tried to cope with the multiple imprisonments he had to experience from his early youth onwards until the 1940s which did not only limit but in some cases ’bury’ his possibilities and opportunities alive. In addition, Friedrich could have also wanted to issue the consequences of his stays within prisons: the transfer to mental health facilities where he was stigmatised as a maniac or at least a dangerous criminal, a misfit or outsider within the society he had to live and work in. As the drawing is one of the examples he entitled, the beholder is aware of the mans’s cause of death: an attack by a polar bear. As the polar bear is not an animal that appears in Schröder-Sonnenstein’s oeuvre on a regular basis, there is no direct explanation why he chose it as a killer. Since the bear and its subspecies, the polar bear, are symbols of violence and danger, 350 the artist might have wanted to underline the superiority of the state and its instances such as the court or the hospital which regulated Schröder-Sonnenstern’s life for decades. Following this interpretation, the likelihood that the artist tried to come to terms with his experiences in the psychiatry via the medium of art must be brought up for discussion. While this example has shown that the Prussian could use the drawings dating from 1933 und

349 Bader, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, p. 45. 350 Wetzel, Lexikon der Symbole, p. 34. 80 1934 as therapeutic devices, the paintings he created in the 1950s and 1960s provide a rather different impression. In 1953 he drew ’Der Friedenshabicht führt den Friedensengel zum Elysium’ (Fig. 8), whose measurements are 73 x 102 cm and which is preserved in the S. u. G. Poppe collection in Hamburg today.351 At the edge of a dark blue atmosphere a deep red demonic creature which resembles a winged dragon is approaching an angel in the shape of a young woman. After the creature has taken a huge step forward with its long birdlike claws revealing massive buttocks to the observer it opens its long beak-shaped jaw in order to bite the helpless angel who has started to scream horrified by the violence the creature adopted. Even though the dragon holds a green palm branch in one hand symbolising peaceful intentions, it sinks its teeth into the belly of the naked lady who is not able to go adrift from the evil creature and has to accept her faith of being plundered. Following the title Schröder-Sonnenstern chose, which suggests that a peaceful hawk wants to lead an angel of peace to the Elysium, the Roman equivalent for the Christian paradise or heaven,352 is is evident that the painting works with mechanisms of grotesque linking on a contentual level. The hawk has been associated with power and superiority towards his fellow animals or human beings since antiquity and has already been described in Greek fabels as a predatory animal haunting smaller birds, in this case the angel, which cannot defend themselves and are not able to stop being instrumentalised or forced against their own will. In Hesiod’s writings the hawk is portrayed as a beast which holds the nightingale capitve with his teeth,353 an image that is also present when looking at Schröder-Sonnenstern’s painting. Therefore, the association of the hawk with a peaceful and calm animal, as the title tries to suggest it, must be seen as a deliberate provocation. When looking at the hawk’s and the angel’s attributes, it becomes clear that this provocation is targeted at the Christian church. The hawk praises itself with bringing peace by holding a palm branch, a symbol for quietude and victory since the early stages of Christendom,354 but hurts the angel it is in charge of on purpose. This impression gets more concrete when looking at the red colour of the animal, which is a symbol for hatred, violence and distruction355 and can be associated with the devil, so an equalisation of the demon and the Christian church takes place. That becomes evident when looking at the anchor the angel of peace is wearing, a symbol which was associated with safety since antiquity and was often used to portray faith,

351 Bader, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, p. 126. 352 Herbert J. Rose, Griechische Mythologie: Ein Handbuch, 2nd edition (Munich: C.H. Bech, 2007), p. 73. 353 Henning Ottmann, Geschichte des politischen Denkens: Von den Anfängen bei den Griechen bis auf unsere Zeit, Vol. 1: Die Griechen, Subvol. 1: Von Homer bis Sokrates (Stuttgart-Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2001), pp. 50 – 51. 354 Wetzler, Lexikon der Symbole, p. 232. 355 Ibid., p. 264. 81 hope and the belief in stability within Christian contexts,356 a feeling the angel completely lost, as the devil symbolising the Christian church is robbing it of all of its sense of security. This feeling is directly transported to the observer, who finds a figure of identification within the angel that faces and sets its widely opened eyes on him making him a witness and a sympathiser against the crime the devil – in this case the Christian church - committed. What exactly Schröder-Sonnenstern wanted to critisise within the Christian church remains open. He could have wanted to point at the violence its representatives and members used for centuries on the one hand, for example during missions when they wanted to convert people making them aware of the Christian Elysium by force. On the other hand it is also likely that he wanted to address the Christian churches prude ideas of sexual morals, as he provided both the angel and the hawk with outsised sexual characteristics. While the hawk with its oversized breasts and pronounced buttocks seems like a female, the angel seems to be androgynous, as its genital area is not defined, the breasts seem like buttocks and the face is over and over decorated with phallus snakes forming the angel’s nose, cheeks and forehead, while long blond hair cover its back. With this highly sexualised depiction Schröder-Sonnenstern could have wanted to provoke the Christian church as an institution, which preached traditional Christian values such as the condemnation of premarital intercourse and abortion as well as chastity for its leaders, monks and nuns but neglected and denied the sexual and moral abuse these people committed at the same time, facts that were known in Germany since the middle of the 19th century but not widely addressed until the late 1990s.357 Therefore, it is rather unlikely that Schröder-Sonnenstern used the painting ’Der Friedenshabicht führt den Friedensengel zum Elysium’ in an art-therapeutic way but rather as a means to slash the Christian church and its depraved sexual morals, as he mentioned himself that he enjoyed ’being oppositional’ towards institutions, the state or the traditional family structure.358 The impression that Schröder-Sonnenstern did not intentionally use art as a therapeutic medium in the first place but rather as a means to critisise and fight against the bigoted moral system of the post-war era becomes even more evident when looking at other works from the 1950s and 1960s. One example is the painting ’Die Schlangenverführung’ (Fig. 9), made of

356 Wetzel, Lexikon der Symbole, p. 12. 357 One of the early writings that addressed the issue of sexual abuse in Christian institutions was the so-called ’Pfaffenspiegel’, written by Otto von Corvin in 1845, where he used historical records in order to hold a mirror up to especially the Catholic church concerning fraud and corruption, sexual abuse as well as spiritual misconducts. Until the early 1890s the book has already been edited for seven more times and did not only reach Christian classes, the media and bourgeoisie but also the masses. For further information have a look at: Herbert Schwenk, ’Der Verfasser des >Pfaffenspiegels>’, Berlinische Monatszeitschrift 2 (1998), pp. 4 – 11, pp. 6 – 8, digitally available under: [https://berlingeschichte.de/bms/bmstxt98/9802prob.htm, accessed 10/09/2019]. 358 Eberhard Simons, ’Narren, Hexen und Dämonen: Die tragische Komödie des Friedrich Schröder- Sonnenstern’, in Irene Maeder (ed.), Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (München: Galerie Maeder, 1987), pp. 7 – 24, p. 12. 82 coloured crayons in 1955 with the measurements 73 x 51 cm. It is preserved in the gallery Brockstedt in Hamburg today359 and shows the profiles of two mystic creatures standing on an earth-coloured floor behind one another, whereas the first one seems to be a male, bold figure, while the one standing behind it resembles a female. With a grimacing face it is insidiously looking aside, as it lays its claw-shaped hand which resembles its single foot on its partner’s shoulder who is looking down to his upper body where a snake has pierced into his chest. While the animal is slowly biting the male’s body, it slithers through the man’s legs leading to the genitalia and buttocks of the female creature which can feel the snake’s tail around its back and one breast whose nipple is erected. The hidden tension indicating that something interdicted and outlawed is happening is also indicated by the foot of the male creature which is replaced by a round emblem showing a skull. Like the artwork ’Der Friedenshabicht führt den Friedensengel zum Elysium’ this painting can be interpreted as a critique towards the morals of the Christian church, as it awakes memories about the Fall of Mankind and forbidden sexual desire, a topic Schröder- Sonnenstern has already addressed in 1952.360 While the male figure is focusing on the snake, the female one initiates contact with the beholder by setting its eyes on him. It hereby involves him in the biblical event on the one hand by showing him that he is the same sinner itself and its partner are but on the other hand it also holds a mirror up to him by making him aware of the sexual tension that exists between the figures which does not correspond with the moral instructions the Christian church provided. As the snake’s tail is leading through the man’s legs to the female’s genitalia touching both its buttocks and sexual organs, memories of anal intercourse are awakened, which was proscribed within Christian circles and a social taboo as well. Since it was not only associated with deviant sexual practices but also with homosexual love, which was considered a serious crime in Germany until 1954 and a less serious one until 1994,361 the painting was not only directed towards a religious audience but towards all social ranks. Schröder-Sonnenstern used these mechanisms of provocation to wake up the German man of integrity who seemed to lead a sinless life looked at from the outside but secretly engaged in forbidden acts whether they were conducted in private spheres

359 N. N., ’Katalog’, in Ingfried Brugger, Peter Gorsen, Klaus Albrecht Schröder (eds.), Kunst & Wahn, Exhib. Cat. Kunstforum Wien 1997 (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), pp. 425 – 446, p. 443. 360 For further comparisons have a look at the painting ’Die Praxis oder die Lebenszauberkünstlerin’, created in 1952 with coloured crayons in the measurements 73 x 51 cm, which is preserved in the gallery Brockstedt in Hamburg and shows a female body under the Tree of Life that is fertilised by a snake. For further information have a look at: Gorsen, Welterlösung und gesellschaftliche Ausgrenzung, p. 364 / 367.; N.N., Katalog, p. 443. 361 Stephan Heichel, Adrian Rinscheid, ’Ein klassischer Fall von Inkrementalismus: Die Liberalisierung der Regulierung von Homosexualität’, in Christoph Knill, Stephan Heichel, Caroline Preidel, Kerstin Nebel (eds.), Moralpolitik in Deutschand: Staatliche Regulierung gesellschaftlicher Wertkonflikte im historischen und internationalen Vergleich (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015), pp. 127 – 146, pp. 133 / 142. 83 or in public at a late hour. Personal experiences with homosexuality such as a secret homosexual orientation or dramatic encounters within this context are not recorded for Schröder-Sonnenstern’s life, so it is not likely that the artist used this and similar depictions as a means to heal a psychosis or treat himself. As also his written notes demonstrate that shocking ideas of anal intercourse as well as fantasies of defaecation outweigh imaginations of heterosexual behaviour, 362 it must be rather interpreted as an attack against a strictly morally perfect, flawless society which he wanted to introduce into human abyssees. Summarising the results of the image analysises and of the look into the possible use of stylistic devices as art-therapeutic means it seems quite unlikely that Friedrich Schröder- Sonnenstern used art as a medium to treat his psychosis. Although creative designing might have helped him to deal with his new situation and the alternative habitat in the beginning, there is not one single drawing or painting where the artist reflected on his stay in the psychiatry portraying the building or psychiatrist or his mental illness. He rather concentrated on topics like exercise of and misuse of power in institutions, being at the mercy of others and the moral system within post-war Germany especially within sexual contexts instead. As he wanted to offer a zynical, provoking and satirical form of criticism at a culture he considered as one big fallacy and deception, he needed to create an alternative world which is liberated from the antiliberal German endowments with meaning. Therefore, he needed to fall back on hybrid creatures formed of human and animalistic material which engage in different acts and think in different terms than the protagonists of contemporary naturalistic movements did who have distanced themselves from an original, nature-related world due to the use of technologies, wars and first attempts of globalisation.363 Proceeding from that, his type of designing as well as his motifs, topics and themes do not seem to be born out of a psychological disorder but rather out of a struggle within and against antiquated structures and views such as the Christian church and facilities like prisons and psychiatries 364 . Therefore, if he talked about himself as a mad or insane painter, he was not convinced that his mental health was deteriorating but was rather aware of the fascination the concept of the mad artist caused in the beholder and used it as a strategy to survive in an antiliberal environment.

4.4 Life, Work and Illness of Oswald Tschirtner

In contrast to Adolf Wölfli and Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern who started to get artistically creative in a state of social and mental isolation, the Austrian Art Brut artist Oswald

362 Bader, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, p. 101. 363 Ferentschik, Gorsen, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern und sein Kosmos, pp. 193 – 195. 364 Roger Cardinal, Outsider Art (London: Studio Vista, 1972), pp. 154 – 155. 84 Tschirtner was part of the Gugging movement and deliberately motivated to draw by its organiser and promoter Leo Navratil. Although he had the possibility to create at any time and with every available material, all of his works emerged from an art-therapeutic background and in the presence of psychiatrists who often suggested topics or general themes Tschirtner could pick up. His identification as an Art Brut representative has been viewed as rather difficult due to this external influence but is justified, as Tschirtner did not react to other contemporary or classical styles, did not abide by traditions and created without selecting role models.365 Proceeding from this basis, the question whether he used art as a type of therapy seems to be autoanswering in the first instance but has to be carefully examined, as a huge part of his creative drives were motivated from the outside. Therefore, the focus shall lie on the extent of this strategy and on the examination of a topic he was not suggested to work on but could choose himself: his strong faith and belief in the Catholic religion.

4.4.1 Oswald Tschirtner’s Biography, Anamnesis and Artistry

Oswald Tschirtner was born in 1920 in Perchtoldsdorf near Vienna into a very Catholic family who motivated him to engage with the bible and Christian associations from an early stage onwards. As one of his aunts and an uncle had already pursued clerical careers, Tschirtner felt called to become a priest, so he attended the minor seminary of the Catholic residential school Hollabrunn while he was a grammar school pupil. After the National Socialist takeover and the Anschluss in 1938 Tschirtner’s possibilities to follow a clerical career were very low and as he could not study theology, he decided to start chemical studies in order to live out his scientific interests at least at some point. Within his third semester he was forced to interrupt his studies though to serve in the Austrian military and got transferred to Stalingrad where he functioned as a radio operator for the National Socialist news and communication service. Even though Tschirtner could successfully flee from the war zone in Russia, he was captured by the French military in 1946 and had to work in a prisoner of war camp in South France for more than a year before he was able to find his way back to Austria. Due to his experiences during the Second World War and especially his service in the prisoner of war camp Tschirtner developed a servere posttraumatic stress disorder turning into schizophrenia which forced him to undergo medical and psychiatric treatment. 366 After Oswald had been committed to the psychiatric university hospital in Vienna whose doctors arranged a permanent hospitalisation for him from 1947 onwards, he could be transferred to the Landesnervenklinik Gugging in 1954. Although he intially lived in the psychiatric area of

365 Ansperger, Tschirtner, p. 297 – 298. 366 Ibib., p. 300.; Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 199. 85 the hospital, Tschirtner could move into the Haus der Künstler in 1981 where he lived in367 as a successful and internationally recognised artist until his death in 2007.368 The first drawings Tschirtner created date from the 1950s when his psychiatrist Leo Navratil wanted to test art-therapeutic methods within the treatment procedure and invited his patient to commit some ideas to paper. As Tschirtner was used to respect authoritarian demands from his early childhood on due to his Catholic background, he did not resist any instigation his psychiatrist made whether it was the timing or the themes he should work on. However, Oswald never got artistically active on his own initiative,369 so he even stopped drawing for ten years until the late 1960s and early 1970s when he experienced a breakthrough after his works were exhibited in the Galerie nächst St. Stephan in Vienna. 370 As Tschirtner was pleased when Navratil and his assistants observed him during the creation process or gave him visual models he should imitate or develop further, the persona of the psychiatrist gained lots of influence during Oswald’s productive periods, a process which is called art à deux and has entered the research about Art brut after Tschirtner’s ways of working had become known.371 In this context one must remember that Navratil did initially not want to discover hidden artists in his clinic but rather saw the potential of art as a form of therapy. Therefore, he used the works Tschirtner and his colleagues produced for diagnostic and medical reasons concerning the patients’ course of treatment,372 so he needed to be present more often than other medics such as Morgenthaler who did not depend on the artworks to help the patients finding a way to deal with their situation and illness. Tschirtner’s oeuvre which is nearly entirely restricted to small-sized ink drawings that are occasionally reluctantly filled with colours and decorated with writings can be characterised by abstract and minimalistic design techniques373 which rely on mechanisms of automatism374 and a focus on the essential elements by neglecting details at the same time.375 Tschirtner’s most important stylistic device, which is at the same time his most prominent motif, is the head-footer, a neutral human being who consists of a head with eyes, nose, mouth, hair, ears

367 Leo Navratil, ’Die Künstler’, in Leo Navratil (ed.), Die Künstler aus Gugging, Exhib. Cat. Museum Moderner Kunst Wien, Salzburger Landessammlung Rupertinum, Kunstamt Wedding Berlin, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz, Wolfgang-Gurlitt-Museum, Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau, 2nd edition (Vienna: Medusa-Verlag, 1983), pp. 49 – 396, p. 334. 368 Ansperger, Tschirtner, p. 301. 369 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, p. 18. 370 Ansperger, Tschirtner, p. 301. 371 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, p. 18. 372 Ansperger, Tschirtner, p. 301. 373 Ibid., pp. 297 – 299. 374 Fink, Kunst in der Psychiatrie, p. 18. 375 Johann Feilacher, ’Oswald Tschirtner & Johann Hauser: ... Mit Strich und Farbe’, in Nina Katschnig (ed.), Oswald Tschirtner & Johann Hauser: ... Mit Strich und Farbe, Exhib. Cat. Galerie Gugging 2016/2017 (Maria Gugging: Galerie Gugging, 2017), pp. m, p. m. 86 and four oversized legs but lacks a torso and sexual organs. Since Tschirtner’s deformed and misproportioned depictions refrain from a background and often lack context, these figures seem to be rather passive and not interactive at all, so the drawings appear inanimate and rigid most of the time. As Tschirtner portrayed the head-footer as a single person or arranged it in pairs and groups in frontal views as well as in profile,376 they differ from the head-footers toddlers draw though. Therefore, they can be considered as results of artistic expression, so they contribute to Tschirtner’s entrenchment within the contemporary art scene.377 As Navratil tried to bring different types of his patient’s artistic imaginations to light by giving him thematic tasks such as the position of the human being within the environment, moving animals or the human being in interaction, the head-footers can be accompanied by little items like clothing, everyday objects, plants or animals whose forms are as reduced as the head-footers themselves. Besides these schematised drawings Navratil encouraged Tschirtner to imitate the artworks of the Old Masters, so there is a small amount of portraits exhibited in the gugging museum that were produced by the Art Brut representative.378 A third group whose artworks date from the 1980s until the early 2000s are drawings with religious subjects concerning the artist’s Catholic faith and its associations, religious peace or the Ten Commandments. They were especially promoted by Navratil’s successor Johann Feilacher, who wanted to liberate Tschirtner from the pressure of being forced to work on thematic tasks he was not interested in and offered him the opportunity to commit topics and motifs to paper which affected and moved him both intellectually and emotionally.379

4.4.2 The Influence of Oswald Tschirtner’s Schizophrenia on Style, Topics and Stylistics of his Artworks - Art as a Form of Therapy: Tschirtner’s Vision of the Christian Faith

In contrast to Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern Oswald Tschirtner’s schizophrenia could be clinically diagnosed, so the stylistic devices and themes of his artworks can be looked at from this point of view and carefully related to his mental illness without instrumentalising the works as diagnostic aids. Some of his features like the high degree of deformation and simplification, the occasionally appearing urge to fill whole sheets with abstract forms and to design every corner of the paper or the tendency to stylise the figures and objects a lot can be and were rudimentarily interpreted as consequences of schizophrenic behaviour and thought

376 Ansperger, Tschirtner, p. 297. 377 For further information have a look at Hartmut Kraft’s examination of the significance and development of the head-footer in the oeuvres of psychiatric patients or artists suffering from mental illness: Kraft, Grenzgänger, pp. 74 – 86 / 201. 378 Navratil, Die Künstler, pp. 334 – 335.; Ansperger, Tschirtner, pp. 298 – 299. 379 Ansperger, Tschirtner, p. 299. 87 disorder following tables of characteristics of schizophrenic art.380 On the other hand they can be signs of the fight against the mental illness as well, as these features offer stability, tranquillity and orientation for psychiatric patients within the daily routine of the mental health facility. In case of Tschirtner it must be considered though that the artist’s motivations to get artistically active and to create without having any type of assistance were low and on some days not existent at all. Therefore, interpreting these stylistic devices as art-therapeutic means the artist deliberately used after he had realised their function and potential would miss the point. As Tschirtner did originally not direct his interests to art, he needed to develop formalised patterns and ways of drawing in order to fulfill the tasks Navratil gave him instead. By developing the head-footer Tschirtner concocted a general, reusable, rather simple symbol and figure he could adapt to different contexts in order to deal with the more or less challenging exercises Navratil wanted him to conduct. Following that, Hartmut Kraft interpreted his stylistic devices as born out of ’emergency solutions which reveal the distress of the drawer’.381 Therefore, it is unlikely that Oswald Tschirtner himself discovered the potential art could have had for him to heal or at least ease his anxieties and traumata from a stylistic and formal point of view, although some of the stylistics like the usage of head- footers to fill whole sheets might have brought him satisfaction, as he felt proud and accepted by his fellow residents, by psychiatrists and by the public who admired his depictions. While an examination of Tschirtner’s stylistic devices conveys the impression that he did not use art as a therapy but rather as a means to please the authorities around him and to feel successful after conducting what was demanded from him, an analysis of the topics he addressed causes questions. One of the ink drawings that date from the creative period after Tschirtner’s recognition as an Art Brut representative in the 1970s and the first exhibitions is called ’Das Jüngste Gericht’ (Fig. 10) and was made in the measurements 21 x 15 cm in 1972. Preserved in the Mumok in Vienna, 382 it shows a tall head-footer with a self-contained, unemotional facial expression and a stylised crown on its head who is sitting on a podium in the middle of a crowd of smaller head-footers. While the ones standing in front of the leading figure lean towards the left side of the drawing, the ones in the back turn to the right side facing the person in the middle, as if all of them are waiting for a decision or an event. Unlike Wölfli’s or Schröder-Sonnenstern’s artworks Tschirtner’s depiction would not be understandable without the title the artist had chosen. By interpreting the scene as a rendition of the Last Judgement, a concept Tschirtner has been familiar with since his childhood and

380 Navratil, Die Künstler, pp. 334 – 335. 381 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 201. 382 Navratil, Die Künstler, p. 342. 88 surely had to go through during the minor seminary, the head-footer in the middle of the drawing can be identified as Jesus sitting on the throne to decide about who is going to be accepted in heaven or who has to pay a bitter penance for all their sins in hell. While the ones in the back of the drawing lean against the right side which is traditionally seen as the good and salutary one383 indicating that they will be delivered from hell, the ones in the bottom lean to the left and therefore will spent their afterlife suffering from infernal punishments. Why Tschirtner has chosen this topic and if he identified with one of the head-footers in the painting waiting for Christ’s decision cannot be entirely answered, as there are no details known about the status of the Last Judgement within his religious thinking and as none of the head-footers make contact with the beholder via facial or mimic expressions. There can be speculated that Tschirtner has chosen the Last Judgement as a motif because of his experiences in Stalingrad which might have made him feel like he arrived at a place where this event could have taken place. As he refrained from inserting unambiguous symbols addressing war or martial conflicts, it is not clear though whether he used the depiction to cope with the scars the Second World War had left in him - both what he saw in Stalingrad and the consequences of these experiences, the reception order into a mental health facility as well as the loss of his possibilities to become a priest. Therefore, it cannot be declared whether he saw the drawing as an art-therapeutic means. It could as well just be interpreted as an evidence for the strong faith that accompanied Tschirtner through his whole life and for his attraction towards Christian values and ideas whereas the Last Judgement is one of the cruial ones determining the direction of a deeply religious person’s existence. That the Christian faith also played a huge part in context with Tschirtner’s mental illness is evident when interpreting the ink drawing ’Schutzmantelmadonna’ (Fig. 11) made in 1972. Preserved in the measurements 21 x 15 cm in the Mumok in Vienna,384 it shows a tall head- footer which opens its limbs like a huge coat in order to create space for six rows of smaller head-footers which try to seek shelter under its guidance, although there is no visible danger within the background of the drawing. Unlike in the ’Last Judgement’ the protagonist of the head-footers within this picture, which evokes connotations of the Christian Virgin of Mercy, sets his eyes directly at the beholder in order to communicate the safety, sympathy and love it can supply him with and to invite him to seek shelter under her limbs as well. Within Tschirtner’s religious thinking the Virgin of Mercy must have played an important role, as it could have calmed him down and made him feel like he was in good hands after the

383 Ursula Deitmaring, ’Die Bedeutung von Rechts und Links in theologischen und literarischen Texten um 1200’, Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 98:4 (1969), pp. 265 – 292, p. 268. 384 Navratil, Die Künstler, p. 343. 89 horrors of the Second World War and the complete reorientation of his life both on a professional and on a mental level at the end of the 1940s. As there are records that Tschirtner found lots of strength to carry on in the bible and the Christian prayers especially during his stay in the university hospital in Vienna,385 the drawing ’Schutzmantelmadonna’ is a prime example for the therapeutic meaning religion played within Tschirtner’s life after he had been hospitalised. Therefore, this work should not be exclusively examined under art- historical aspects and interpreted as a therapeutic medium but must be seen as a proof how Tschirtner found courage, strength and stability within the Catholic religion as well. Due to the interaction between the beholder and the protagonist it is also an evidence for his wish to transfer these feelings to his fellow human beings and the outside world. Therefore, not the artistic action or the creative designing itself might have functioned as a type of therapy for the artist but the content and hereby a completely different semantic field. That Tschirtner still felt the need to communicate his belief and to mediate the Christian message to the people when he had already been hospitalised for more than two decades is also evident when looking at the ink drawing ’Moses und der brennende Dornbusch’ (Fig. 12) from 1971 which is one of the few subsequently coloured examples that could be preserved in the Gugging museum in the measurements 14,8 x 10,5 cm.386 On the left side of the paper a red head-footer is standing in profile in front of a blue plant that can be interpreted as the burning bush of the book Exodus. Although the prophet does not integrate the beholder into the drawing, as his blue eye is not set on him and he is entirely consolidated in himself, Tschirtner could have hereby reflected on his wish to follow a clerical career, to impart his religious feelings and beliefs to the community and to function as a religious leader as Moses did. Following this intention, the impression that could be received after analysing the Virgin of Mercy can be confirmed: the drawing itself and the production process cannot be seen as means Tschirtner deliberately used to heal himself from pain, in this case form the pain of not being able to become a priest, a disappointment he also stressed in his autobiography.387 Art did only function rudimentarily as a therapeutic medium, since the contentual context, the strong tendency to depict religious scenes and principles, in which Tschirtner found strength to carry on, played the main role within the digestion process. Therefore, art was more a technique and a means to an end which Tschirtner subordinated under the content.

385 Robin Pape, ’Tschirtner, Oswald: Österreichischer Künstler und Anstaltsinsasse’, Biographisches Archiv der Psychiatrie, [https://www.biapsy.de/index.php/de/9-biographien-a-z/146-tschirtner-oswald, accessed 10/09/2019]. 386 Hannah Rieger, ’Oswald Tschirtner’, Living Art Brut, [https://livinginartbrut.com/index.php/de/kuenstler/kuenstler-r-z/oswald-tschirtner, accessed 11/09/2019]. 387 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 200. 90 5. Lives and Works of Artists in German, Swiss and Austrian Psychiatries - Psychosises as Life Crises and Mechanisms of Artistic Rebirth

Already the examination of three of Adolf Wölfli’s, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern’s and Oswald Tschirtner’s artworks and their relation to their biographies and clinical histories have shown that psychosises do not necessarily have to function as means of destruction and restriction when it comes to creative designing and artistic possibilities. All of the three artists discovered art as a means of expression during their time in a mental health facility and under the influence of a mental disorder instead. Its usage anon was versatile. One wanted to use it as a type of therapy when the other one needed it to keep himself occupied or considered it as a transformative awakening experience that aroused his interests in new professions and purposes in life. The third one in contrast was challenged to create by his caretakers and psychiatrists and could only gradually see the advantages an art-therapeutic treatment can have on mental and physical healths. Especially in cases of professional artists who have been working in this sector for a certain amount of time before they fall ill with a mental disorder and need to receive treatment in a clinic, the influence of the psychiatry as a new habitat and of the new mental state can be so huge that a process of creative regeneration and artistic rebirth is activated. Within this context the depressed painter Joseph Beuys stated what many of these professional artists noticed and experienced: After a while of a depressing lack of artistic, intellectual and physical drives following a state of huge exhaustion old patterns, restricting structures and binding traditions can be ejected within the disease process and transformed into positive forces that support the person’s discovery of new tasks, challenges and professions as well as a reorganisation of their social and political status. Hartmut Kraft who is regarded as the conceptual founder of this idea described the process as ’plus healing’ because the artist does not only revive his former physical and mental health but can also outgrow boundaries and restrictions and therefore finds himself in a better state than he has been in before he fell ill.388 How styles, motifs, themes and topics can change, expand or advance during and due to professional artists’ referrals to the mental health facility, if and how these changes can affect their artistic production not only during their stay but also after their discharge shall be examined in the following chapters. By comparing three artworks of each artist that emerged within the creative periods before, during and if possible also after the hospitalisation new structures of creative designing shall be revealed and the stigmatisation of psychosises as destructive and counterproductive mechanisms shall be presented in a different light.

388 Kraft, Grenzgänger, pp. 282 – 283. 91 5.1 Stylistic Change in the Works of Louis Soutter

A prime example for a professional artist who has been transmitted to a mental health facility after having worked internationally recognised for more than two decades in the art scene was the Swiss musician and painter Louis Soutter. In contrast to Wölfli, Schröder-Sonnenstern or Tschirtner Soutter has never spend time in a psychiatry but lived in a care home for elder people for nearly 20 years of whom many suffered from a mental or neurodegenerative illness. In the care home he developed a severe psychosis which had already been rudimentarily present before his reception order and caused him to not only experiment with the materials and techniques he has regularly used during his professional life but also to expand the functions art could have in his life in general.389 As Soutter was surrounded by mentally affected people and had to live within a highly restricted institution whose reforms only started step by step at the end of the 1920s,390 his situation was rather similar to other artists’ living in psychiatries. Therefore, his life and art production can still be examined within this master thesis under the aspect of creative regenerations within a mental health facility.

5.1.1 Louis Soutter’s Biography, Anamnesis and Artistry

Louis Soutter was born in 1871 in Morges near Lake Geneva in Switzerland as the son of a pharmacist and a woman coming from an upper-class intellectual background who introduced him to the Fine Arts and encouraged him to get artistically active and to learn how to play the violin at an early age. Having initially wanted to study engineering and architecture and to become a violinist Soutter turned to art in the late 1890s after he had abandoned all former studies in order to attend classes in painting and drawing in Geneva, Lausanne and Paris. To further pursue his career as a professional artist he moved to Colorado Springs in 1897 where he conducted art classes at the local college. Although he could hold the position of the head of the college’s art department, was able to participate in international exhibitions and was socially integrated and fully recognised in the United States, he started to develop a light type of depression due to marital conflicts. This weakened his physical and mental state to such an extent that he had to return to Switzerland in 1903 where he focused on his career as an artist rather than a teacher and partook in exhibitions both in Switzerland and abroad.391

389 Hartwig Fischer, ’Vorwort’, in Hartwig Fischer (ed.), Louis Soutter 1871 – 1942 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Haitje- Cantz, 2002), pp. 9 – 12, p. 9. 390 Kerstin Hämel, Öffnung und Engagement: Altenpflegeheime zwischen staatlicher Regulierung, Wettbewerb und zivilgesellschaftlicher Einbettung (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2012), p. 84. 391 Hartwig Fischer, ’Zur Biographie Louis Soutters’, in Hartwig Fischer (ed.), Louis Soutter 1871 – 1942 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Haitje-Cantz, 2002), pp. 265 – 285, pp. 265 – 270. 92 As his psychosis, which resembled schizophrenic outbursts according to Alfred Bader’s examinations,392 took on more dramatic scales after his father’s death in 1904, he was not able to continue working, refused to draw and displayed such a bizarre behaviour that he was brought to the mental hospital in Siez in order to receive treatment for a year. Having made the impression that he fully recovered he was released and joined several orchestras in Switzerland and Germany in 1905 in order to finance the extravagant lifestyle he had been used to since his stay in the United States. According to reports of his fellow musicians and his family Soutter’s behaviour started to deteriorate again though in the 1910s where his schizophrenic outbursts combined with autistic features, enormous self-doubts and a constraint of severe, unfounded feelings of guilt. When he financially ruined his relatives and ran up such a high amount of debts that his mental accountability was officialy doubted they finally deprived him of the right of decision in 1915 and even transmitted him to a home for mentally abnorm, disabled and dipsomaniac people in 1922.393 The most far-reaching experience Soutter had to go through in this context was his referral to the care home for elder men in Ballaigues in 1923. The artist was forced to live there for the last twenty years of his life in total isolation, social rejection and local reclusion394 after his legal guardian and his relatives had decided that they did not want to finance his lifestyle anymore and that he was a danger not only to the family’s reputation but also to its safety and wellbeing. Within the institution which was embedded in a religious, paternalistic community Soutter fell ill with depression due to the feeling of being constantly observed, incarcerated and locked up from society. He did not only feel powerless due to the deprivation of his right of decision but also humiliated and untolerated as an artist, as the home’s management denied him the right of taking engagements as a musician and did not put up with his protests against the detention both by regularly leaving the home for days395 and by hunger-striking, which was partly responsible for his death in 1942.396 After Soutter had tried to fight for his release both physically and verbally, the home’s head deprived him of his violin,397 so his possibilities to get artistically active and to express his emotions and thoughts were limited to drawing and painting. As he had seldomly painted in the 1910s and 1920s, the major part of his graphic oeuvre came into being in Ballaigues where more than 3000 drawings on pieces of newspaper and notebooks survived. Since

392 Alfred Bader, Louis Soutter: Eine pathographische Studie (Stuttgart: Eckhardt, 1968), p.m. 393 Fischer, Biographie Louis Soutters, pp. 269 – 271.; Bader, Soutter pathographische Studie, p. m. 394 Bader, Soutter pathographische Studie, p. m. 395 Michel Thévoz, Louis Soutter: Ou Ècriture du Désir (Lausanne: Editions L’Age d’homme, 1974), pp. 30 – 34. 396 Fischer, Biographie Louis Soutters, pp. 271 / 384. 397 Thévoz, Ou Ècriture du Désir, p. 33. 93 Soutter’s artistic activities were not supported by the clinical stuff and medics though398 - there is even a legend saying that his drawings were used as heating fuel in the first decade he spent there -, the preserved works represent only a small part of all the artworks Louis created in rapid succession in the care home.399 Why he started to excessively paint and draw there may have been partly caused by a lack of his typical means of expression - music and his violin - but also by his wish to express himself in a direct but also in a more or less permanent way, so his drawings can be interpreted as documents of his life, his stay within the care home and especially of all the feelings and concepts he associated with it. The exceptional mental and emotional state the artist has been in while he was living in Ballaigues made him reconsider not only the purpose of art in his life but also techniques, motifs, styles and topics. The few paintings of his first creative period dating from the 1890s to the 1910s were rather traditional and naturalistic depictions of people and inanimate objects in the form of aquarelles or pen and ink drawings which followed the demands of contemporary academies. They were at best revived by using impressionist and symbolistic borrowings such as a dissolution of the contours and a vivid usage of non-object-related colours but were relatively conventional compared to the artworks which were sold on the market at that time. In the late 1910s the artist started to develop some of the fundamental stylistic features that characterise the style of his late works:400 a neglection of proportions and entirely naturalistic forms, a preference of black-and-white structures over colourful depictions as well as a reduction to the essential. They still cleaved to naturalism though showing themes like nature and landscape, flowers and blossoms, which are topics he still displayed in the 1920s and 1930s but in other manners.401 In the care home Soutter revived both his technique by using also the left hand to create and the material by working nearly exclusively with pencil and ink on paper, whereas size and format increased over time when his works were approved and complimented from the outside, so Louis’ self-conception as an artist grew. Soutter also changed his motifs under the influence of the extensive hiking he conducted and the regular starvation diets which helped him to put himself into a state of trance and hallucination, where he was open for dreams and visions, as Le Corbusier called it. In his so-called Mannerist period in the 1930s for example he focused on the depiction of women, war and crime, sex and desire as roots of suffering as well as on religious topics such as the passion or reflected on his relationship with God by

398 Fischer, Biographie Louis Soutter, p. 272. 399 Bader, Soutter pathographische Studie, pp. m. 400 Ibid., pp. m. 401 Lucienne Peiry,’“Die Utopie malen“’, in Hartwig Fischer (ed.), Louis Soutter 1871 – 1942 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Haitje-Cantz, 2002), pp. 89 – 92, p. 91. 94 portraying so-called godless, unholy creatures. 402 The most influential technical renewal though was his idea to draw directly with his fingers due to physical reasons such as a reduction of sight and an advanced sclerosis which made working with a pencil very painful and difficult as well as due to his immense wish to express. His finger paintings, which have been the first ones made by a professional artist, consist of a combination of concrete symbols and highly stylised figures made with black oil colour but also show signs of abstract designing which he dived into in the last ten years of his life. In their entirety they resemble depictions of tribal populations displaying fertility and funerary cults.403 Proceeding from that, Soutter started to more and more use his body as a medium to create and discovered gaps and spaces as means of expression.404 Although his drawings had already been partly recognised during his lifetime after his cousin, the architect Le Corbusier advocated their presentation within French and US-American exhibitions, introduced intellectuals to Soutter’s works and organised their selling, his oeuvre has not been fully dicsovered until the 1960s. In 1961 the first bigger museum exhibition took place in Lausanne and the first monographies were published. They did not only familiarise the public with Soutter’s artworks but also classified him as an Art Brut representative.405 As Soutter was a professionally trained artist who found a very unique way of creating without considering any traditions, this later led to a rethinking of the types of groups that are integrated within the concept and made Art Brut an even more inclusive term.

5.1.2 Psychosises as Promoters of Stylistic Change and Creative Regeneration in Louis Soutter’s Oeuvre

The first connections between Soutter’s illness and the apparent stylistic change in his late works have already been noticed by Alfred Bader who suggested a two-stage model as an explanation in his pathological study on Soutter’s life and artworks. Herein he assumpted that the artist has already been suffering from a light type of schizophrenia during his time in Colorado Springs which developed into a chronical disease over the years and led to multiple stays in mental hospitals during the 1910s and 1920s. As every other mentally affected artist Soutter was able to continue working following his traditional practices, old principles, motifs and styles during the first stage of his disease. In this period Bader called latency he suffered

402 Fischer, Biographie Louis Soutters, pp. 272 / 275. 403 Ingfried Brugger, ’Louis Soutter und Arnulf Rainer: Von der werkzeuglosen Malerei zur körperbezogenen Kunst’, in Ingfried Brugger, Peter Gorsen, Klaus Albrecht Schröder (eds.), Kunst & Wahn, Exhib. Cat. Kunstforum Wien 1997 (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), pp. 411 – 413, p. 411.; Fischer, Biographie Louis Soutters, p. 281. 404 Fischer, Biographie Louis Soutters, p. 283. 405 Ibid., pp. 273 – 275 / 285. 95 from strong psychotic outbursts but as they alternated with phases of mental calming and easing he could still draw on his wealth of (artistic) experiences. As soon as the illness started to run a chronic course though, long periods of creative tiredness and lack of motivation were followed by times of enormous artistic power leading to a spreading of the illness and ill elements onto the artworks in the second stage of the disease. Within this process, which often did not only affect the mind of the artist but also physically restricted him, a stylistic, motivic and/or thematic change could take place, so the mental illness functions as an explanation for a creative reorientation and reorganisation.406 Bader’s successor Michel Thévoz instead who is not only an Art Brut specialist but also a connoisseur of Soutter’s works stated that although there is an element of anormality in the drawings the artist created during his stay in the care home, interpreting them from a highly pathological point of view as Bader did would miss the point. As it would undermine parts of Soutter’s originality, he saw the topics, motifs, styles and themes Soutter transformed not as signs and consequences of an illness but rather as an extension of normality and the ’normal’ style Soutter adopted in the 1890s and at the beginning of the 20th century.407 Bearing in mind these two diverse opinions three works of Louis Soutter shall be examined on the extent and type of changes, whereas the concept of this theses has to be slightly changed at this point, as Soutter has never left the mental hospital. Therefore, an analysis of a work dating from the time afterwards and the classical three-part division this master thesis adopted is not possible. Instead, a work from the period immediately following his stay in the United States will be compared with two others dating from the years he spent in Ballaigues, with one having been created in the middle and one towards the end of his stay. One of the few paintings that could be preserved from Soutter’s first creative period is a still life (Fig. 13) made between 1904 and 1909. Painted as an aquarelle with gouache, watercolour and pencil on white paper in the measurements 49 x 38,5 cm it is called ’Deux Vases’ and is stored in a private collection today.408 A blue vase is standing at the edge of an indefineable underpacking which is covered by a yellow blanket that might be stretched over a desk or a table. While a transparent second vase is being placed in the background, red and slightly pink-coloured roses spread into different directions over the neck of the blue vessel. Following his traditional, academic trainig Soutter depicted the vase and its content in a very

406 Bader, Soutter pathographische Studie, p. m. 407 Michel Thévoz, ’Zum Geleit: Louis Soutter’, in Michel Thévoz (ed.), Louis Soutter: Werke von 1923 bis 1942, Exhib. Cat. M. Knoedler Zürich AG 1981 – 1982 (Zürich: M. Knoedler Zürich AG, 1981), pp. 12 – 17, p. 13. 408 N.N., ’Katalog’, Michel Thévoz (ed.), Louis Soutter: Werke von 1923 bis 1942, Exhib. Cat. M. Knoedler Zürich AG 1981 – 1982 (Zürich: M. Knoedler Zürich AG, 1981), pp. m., p. m. 96 naturalistic way. He refrained from using symbols common for the genre such as attributes of fugaciousness and evanescene which could indicate a meaning he wanted to transfer to the observer but concentrated on the rather distant and sterile depiction of the object itself. The only thing giving away that he opened himself for the contemporary art scene is his dealing with the surfaces and contours which he designed according to impressionist standards by slightly dissolving the vase’s form and by working with dashes of colour when painting the roses and vessel. Based on these thematic and stylistic features, the ink drawing ’Obscure est ma passion’ (Fig. 14) which was made in 1934 in the measurements 31 x 22,5 cm and which is stored in a private collection as well,409 seems to be a radical break with his former way of depicting as it is represented by the painting analysed above. In front of a checkerboard pattern Soutter arranged a bust of a young woman with long dark hair being tamed into a ponytail around her head whose long neck is leading to a shoulderless upper body. With heavily made-up and widely opened eyes sitting in deep sockets she is looking at an object in front of her and opens her mouth slightly as if she wants to speak in the next moment. Showing a very sad and melancholic facial expression four big tears are runnig down her cheeks corresponding with the title Soutter added in the drawing’s left corner: Obscure est ma passion - Concealed is my suffering. The biggest change that directly speaks through the painting concerns its technique and material. Instead of staying with his traditional material- watercolours and gouache on paper - Soutter chose ink as his medium of expression both because of the content of the message he wanted to transfer to the observer and as he was not able to get other image carriers and painting utensils in the care home. Instead of focusing on an accurate, careful and attentive approach to the surface and the form of his subject as he tried to do it in his still life he committed the woman’s head and especially her hair to paper with fast, passionate and forceful movements that massively increase its vividness. By arranging lines without following any directions in a wild way the sterile and distant effect the aquarelle causes in the beholder disappears and makes space for a direct transfer of Soutter’s emotions to the paper and to its observer. This impression gets even stronger when looking at the drawing’s motif and its connection with the beholder. Although Soutter still chose to portray the woman in a naturalistic but reduced way, the cold atmosphere radiating from the aquarelle is replaced by a direct relationship between the observer and the subject, as the woman faces him by

409 Michel Thévoz, Louis Soutter: Catalogue de l’oeuvre (Lausanne: L’Editions L’Age d’homme, 1976), p. 282.; N.N., ’Louis Soutter: Obscure est ma passion’, Mutual Art, [https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Obscure-est- ma-passion--ruckseitig-La-mo/99AEC04E665C66C7, accessed 15/09/2019]. 97 deliberately setting her eyes onto him. Since the artist refrained from painting the pupils but let his protagonist open her eyes widely in order to express urges, forces and emotions, the woman seems to catch and enchant the beholder as if she wants to communicate all her pain and suffering directly to him, an intention that is intensified by her slightly opened mouth which tries to verbally address her pain and the tears streaming down her face. If the protagonist of the ink drawing can be identified as one of the women living in Soutter’s environment or being part of his career and private life is not known. As the care home was exclusively restricted to men, he could not have tried to portray a female resident. The only woman playing a huge role within the artist’s life, his ex wife Madge Fursman, was not perceived as an emotional figure communicating pain but rather as a dangerous, destructive female which haunted the artist for the rest of his life. She was therefore often portrayed as a sardistically laughing figure with strong teeth facing the beholder, as if she wants to impale him. Proceeding from that, one can suspect that Soutter saw the woman as a representative of his own pain, which was as obscure and not recognised by his environment as hers. There are hundreds of letters proofing that Soutter tried to convince his family, potential employers and the community’s administration of his mental accountability, of his will to work for his own alimentation and that he fought for his release from the prison both the care home and his own body represented to him, every single one without success.410 Following that interpretation, the drawing could represent an attempt to catch the beholder’s sympathy and to make him acknowledge the pain the artist had to go through by turning him into both a witness and a medium of transport that could communicate Soutter’s suffering and unfair treatment to the outside world, by turning him into an accomplice to plead for his cause. Therefore, seeing this drawing as an evidence for the influene of Soutter’s mental illness on his art, as Bader suggested it, does only partly work, as it was not the illness he suffered from and that caused him the pain represented by the tears streaming down the female’s cheeks but rather the treatment he received due to his mental otherness and its consequences. The care home building and the rooms he lived in themselves as well as the restricted forms of social contact and the social exclusion that were connected with this circumstance must have been much more important forces leading him to change topics and styles to more direct, emotional and connective ones in the 1920s and 1930s than the mental disorder itself. Therefore, Soutter is an accurate example for the influene the psychiatry or in this case the care home for elder men as a building and as an institution could have on an artist’s life and work.

410 Fischer, Biographie Louis Soutters, pp. 268 / 272 / 278. 98 This impression intensifies when looking at the finger painting ’La corde fatale’ (Fig. 15) Soutter created in 1937 but revised in 1942 in the measurements 50 x 64,8 cm with ink and gouache on paper. Today exhibited in the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Switzerland,411 it shows four black faceless figures in movement who seem to be dancing looking in different directions, frontally facing the beholder or turning to the right side showing their profiles. While at least two of them wear a dress and can therefore be identified as females, one male figure is placed in the left corner while the person standing between him and the woman dancing in the middle cannot be defined for definite. He or she is holding onto a long stick as if they need some kind of support giving them strength to carry on. With slow motions the figures follow the others who turn to a cord in the right corner of the drawing which functions as a frame for not only the picture but also for the event taking place. As in ’Obscure est ma passion’ the most evident stylistic change is connected with the different technique Soutter adopted within the painting. Instead of using a pencil he drew directly with his fingers onto the paper and therefore created in a more stylised and abstracting way refraining from fleshing out faces or details. Although the painting can still be classified as concrete and representational, Soutter completely dismissed his naturalistic way of depicting by reducing the form to its essential parts and by eliminating colours, clearly defined contours and contrasts, so the painting reaches a new level of originality and seems to be more archaic and direct. Considering the motif, an assumption that can already be made when looking at the first years of his stay in the care home proves to be true: Instead of nearly exclusively focusing on inanimate objects and motifs of the fine arts Soutter discovered the human being, his body and connections to his environment as new topics. Unlike in ’Obscure est ma passion’ none of the portrayed figures faces the beholder or sets his or her eyes directly onto him in order to transfer a message or make him a witness and accomplice. The observer and the picture’s protagonists are connected through the strikingly emphasised hands instead, which consist of long spiderly fingers trying to reach the beholder and touch each other. Although the figures stand closely next to each other, they do not get in contact, do not face each other, do not turn their bodies to one another or touch each other. As every one stands on his or her own and does not try to interact with the beholder or with the figures being around them, the painting can be interpreted as a visualisation of the social exclusion and isolation Soutter felt412 as soon as he was transferred to the care home being unable to contribute to the society’s wellbeing and interact with his fellow human beings, a

411 N. N., Katalog, p. 443. 412 Hartwig Fischer, ’Les affres sans témoins: Zum Werk von Louis Soutter’, in Hartwig Fischer (ed.), Louis Soutter 1871 – 1942 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Haitje-Cantz, 2002), pp. 13 – 40, pp. 18 – 19. 99 theme that has been visualised by psychiatric patients since the early 1800s. These feelings of being unworthy, useless and forgotten by society grew stronger over the years due to an increasing lack of contact to the outside. While the first years of Soutter’s stay within the care home were characterised by regular visits of friends, family members and intellectuals who were interested in Soutter’s works both in the home and their houses, the last years of his life starting from 1937 represent a time period of strong melancholy and tolal despair. Unlike in the first years Soutter was not able to undertake long walks anymore and could seldomly leave the residence, as his health condition declined. This situation worsened when he lost contact with some of his long-time correspondents such as Le Corbusier, who stopped sending letters after 1940.413 Feelings of extreme exclusion and loneliness grew stronger and the wish to get in contact with other human beings, especially with mentally healthy ones living outside the care home, to interact without being restricted to his deteriorating mental health as well as being socially accepted got immense. In order to transport these feelings of powerlessness to the observer and to communicate his loneliness and the impossibility to reach out to the outside world and to get in contact with other residents as well Soutter’s figures do not touch each other. Every type of cooperation, mutual understanding or interaction is not working anymore. The figures are frozen holding onto the sticks in their hands, the only thing they can reach when their fingers grasp at nothing at the same time. Proceeding from that, the assumption that not the mental illness itself caused the stylistic, technical and motivic change in Soutter’s work but rather the feeling of being locked up in a care home unable to direct his life without being restricted both by his family and relatives as well as by the home’s stuff. Bader’s idea that schizophrenia caused the artistic reorientation Soutter engaged in is rather unlikely. Unlike other patients living in institutions similar to Ballaigues Soutter never reflected on his illness but always on its consequences and hereby is a typical example for how the environment of the psychiatric institution- in this case of the care home- could shape the patient’s way of designing and the way he got artistically active.

5.2 Stylistic Change in the Works of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

As the general outline about the concept of the mad artist and the social acceptance of his works has already shown, the German avant-garde artists played a huge role for the recognition of the paintings and drawings made by psychiatric patients. Within this context it is often overlooked that ’madness’ and mental illnesses have not always been only observed by the expressionists from the distance. Some of these poets, painters and writers have

413 Fischer, Biographie Louis Soutters, pp. 284. 100 suffered from mental illnesses themselves, especially after they had served in the military during the First World War, which increased the possibility of developing a psychosis due to a lack of opportunities to get artistically active and because of experiences of hunger, violence and anxiety.414 One of these artists who was serving as an artillery driver in the First World War before he fell ill with a severe form of depression was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Having been tortured by the harsh military environment his psychosis intensified after he had developed a serious alcohol addiction and drug dependency which forced him to seek medical and psychological treatment in various sanatoria in Germany and Switzerland. Although Kirchner has never spent time in a state-owned psychiatric hospital,415 the sanatoria can be classified as similar institutions, as they were also specialised in treating patients with mental illnesses besides being an institution for the convalescene of the whole body.416 Therefore, Kirchner can still be instanced as an example for answering the question whether a special amount of time spent in a mental health facility can cause stylistic change within a professional artist’s oeuvre. As an example, three of the several self-portraits emerging in the 1910s and 1920s shall be examined in the following chapter.

5.2.1 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Biography, Anamnesis and Artistry

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was born in 1880 in Aschaffenburg as the son of a chemist who encouraged him to experiment with graphical techniques, enabled him to attend classes in watercolour painting and familiarised him with the artworks of Albrecht Dürer. Having been artistically and intellectually promoted from an early stage onwards Ernst Ludwig has already wished to become an artist in his childhood. Although he had graduated with a diploma in architecture from the polytechnical university in Dresden, he entirely focused on his career as a painter from 1905 onwards, when he and three friends founded the artist group ’Die Brücke’417 in order to set the stage for a new anti-academic and non-traditional art within the Germany of the pre-war period. 418 After having initially created by using the French impressionists’ artworks as role models Kirchner and his colleagues started to lay the foundations for the German expressionism, a new way of designing and creating Kirchner and

414 Martina Conrad, ’Zwischen Euphorie und Entsetzen: Künstler im Ersten Weltkrieg’, Documentary SWR2 Wissen, 24.21 – 25.23, [https://www.swr.de/swr2/wissen/kuenstler-im-ersten-weltkrieg/- /id=661224/did=12863894/nid=661224/1y96j48/index.html, accessed 17/09/2019]. 415 Schoop, Kirchner im Thurgau, pp. 9 – 11. 416 Elizabeth Martin, Concise Medical Dictionary, 9th edition (Oxford: University Press, 2015), digitally available under: [https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199557141.001.0001/acref- 9780199557141-e-8981, accessed 17/09/2019]. 417 Annemarie Dube Heynig, ’Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig’, in Fritz Wagner (ed.), Neue Deutsche Bibliographie, Bd. 11 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1977), pp. 658 – 661, digitally available under: [https://www.deutsche- biographie.de/gnd118562398.html#ndbcontent, accessed 17/09/2019]. 418 Averil King, Emil Nolde: Artist of the Elements (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2013), p. 37. 101 his friend Pechstein wanted to pass on to the young generation by launching an art school. While Kirchner’s career as a teacher ended quickly, as he could not attract many students, the artist group enjoyed great success in Germany. Although they were able to organise several solo exhibitons and could also present their works together with the ones of other artist groups such as ’Der Blaue Reiter’ or the ’Secession’, the group was dissolved in 1913 because of inner conflicts after Kirchner had published a chronicle about its history of origins in which he overemphasised his own role within the foundation process.419 His tries to start a career as a solo artist by establishing contacts with gallerists, architects and art historians ended abruptly with the beginning of the First World War, which Kirchner experienced while he was on the island Fehmarn experimenting with outdoor painting. The artist’s return to Berlin marks the start of his psychosis, as he developed a strong fear of people in uniforms following his immediate arrest on suspicion of spying due to his contacts with French entities, which led to stress disease and trepidation. Kirchner’s state worsened when he tried to deal with his anxieties by drinking high amounts of alcohol and when he wanted to save himself from being conscripted to serve in one of Germany’s infantry divisions by voluntarily offering to join the army as an artillery-driver. Although his supervisor, who was friends with Kirchner’s colleague Nolde, absolved him from mentally distressing orders and even offered him the possibility to leave the military for a week in order to regain strength, Kirchner could not find a way to deal with the military drill and had to be declared unfit for service after having a nervous breakdown in 1915.420 Having not been able to deal with the experiences he gathered during the First World War, especially with being constantly controlled by others, Kirchner had to make use of medical and psychological help, so he hospitalised himself into a sanatorium near Frankfurt. The facility’s leading psychiatrist Oskar Kohnstamm nearly exclusively treated Kirchner by occupying him with artistic activities such as the restyling of the sanatorium’s rooms and the production of portraits showing his fellow residents, 421 as he had already tested the therapeutic, calming and subliming potential art could have in dealing with other intellectuals. Nevertheless, Kirchner’s mental and physical state further deteriorated, as he inflicted a starvation diet on himself, which only contained coffee and cigarettes, and developed an addiction to the sleeping pill veronal as well as to alcohol in order to avoid another military service. As some of his friends and patrons connected this procedure with insanity, Kirchner

419 Norbert Wolf, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1880 – 1938: On the Edge of the Abyss of Time (Cologne: TASCHEN, 2003), pp. 7 / 46 / 54 / 93. 420 Schoop, Kirchner im Thurgau, pp. 9 – 10. 421 Ibid., p. 10. 102 feared that he could be diagnosed with a mental illness and committed to an asylum, so he asked the head of the sanatorium in Charlottenburg to attest him an inborn neurological disorder caused by a brain tumor, which was worsened by a syphilitic late-onset disease.422 This diagnosis was strengthened when the artist moved to Davos in Switzerland in 1917 in order to get away from the war zone in Berlin into a neutral state where a recovery in the countryside seemed to be possible when he could not get rid of his drug dependency and nervous disorder in Berlin. After he had also not been able to fully heal his sufferings in the remote chalet on the Stafelalp he had rented Kirchner received treatment in the private psychiatric sanatorium Bellevue in Kreuzlingen for ten months. 423 Like Kohnstamm the leading psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger was sure that the artist was suffering from an inborn disease concerning the spinal cord that would explain the feelings of paralysis Kirchner felt in his hands, partly cause his mental instability and could be worsened by traumatic experiences such as the ones Kirchner endured during the time he spent in the military. Binswanger’s therapy consisting of social reintegration as well as electrotherapeutics and the administration of morphine - a substance, Kirchner started to depend on as much as he did with veronal -424 did only improve but not completely stabilise the artist’s health when he was released in Juli 1918 and could move into an old farmhous in the Swiss mountains.425 Therefore, Kirchner was under medical and therapeutic supervision from 1921 onwards for the rest of his life after he had met the Swiss collector and psychiatrist Frédéric Bauer who practicioned at the sanatorium in Turban in Davos. Bauer did not only build up the biggest collection of Kirchner artworks that exists but also took care of the artist’s chronical pains by prescribing medication and by being a contact person offering some type of counseling, as Kirchner was never committed to a sanatorium again.426 His ongoing delusional and paranoid behaviour complicated the presentation and spreading of his artworks which also continued in Germany during his treatments in the last 20 years of his life. Although Kirchner was celebrated as one of the most influential artists of the German avantgarde and could even join the Prussian Academy of the Fine Arts in Berlin, his fears of being haunted and imprisoned became stronger after the takeover of the Nationalsocialists in 1933. After more than 600 of Kirchner’s artworks had been confiscated and presented at the

422 Gockel, Pathologisierung, pp. 106 – 109. 423 Schoop, Kirchner im Thurgau, pp. 14 – 16. 424 Gockel, Pathologisierung, p. 109. 425 Dube Heynig, Kirchner, [https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118562398.html#ndbcontent, accessed 17/09/2019]. 426 Roland Scotti, ’Arzt und Ästhet: Das Verhältnis Dr. Frédéric Bauers zu Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’, in Hans Delfs, Roland Scotti (eds.), Kirchner Museum Davos: Magazin V- Frédéric Bauer (Davos: Kirchner-Verein, 2004), pp. 11 – 20, pp. 11 – 13 / 15. 103 exhibition on degenerate art his feelings of being not only socially isolated but also wanted and haunted by the new German government increased his mental problems to such a huge extent that Kirchner did not find another exit than to shooting himself in Frauenkirch in Switzerland in 1938.427 Compared to Soutter Kirchner’s wish to get artistically active never declined whether he was in a sanatorium, serving in the military or being mentally unaffected as in his first creative period. Therefore, artworks from every time period could be preserved, although their numbers differ based on his physical state. In his first creative period during his time as a university student in Dresden the artist painted in a naturalistic way by following impressionist, symbolist or Jugendstil role models and by copying the Old Masters working with conventional materials and techniques. In the 1900s and 1910s Kirchner distanced himself more and more from a naturalistic way of depiction by using strong colours which were brought to paper in a wild and pastose way, by using broad and jagged brushstrokes, slowly deforming the objects, inserting sharp contours and by emphasising rhythm and diagonals in order to dissolve a clear separation of the front and the background and any three-dimensionality. Inspired by the original creative forces he discovered in the artworks created by the so-called ’primitive people’ he displayed both symbols of his environment like landscapes and urban life, created portraits of friends as well as of family members and used new techniques like woodcarving and woodcutting leaving traditional methods such as oil painting and painting in watercolours behind.428 This alternative way of creating becomes even more visible when looking at the works dating from the time period after Kirchner had moved to Switzerland, which represents a caesura in his life. In the Swiss mountains he found new motifs and started to portray the people, animals and customs common in this area by emotionally infusing the colours and increasing the sizes of the forms, as he gave up the wild and harsh use of the contours in favour of a mild and round conception of the surfaces. While the paintings of his first time period can be characterised by an eye-catching and bold usage of colours, the shades of the later works are reduced focusing on harmonising one another and merging into each other,429 as the intentions Kirchner had in his teenage years - the preparation of a reformed and non-academic German art - have been achieved and non-naturalistic, more and more abstracting art has been widely

427 Dube Heynig, Kirchner, [https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118562398.html#ndbcontent, accessed 17/09/2019]. 428 Ibid., [https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118562398.html#ndbcontent, accessed 17/09/2019]. 429 Annette Baumann, ’Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’, Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, [https://hls-dhs- dss.ch/de/articles/021959/2007-08-13/, accessed 17/09/2019].

104 accepted within Central Europe.

5.2.2 Psychosises as Promoters of Stylistic Change and Creative Regeneration in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Oeuvre

One of the topics that run through Kirchner’s whole graphic and painted oeuvre whether he has been living in Germany or Switzerland and which also influenced the artists of ’Die Brücke’ and all the intellectuals around him is the self-portrait. 430 As it directly mirrors Kirchner’s idea and conception of his life, his profession as well as his mental health, it offers a direct look into questions of stylistic, motivic and thematic change under the influence of his illness and stay within mental health facilities. The examination of that issue shall be restricted to this genre due to the high amount of works Kirchner created during his life and which could also provide insights into the reasons for an artistic regeneration. One of the first self-portraits that could be preserved within Kirchner’s oeuvre is the painting ’Selbstbildnis mit Modell’ (Fig. 16) made in 1910 but remastered in 1926 with oil on canvas in the measurements 150,4 x 100 cm. Exhibited in the Hamburger Kunsthalle,431 it shows a narrow room whose contours become indistinct and hidden by a carpet of red, blue, green and orange colours. In the left corner of the painting Kirchner is standing in front of a non-visible easel holding a colour palette in his right hand and wearing only an orange dressing gown with broad blue stripes. With empty eyes consisting only of two black holes he is staring at the canvas ready to draw the first lines and forms with the brush he dipped into red colour and is holding in his left hand. While he is smoking a pipe, he does not notice the red-haided woman sitting on a bed behind him watching him while he is painting. Wearing only a transparent light blue slip with pink ribbons at the seam, shoulders and neck line as well as red sandals her dress is rather revealing than covering her curves and gives away that she has an intimate relationship with the artist. Even though the painting seems to resemble typical depictions of the artist working in his studio and getting inspired by a model and muse, Kirchner’s artwork does not represent a classical self-portrait as a painter. While in other examples of this genre the artist directly sets his eyes onto the observer in order to make him aware of his profession underlining his

430 Samuel Vitali, ’Das Bild des Künstlers Selbstproträts und Freundschaftsbildnisse bei Kirchner und seinem Kreis in den zwanziger Jahren’, in Beat Stutzer, Samuel Vitali (eds.), Expressionismus aus den Bergern, Exhib. Cat. Kunstmuseum Bern, Groninger Museum, Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur 2007/2008 (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spies, 2007), pp. 66 – 79, p. 66. 431 Martina Gschwilm, ’Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Maler und Modell’, Hamburger Kunsthalle, [https://www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/sammlung-online/ernst-ludwig-kirchner/maler-und-modell, accessed 18/09/2019].

105 reputation and proudly showing what he is capable of, Kirchner melancholically stares at the easel which is not included in the painting and has to be added in the beholder’s mind, another factor which distinguishes Ernst Ludwig’s painting from classical ones. Instead of looking at the model that should be the motif of his work and whose characteristics he should filter in order to depict her or on the beholder he should impress, he is focusing on the act of painting itself turning his back on the woman. This impression intensifies when looking at the role of the model within the painting. Although she is not making eye-contact with the observer, she is still functioning as a medium of introduction which leads the beholder into the picture making him sympathise with her rather than with Kirchner who the observer perceives as rather unapproachable and farouche. Therefore, the painting gives away how Kirchner perceived himself at the beginning of the 1910s: He was the creative, independent solo artist who was able to work by concentrating on an inner vision of objects and subjects he bore in his mind instead of following nature’s forms, who created the so-called ’art from’.432 He was the melancholic artist free from civilisation who worked separated from the mainstream, the autodidact who did not need to be trained through academic classes or studies in order to reach the public, who is the new supporter and addressee of expressionist art. The self-portrait with his model represents the typical style Kirchner adopted in the late 1900s and early 1910s. Although he was still cleaving to concrete depictions, he has already given up a naturalistic way of designing by breaking away from the use of local colour choosing placative shades instead which should represent the emotions he felt during the act of painting and by more and more dissolving the form. Using round structures by avoiding sharp edges and hard contours he liberated the objects from their three-dimensionality, reduced their form to the essential by using as few lines as possible, optically distorted them433 and scaled them behind one another to override spatial borders and to separate back- and foreground. Both these stylistic and motivic features have been more or less slightly transformed in the painting ’Selbstbildnis als Kranker’ (Fig. 17) which dates from 1918 and was remastered in 1930 in the measurements 59 x 69,3 cm in oil on canvas. It is exhibited in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich434 and shows a small, barely furnished violet room in whose midst a wooden green bed is placed which is covered by a fiery red blanket. The artist who is wearing a blue shirt with red and pink patterns is sitting huddled and weirdly twisted on the top of the

432 Georg Reinhardt, ’Im Angesicht des Spiegelbildes: Anmerkungen zu Selbstbildnis-Zeichnungen Ernst Ludwig Kirchners’, Brücke-Archiv 11 (1979/1980), pp. 18 – 40, p. 19. 433 Ibid., p. 19. 434 Tine Nehler, ’Selbstbildnis als Kranker’, Die Pinakotheken, [https://www.pinakothek.de/kunst/meisterwerk/ernst-ludwig-kirchner/selbstbildnis-als-kranker, accessed 20/09/2019].

106 bed with his upper body turned to the bed’s foot and his head turned to the observer looking out of the painting’s frame. While he is stretching his left hand as if he wants to protect himself from harm, he puts his right hand underneath his mouth nearly biting his fingernails. Caught in enormous fear, stress and anxiety he cannot enjoy the mountainous landscape coloured in red, green and blue which emerges behind the window in the background. Based on the landscape in the background the scene is set in the second chalet Kirchner rented in Davos and took place after he had been released from the sanatorium in Bellevue. 435 Therefore, not only the location changed but also Kirchner’s self-definition. Instead of portraying himself as an innovative, independent and successful painter in his studio he showed up as an ill person strickened by drug dependency, alcohol addiction and paranoid delusions, which he expressed with the dark green colour on his face, the sharp contours that look like they cut into his skin, the hollow cheeks and the eyes sitting in deep holes. As he located the scene within his private rooms, he underlined that the illness followed him everywhere and constantly accompanied him. Although there is evidence that Kirchner might not have seen himself as a drug and alcohol addict and did not perceive himself as psychotic, the depiction as an ill person was essential for his wellbeing and survival. He needed to make sure that his environment and the people surrounding him, both medics, psychiatrists and friends as well as the government, were aware of his mental and physical problems in order to avoid military service and being brought back into a warzone,436 an experience that scared Kirchner even more after he was told that his colleagues Franz Marc and the son of his first psychiatrist Rudolf Kohnstamm died at the front.437 Proceeding from this point of view, the beholder becomes a very important figure within the process of reception and was integrated into the painting. As Kirchner is directly facing him and setting his eyes onto him in order to transfer all his pains, fears, anxieties and the horror he went through because of his psychosis but also because of his feeling of being constantly haunted by the military and the war, the beholder sympathises with him. In addition, he also turns into a witness who can prove that Kirchner was not able to do his service because of his mental health problems but because of his physical restrictions such as the pain in his spinal cord as well which is expressed through the artist’s posture. His whole body is twisted and cramped, as physical problems were considered as more grave reasons to be exempted from military service.438

435 Nehler, Selbstbildnis als Kranker, [https://www.pinakothek.de/kunst/meisterwerk/ernst-ludwig- kirchner/selbstbildnis-als-kranker, accessed 20/09/2019]. 436 Vitali, Selbstporträts und Freundschaftsbildnisse bei Kirchner, p. 66. 437 Schoop, Kirchner im Thurgau, p. 10. 438 Gockel, Pathologisierung, p. 109. 107 In connection with this motivic development the stylistic characteristics of Kirchner’s works changed, as his forms got more sharp-edged blending less into each other but having fixed contours. The fore- and background are more separated from each other and the degree of three-dimensionality increased but Kirchner still refused to adopt a naturalistic way of designing. Therefore, he did not depict the objects by using the correct perspectives and refrained from using local colour as well, although the range of colours got darker, subdued and more discreet, as Kirchner saw both his present situation and the future as an insecure one. Therefore, the painting stands in contrast to the spirit of optimism that shines through the bright and placative colours of the artworks made before the First World War. Considering both this stylistic and and motivic change, it must be stated that not the sanatorium as a habitat or the treatment Kirchner received there influenced him in creating differently but rather his paranoid delusions and the experiences he gathered during the war. As Kirchner was convinced that he was not mentally affected, he portrayed himself in his private room but never used the building or the walls of the sanatorium as a background for his paintings. Therefore, interpreting the stylistic and motivic change as dependent on either his stay in a mental health facility or on his illness would fall short. Kirchner liked to play with ideas about a connex between an illness and enormous creativity as the concept of the genius includes it, so he lengthened his head in the painting which is oversized compared to the rest of his body. Although he thought that his artistic ingeniuty is located in his brain, he never connected it with a mental illness but rather saw a physical degeneration like the problems he had with his spinal cord as the reason for his creativity,439 an idea that brings the first and second theoretical chapter of this thesis to a full circle. Bearing also this in mind the painting seems like a personal anti-war propaganda using a physical illness and in Kirchner’s eyes a light psychosis as a weapon against compulsory conscription. The third self-portrait (Fig. 18) which shall be used in order to work out how motifs and styles in Kirchner’s works changed over the years and to answer the question whether the sanatorium played a role within this process dates from 1925/1926 and was made with oil on canvas, whereas the measurments are unknown. It is part of the E. W. Kornfeld collection440 and emerged after Kirchner had left the sanatorium in Bellevue and was reintegrated into the society in Davos. The painting shows a buste of the artist in a three-quarter profile in front of an indefinite violet background which is decorated with green dashes of colour that resemble

439 Ibid., pp. 116 – 118. 440 Lisa Zeitz, ’Den Schweizer Kirchner zeigen’, Weltkunst 153 (2019), digitally available under: [https://www.weltkunst.de/ausstellungen/2019/02/den-schweizer-kirchner-zeigen, accessed 20/09/2019].

108 a plant. Dressed in an elegant blue shirt with a pink collar he looks to the left having a serious but calm expression on his face and thoughtfully directs his widely opened blue eyes onto an object in the distance. Compared to the ’Selbstbildnis mit Modell’ or the ’Selbstbildnis als Kranker’ Kirchner did neither portray himself as an artist nor as an ill person but rather as a well-established member of the high society who is settled in himself. Within the painting there is no sign of a physical or mental pain torturing the artist visible and both the clothing and his facial expression seem to belong to a successful business man who is looking at his achievements with pride, a status Kirchner has reached by the middle of the 1920. As this was a time when both the war was over and Kirchner had established himself as an internationally recognised painter in the German and Swiss art scene living from the income of his exhibitions,441 there was no need to portray himself affected by the problems concerning his spinal cord and by the paranoid delusions he suffered from, although his health problems continued until 1938. Therefore, the hypothesis that Kirchner’s self-definition and the bigger intentions that stood behind his self- portraits influenced both the motifs and the styles of his artworks rather than his psychosis or the sanatorium as a habitat seems to be confirmed again within this example. This is also evident when looking at the stylistics within the self-portrait from 1925/26. Instead of using sharp-edged forms Kirchner let both the surfaces intermingle with each other and reduced the colours to dark but more intensive ones he brushed onto the canvas with slow and broad strokes instead of using the utensils in a wild and energetic way. Similar to the first self-portrait he refrained from adding many objects into his painting and reduced them to the essential: The head and upper body of the artist and a discreet background pattern. Therefore, also the stylistic features show that Kirchner changed and adapted his topics, motifs and stylistics to his needs in the current situations. That he portrayed himself as an ill person after he had been released from a mental health facility and hereby changed both his motifs, perception as an artist and stylistics was more a neccessity in order to escape a conscription but evoked by the new environment or the treatment he received in the sanatorium.

5.3 Stylistic Change in the Works of Blalla W. Hallmann

One of the prime examples Hartmut Kraft instanced for his concept of the ’plus healing’ was the German artist Blalla W. Hallmann who had been a conventional, moderately successful painter before he fell ill with schizophrenia during a short period of residence in the United States at the end of the 1960s. After he had spent more than two years in psychiatries and had

441 Dube Heynig, Kirchner, [https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118562398.html#ndbcontent, accessed 20/09/2019]. 109 to fight against the illness until the late 1970s he completely restarted his career as an artists having experienced a ’transformative crisis’442. Whether this artistic ’Wandlungskrise’,443 as Hartmut Kraft called it, was caused by the illness itself or by the treatment in and the commitment to several psychiatries shall be the question of the following chapter.

5.3.1 Blalla W. Hallmann’s Biography, Anamnesis and Artistry

Blalla W. Hallmann was born as Wolfgang Hallmann in Quirl in Lower Silesia in 1941 as the son of a master painter and locally known artist.444 After his father had to serve in the Second World War and was taken prisoner by the American allies Blalla spent his childhood in German refugee camps experiencing hunger, financial shortages, emotional, religious as well as social isolation. Although he could settle in Rhineland in 1945, he still led a life as a social misfit feeling neglected by his mother,445 who he later often portrayed as a witch in his works. After Hallmann had finished middle school he inscribed at the art academy in Düsseldorf in 1957 but preferred an apprenticeship as a house painter, so he left college after one semester. Having always wanted to become a professional artist like his father he enrolled at the art academy in Nuremberg between 1960 and 1965 and tried to receive regional commissions in the following years. As he painted in a naturalistic way depicting very traditional themes and topics during a time when alternative trends such as Pop Art and abstract painting have been popular, he could not reach the contemporary gallerists and art patrons though. During this time he received the nickname Blalla, as an art critic described his works as blabla which is a German pejorative term for meaningless or trivial.446 Due to his lack of success as a professional artist in Germany and financial difficulties Hallmann travelled to San Francisco in 1967 at the invitation of a friend who wanted to introduce him to the local art scene.447 Although he could initially teach at the University of California,448 he was not able to solve his financial problems during his biennial stay in the United States and developed a severe psychosis due to drug abuse, unemployment, malnutrition 449 and social isolation. Suffering from paranoid episodes, visual as well as auditory hallucinations Blalla developed multiple personality disorder combined with

442 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 244. 443 Ibid., pp. 234 / 243 – 244. 444 Ibid., p. 234. 445 Matthias Reichelt, ’Einleitung’, in Matthias Reichelt (ed.), Die Sprache verschlagen: Die Bildgewalt des Blalla W. Hallmann (Nuremberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2007), pp. 17 – 22, p. 18. 446 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 234. 447 Ibid., p. 234. 448 Eva Zeltner, Blalla W. Hallmann: Kurzbiographie, Blalla W. Hallmann Blog, [https://blalla-hallmann.de/, accessed 20/09/2019]. 449 Reichelt, Einleitung, p. 19. 110 depersonalisation, associative disorder and suicidal thoughts which did not only cause him to stop getting artistically active but also resulted in serious harm towards himself and others. After his hallucinations and paranoia caused the police and the public authorities to become aware of his bizarre behaviour and his invalid permit of residence Hallmann had to return to Germany in 1969 and committed himself to two psychiatric hospitals in Bavaria and Rhineland-Palatinate where he was diagnosed with a schizoid psychosis.450 While Hallmann received medicinal as well as psychological treatment for two years, he hardly produced any artworks and destroyed the major part of the drawings and paintings he had created within the United States and before he fell ill with a mental disorder. Having been forced from the outside to get artistically active again he only painted on demand and within occupational therapy, so he decided to retrain and take new professional challenges by joining a drama group. As he could not deal with the pressure of being on stage regularly, his psychosis became more intense and Blalla had to seek treatment within a clinic in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1972 where he slowly found his way back to painting. Supported by medical treatment the artist was able to control his psychosis more and more within the following years, so he could further pursue his career in the 1980s and 1990s451 and even held a chair at the art school in Braunschweig.452 As he used new motifs, styles and topics he had discovered while dealing with his psychosis and treatment, Hallmann could achieve success in Germany in the last decades of the 20th century before he died in 1997.453 Stylistically it is difficult to embed Blalla W. Hallmann’s artistry within the contemporary art scene, as his oeuvre shows characteristics of Outsider Art and Art Brut, surrealism and folk art454 whose importance varied in the three phases it can be subdivided into. After he had initially created following naturalistic design principles and depicted religious topics, usually with watercolour and oil on paper, in his first creative period between 1963 and 1968455 he started to use the pencil drawing as a medium of expression while he was stationed in the clinic. Under the influence of the psychosis he gave up all traces of naturalism in this second creative period and discovered sex, violence and aggression as new topics. He committed them to paper in a very stylised and reduced way by using elements of deformation, by dissolving the perspectives and three-dimensionality as well as by removing placative or

450 Kraft, Grenzgänger, pp. 234 – 237. 451 Ibid., pp. 237 – 241 / 244. 452 Zeltner, Blalla W. Hallmann, [https://blalla-hallmann.de/, accessed 20/09/2019]. 453 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 243. 454 Zeltner, Blalla W. Hallmann, [https://blalla-hallmann.de/, accessed 20/09/2019]. 455 Hartmut Kraft, ’Blalla W. Hallmann, 1941 – 2. Juli 1997: „Gipskopf mit Mütze“, in Ingfried Brugger, Peter Gorsen, Klaus Albrecht Schröder (eds.), Kunst & Wahn, Exhib. Cat. Kunstforum Wien 1997 (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), pp. 423 – 424, p. 423. 111 intensive colours. Although these works merely consisted of forms in different combinations but lacked a narrative context, he was later able to connect the religious themes of the first creative period with these sexual and violent ones as well as with the new stylistic features. With the progression of his disease Hallmann’s forms got more and more rigid and stiff consisting only of geometrical and symmetrical patterns which he needed in order to anchor himself during schizophrenic outbursts.456 After Hallmann was able to leave the clinic and could pursue his profession as he did before he fell ill with schizophrenia he succeeded in combining both the stylistics and the topics of his two preceeding creative periods with each other by focusing on the medium of painting with oil, watercolour and crayons as well as on woodcarvings and sculptural works. Drawing on European traditions such as the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, James Ensor, Gothic painting in Franconia or Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern he depicted sociocritical topics fighting against traditional hierarchies such as the Catholic church and the state’s government, getting even with commerce, an US-orientated consumer society using nuclear energy and destroying the planet or revealing the Germans’ double standards both when it came to their nationalsocialist past or their role within the Cold War. Therefore he used strategies of irritation, provocation, disharmony, zynism and horror by demonstrating any type of violence mercilessly and by confronting the observer with immorality and injustices. By using traditional devices such as local colour, natural forms, rudiments of a correct perspective and three-dimensionality and by narrating stories of sex, crime and death Blalla W. Hallmann confronted the observer with the abysees of the human soul and psyche and hereby provokes moments of schock, fear and anxiety within the beholder.457

5.3.2 Psychosises as Promoters of Stylistic Change and Creative Regeneration in Blalla W. Hallmann’s Oeuvre

Due to the intentional destruction of many of his early works under the influence of the psychosis and due to a lack of success which hindered Blalla W. Hallmann from selling his drawings and paintings to gallerists and museum folks and from presenting them to the public it is more difficult to find enough material for a representational comparison on this chapter’s research question. One of the few works that could be preserved from the late 1950s is the painting of the ’Katzenbändigerin’ (Fig. 19), which was made in 1958 with egg tempera on

456 Kraft, Grenzgänger, pp. 237 – 241. 457 Georg F. Schwarzbauer, ’Blalla W. Hallmann: Sein malerisches Werk’, in Emsdettener Kunstverein (ed.), Blalla W. Hallmann: Arbeiten 1958 – 1990 (Emsdetten: Emsdettener Kunstverein, 1991), (Schriften des Museums Oberdeutsche Galerie in Regensburg, 12), pp. 17 – 41, pp. 18 – 19 / 23.; Reichelt, Einleitung, pp. 17 / 19 – 20.; Kraft, Grenzgänger, pp. 242 – 243. 112 wood in the measurements 124 x 104 cm. It is part of Hartmut Kraft’s private collection today458 and shows a broad androgynous figure dressed in a light blue shirt and a navy skirt with stripes in front of a couple of red houses which are surrounded by a tall transparent church tower. With a grimacing facial expression the figure whose hair have already whitened tries to clear its way through the snow which is covering the roofs of the houses and leaves the village in an eerie silence. The person’s face has turned pale except the long nose which has already got blue due to the coldness of the night, while she is starring at an object in front of her with widely opened yellowish eyes. Holding a coronal in her right hand she is approaching a cat lying sprawled in front of her in order to catch it and take it with her. While the animal is looking horrified as it hears the figure approaching, another cat the figure has already caught is standing next to her with a peaceful smile on its lips. The painting shows the stylistic characteristics that are representational for Blalla’s first creative period. Still cleaving to a naturalistic but seemingly reduced and abstracting way of depicting, the figures and objects lack corporeality and appear flat, as he focused on the essential elements. Although he did not refrain from painting at least partly perspectively correctly, the forms do not resemble natural ones and the relations between body parts are not accurate being either too long or too broad. By neglecting rules of correct proportions, contouring and shading there is no three-dimensionality reached within the painting, which is supported by the free use of colours. These are not local ones as well, as the cats are green and red and the figure is painted in an unnatural, salmon-coloured tone. Blalla W. Hallmann himself did not talk about the deeper meaning of the painting but due to the accentuation of the cats, which have been symbols of darkness, infidelity, black magic and unchastity in the Christian conception of the World since the Middle Ages, 459 it can be assumed that he hereby tried to come to terms with his childhood and the complicated relationship he had with his mother. Therefore, he could have identified with the cat lying in the front directly setting its widely opened eyes onto the beholder in order to show him how scared it is, as the figure which could represent Hallmann’s mother is approaching. This becomes even more evident when looking at the religious symbols which are hidden in the painting: the figure is approaching with a corona which resembles an Advent wreath rather than a rope she would have needed in order to catch the cat. Proceeding from that, Hallmann could have wanted to criticise both the Protestant religious eduction and the system of values his mother raised him with, which he made responsible for his social isolation within the

458 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 235. 459 Wetzel, Lexikon der Symbole, p. 162. 113 Catholic Rhineland.460 When it comes to the preserved artworks of Hallmann’s second creative period he spent in the psychiatry and when he was affected by his mental illness a similar balance can be drawn as for the works of his first creative phase. One of the few pencil and coloured pencil drawings (Fig. 20) he did not destroy is not entitled and dates from 1969, a time when Hallmann has been living in the psychiatric hospital in Klingenmünster. Made in the measurements 43 x 35,5 cm it is preserved in Hartmut Kraft’s private collection as well461 and is entirely filled with geometrical forms. By using means of caricature and irony Blalla drew a deformed face in the middle of the paper consisting of two ovoid eyes with blue ovoid pupils and long eyelashes, a nose that resembles erected male genitalia as well as a long zylindrical setup which is placed on top of and behind the eyes and resembles a hat. Mouth and ears are not included in the painting, which Kraft interpreted as a consequence of the schizophrenia.462 Instead of depicting a concrete and representational motif as in the ’Katzenbändigerin’ Hallmann reduced his style to the use of geometric forms, nearly refrained from any colour and got rid of the background, the perspective and any narrative sense the pictures of his first creative period still had. He hereby broke with his artistic training both on a contentual and on a formal level by going from depicting a religious topic to a highly sexualised one, by confronting two artistic, moral as well as societal fields with one another. That the habitat of the psychiatry influenced him in changing his style like this and to choose the different motif due to a restriction or due to traumatic experiences in the new environment as it has been the case with Soutter has to be doubted though. As there is evidence that both the stuff and the spatial conditions made it possible for Hallmann to get creatively active the way he was used to and that he was even encouraged to draw and paint while he lived in Klingenmünster,463 it must have been rather the illness than the building of and the treatment in the psychiatry that cause this stylistic and motivic change within his oeuvre. This impression is being confirmed when looking at a painting from the third period of Hallmann’s creative designing, which is called ’Gott ist die Liebe’ (Fig. 21) and whose provenance is not known. Made in 1993 with acrylic on glass in the measurements 120 x 110 cm464 it shows a long Gothic hall which is equipped with a checkerboard pattern and six

460 Reichelt, Einleitung, p. 18. 461 Kraft, Grenzgänger, p. 237. 462 Ibid., p. 237. 463 Ibid., p. 238. 464 N.N., ’Blalla W. Hallmann: GOTT IST DIE LIEBE, 1993’, NO Art Gallery, [http://www.no- art.info/_gallery/de/hallmann.html, accessed 20/09/2019].

114 pillars. In the middle of the hall God the Father in the shape of Mickey Mouse who is wearing a big golden crown on his head and a red coat which is decorated with the dollar symbol and seamed with the US-American flag is anally penetrating Jesus who is portrayed as Mickey Mouse as well. On his head he is wearing the thorny crown surrounded by a golden halo which directs the observer’s attention to his blue T-Shirt whose sleeve is decorated with the United States’ flag as well. With his trousers down he is anally penetrating a white duck whose forehead shows the same American signum as well. Although it is looking ahead during the act whose enormous sexual tension is also demonstrated by the phallic noses both God the Father and Jesus have, the animal does not notice the other duck which is hiding behind a pillar observing the scene. Comparing ’Gott ist die Liebe’ with the painting and the drawing of the first two creative periods the motivic change that characterises Hallmann’s oeuvre as a consequence of his mental illness gets even more evident. Although he had already discovered sex and phallic objects as themes during his stay in the psychiatry, Blalla used them to criticise both the Catholic church and the American way of life in this acrylic sheet for the first time. 465 Referring to the scandals of sexual abuse within the Christian institutions which got widely and publically known in Germany during the 1990s for the first time and did not only concern Europe but the United States even more,466 he demonstrated the hidden side of the church’s idea of human love, sex and marriage. He pointed out that behind the innocent surfaces priests, nuns and all other sorts of clerics have been assaulting women, men and children for centuries by adopting means of sarcasm when looking at the title ’Gott ist die Liebe’- God is the love. Within this context the duck hiding behind the pillar serves as a figure of identification for the beholder who beomes aware of the crisis but does not act and rather observes in silence. On the other hand Hallmann addressed the church’s longing for money by dressing God the Father in a coat decorated with dollar signs, a critique he also directed to the shopaholic consumer who emerged after the German reunification in 1989.467 Following this interpretation, the painting can also be seen as an attack at the spineless and uncritical citizen who is following politics without reflecting letting himself getting penetrated by hierarchical power structures he does not fight against. Besides this thematic and motific transformation the stylistic features of Hallmann’s third

465 Travis Jeppesen, ’Blallas Blasphemie: Die Wiederentdeckung von Blalla W. Hallmann,’ Umêlec 2, (2005), digitally available under: [http://divus.cc/london/de/article/blalla-s-blasphemy-rediscovering, accessed 20/09/2019]. 466 Paul Uche Nwobi, Poor Formation as a Principal Factor to the Crisis in Priesthood Today (Blumington: AuthorHouse, 2012), p. XVII. 467 Jeppesen, Blallas Blasphemie, [http://divus.cc/london/de/article/blalla-s-blasphemy-rediscovering, accessed 20/09/2019]. 115 creative period changed as well. Instead of only composing forms and geometrical structures he found his way back to a naturalistic style which got even more concrete and representational than in his first creative phase. Instead of designing flat forms whose colours did not resemble the local ones and who only consisted of empty contours he created three- dimensional, corporeal figures using perspectives as well as object-related shades. In order to intensify the shocking effects his paintings should have he refrained from depicting light and shadows and used the colours in a placative, homogenous way without intermingling them, so the contours and forms seem to collide without blending. Therefore, the painting of this third period rather resembles a comic than a par for par depiction of the reality, a strategy Hallmann deliberately used to transfer his sociocritical message even more directly to the observer. Proceeding from that, the hypothesis that the psychiatry as a habitat or Hallmann’s mental illness did influence the stylistic and motific change that characterises his third creative period, seems very dubious. The sudden interest in offering criticism in the last twenty years of his life was a consequence of not only his religiously and socially restricted childhood but also of the stay within the United States which made Hallmann become more aware of social injustices and more attentive for them in Germany as well, so the transformation of his topics and stylistics was rather caused within a long process than by one single event. Nevertheless, it must not be entirely excluded that both the psychiatry as a new habitat and the treatment of the illness could have evoken original forces within the artist which made him reflect on society, hierarchies, and morals he lived in. Therefore, the psychiatry as a habitat and his mental illness must be considered as indirect forces within the artist’s process of creative regeneration and rebirth.

116 6. Psychiatries as Total Institutions - Art and Creative Designing as Strategies to Express Autonomy and Self-Determination

In order to link the preceeding contentual chapters with each other art production and creative designing in psychiatries whether it was done by an autodidact who has never been artistically active before or by a professional artist shall be examined within a broader sociological context. By asking about the general function art could have for the patients independently from the individual case the question whether getting artistically active was a way for them to express autonomy and self-determination in the restricted environment of the psychiatry is treated by using the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of the total institution. Therefore, the following chapter tries to work on the hypothesis that creative designing was a possibility to lift the character of the psychiatry as a total institution by looking into its characteristics and by asking which role art could have played in this context in practice.

6.1 Erving Goffman’s Concept of Total Institutions - Characteristics and Examples

The concept of the Total Institution was set up by Erving Goffman in 1961 and put into writing in his monography ’Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates’468 after he had been practising at the St. Elisabeth Hospital in Washington D.C. in 1955/56469 working on a paper about the lifestyle and social milieu of the clinic’s inmates. Subdivided into four parts it examines social structures, hierarchies and forms of interaction in facilities of so-called ’social arrangements’.470 These are habitats for groups of equated people who have been abandoned from the societies they lived in either voluntarily or involuntarily for a more or less long period of time due to health and care, safety, military or religious reasons and whose daily lives follow the rules of a bureaucratic superstructure which uses mechanisms of mortification in order to control the inmates.471 According to Goffman such institutions can be state welfare facilities like poorhouses and orphanages, asylums like psychiatric and general hospitals and institutions for the custody of socially dangerous people such as prisons and gaols. In addition, he also included facilities for the organisation of labor unions such as military barracks, estate houses and residential schools or religious institutions which serve both for education and as places to distance oneself from profanity like cloisters

468 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Chicago: Anchor, 1961). This master thesis will refer to the German edition released in 1973 by the Suhrkamp publishing: Erving Goffman, Asyle: Über die soziale Situation psychiatrischer Patienten und anderer Insassen, transl. by Günther Busch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973). 469 Dominique Karner, ’Totale Institutionen: Psychiatrien im 19. Jahrhundert am Beispiel der k.k. Provinzial- Irren-Heilanstalt Hall in Tirol’, historia scribere 8 (2016), pp. 27 – 43, p. 28. 470 Goffman, Asyle, pp. 7 – 8 / 15. 471 Benny Goodman, ’Erving Goffman and the Total Institution’, Nurse Education Today 33 (2013), pp. 81 – 82, p. 81. 117 and monasteries 472 which exercise control over their residents by using the following principles: They first restrict the patients’ contact to the outside world stripping them off of the roles, professions, legal rights and positions as well as their socio-economical status they had before they were transferred to the institution, a process Goffman called ’civil death’.473 They then depersonalise them within a process of clearing all traces of individuality, of treating them as numbers rather than persons, of dispossessing them by using mechanisms of humiliation and punishment. They undermine their dignity by transferring highly personal activities such as body hygiene, sleeping or eating into a public matter and by restricting the persons’ possibilities to decide things based on their own will.474 In order to guarantee a regulated togetherness within the institutions they are normally shaped by two groups facing each other which are connected within a forced relationship and mutual system of values: Inmates and institutional staff who represent the passive and active part as well as the receiving and the ordering agent within the hierarchy of the institution are dealing with one another based on the facility’s instructions and rules and hereby ensure that the structures of power and dependency are being maintained.475 One of the main traits of this control process that makes the second chapter of this theoretical examination particularly interesting is the last mechanism Goffman mentioned when describing the structures of mortification a total institution uses to keep its occupants under control: Restriction on self-determination, autonomy and freedom of action.476 Within this context he distinguished four categories and characteristics that shape lives and works of the concerned inmates: While non-institutionalised people are able to move and carry out different tasks in several stations, the inmates of a total institution are forced to work, live, sleep and eat in the same place while being controlled by the same authority, so the separation of roosting place, workplace and play area is removed.477 As a second characteristic they are not able to freely conduct exercises on their own, as they are bound to cooperate with a bigger group of fellow inmates who are all treated the same way working on the same task. In addition, their timelines are set by the authority under whose control they are living and the rules they laid down, so every part of their daily routine is structured from the outside with one activity leading to another. Within his fourth point Goffman listed that these restrictions

472 Martin Scheutz,’„Totale Institutionen“: missgeleiteter Bruder oder notwendiger Begleiter der Moderne? – Eine Einführung’, in Martin Scheutz (ed.), Totale Institutionen, Wiener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Neuzeit 8:1 (2008), pp. 3 – 19, p. 5 473 Goffman, Asyle, p. 26. 474 Scheutz, Totale Institutionen, p. 6.; Goodman, Goffman and the Total Institution, p. 81.; Goffman, Asyle, pp. 26 – 27. 475 Karner, Totale Institutionen, p. 32. 476 Goodman, Goffman and the Total Institution, p. 81. 477 Karner, Totale Institutionen, p. 32. 118 are set by the total institution in order to fulfill an official higher goal, so the inmates turn into vicarious agents who act according to a higher rationale the facility sets.478 Goffman listed five tasks total institutions want to reach by treating their inmates following this set of rules. Besides economical benefits they want to reach by letting the occupants work on a regular basis they pretend to provide educational and training opportunities as well as religious catharsis. Many of them are also connected with medicinal and psychological care and in case of prisons, camps or leprasoriums they claim to save the society from danger by using mechanisms of prevention, deterrence, revenge and social rehabilitation.479 Subsequent to this analysis Goffman harshly critisised that the institutions would rather want to reshape and transform their inmates by using means of violence and humilitaion instead of making a resocialisation possible, so that they would not solve difficulties and remedy shortcomings but cause and worsen them instead.480 According to Martin Scheutz, the opportunities an inmate has in order to deal with his new situation, which might not resemble his or her former lifestyle at all, are versatile. They can range from a total emotional and social isolation combined with some kind of inner emigration to a so-called colonisation which means the inmate finds a way to lead a happy life in the institution by playing the role of the ideal occupant. While scattered instances show a maximum of resistance towards being hold captive against their will and entirely focus on themselves and their wellbeing, most of the people living in the lower hierarchies of a total institution would formally accept the situation and adapt but emotionally distance themselves.481 Proceeding from this general point of view, the next chapter tries to ask if the six artists, which served as prime examples for the questions how art could be used as a form of therapy and how psychosises could cause a stylistic change and creative regeneration, found themselves in a total institution and if so, whether they used art as a means of personal fruition and a medium to express self-autonomy and self-determination.

6.2 Art as a Strategy to Express Autonomy and Self-Determination in Psychiatries of the 19th and 20th Century - Total Institutions in Practice

In order to employ Erving Goffman’s concept of the Total Institution on the six mental health facilities Wölfli, Schröder-Sonnenstern, Tschirtner, Soutter, Kirchner and Hallmann have been working in and to answer whether they could break the sixth characteristic of a restriction on self-determination, autonomy and freedom of action by getting artistically

478 Goffman, Asyle, p. 17. 479 Ibid., pp. 86 – 87. 480 Scheutz, Totale Institutionen, p. 9. 481 Ibid., pp. 7 – 8. 119 active in these institutions, the diversity of the facilities has to be kept in mind. Although every one of these artists lived in an establishment whose rules were at least similar to the ones that were valid in psychiatries such as restricted contact to the outside world, a daily routine planned out by the institutions’ administration and a lack of possibilities to pursue one’s original profession, it has to be considered which status the institution had both in the country and in the psychiatric landscape around it. It also has to be examined whether the concerned institutions were private or state ones, how treatments changed according to this factor and if art has been used as a therapeutic means within this context. Adolf Wölfli spent more than 30 years of his life in the Waldau asylum, one of the first psychiatries in the Canton of Berne which provided accomodation for more than 400 patients while the artist lived there. From 1890 onwards until 1933 the institution was administered by the Basle psychiatrist Wilhelm von Speyr who was convinced that the best treatment for the patients would be a regular participation in occupational therapy, lying in bed for hours - the so-called Bettbehandlung - and as much isolation as possible, a factor which was further promoted by the remote area the Waldau was located in. As he was not keen on trying innovative methods that reached psychiatric institutions around 1900, he supported outdated measures482 such as the confinement in a solitary cell Wölfli had to endure for 30 years. Speyr hereby further restricted not only Wölfli’s contact with the outside world but also his possibility to move around in the building itself. Wölfli had one room made available for him to live and work, so by getting creatively active he had the possibility to widen his geographical radius and to get rid of the physical restrictions he endured in the asylum. This becomes especially evident when looking at the black-and-white drawing ’Die Assiisen des Mittellandes’ where he clearly referred to a different local area than the one he lived in or his depiction of the asylum building, a prospect he did not see very often. In addition, Wölfli collected posters and newspapers showing landscapes, advertisements and customs and created so-called geographical notebooks where he travelled as the child Doufi through the world and was able to buy all the places he visited, to fill them with infrastructure and to launch institutions there.483 Besides this local and geographical restrictions Wölfli also fought against the institutional cooptation, equation and depersonalisation within the psychiatry’s hierarchy by getting artistically active, as he exclusively dedicated himself to creating and also perceived himself as a professional artist who sold his works and could drew and paint whenever he liked without being restricted by the clinical stuff and their schedules.

482 Martina Wernli, Schreiben am Rand: Die „Bernische kantonale Irrenanstalt Waldau“ und ihre Narrative (1855 – 1936) (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012), pp. 21 – 22. 483 Spoerri, Adolf Wölfli, pp. 20 – 21. 120 In contrast, the early works Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern created in the psychiatry Neustadt in Holstein convey a rather ambiguous impression. As there are not many details known about how he lived, worked and was treated in the institution, it is difficult to definitely prove that Schröder-Sonnenstern wanted to fight against the local restrictions and processes of isolation he had to endure in it. There are letters sent by his fiancé Martha to the clinic’s administration on behalf of his release 484 and even written complaints Schröder- Sonnenstern sent to the local authorities after his referral to the psychiatry. As it was one of the most loyal ones to the state and the government in the whole county,485 a characteristic Schröder-Sonnenstern despised due to his hatred against institutions, it seems to be likely that he wanted to leave the facility as soon as possible. Apart from his need of being recognised by others and not equated with his fellow inmates he must have felt like a prisoner, an impression that intensifies when looking at the painting ’Gefangener Nr. 28 von einem Eisbären zerrissen? Am 13.1. begraben... und das alles mit lächelnder Miene!’. On the other hand he told Martha that he was enjoying his stay and wanted to live in the psychiatry even longer, as it offered him the possibility to find enough strength, quietness and time to get creative and as the episode about the insane painter shows the conditions and circumstances for a professional art production in the psychiatry in Neustadt must have been given.486 Therefore, it must remain open whether Schröder-Sonnenstern used art as a means to express autonomy and self-determination within the new environment. Compared to Wölfli and Schröder-Sonnenstern Oswald Tschirtner’s situation in the clinic in Gugging was completely different and questions of local restriction and isolation were not a matter that concerned the artist. As Tschirtner was deliberately promoted in getting artistically active within art-therapeutical contexts and could even move into a house that was dedicated to the creative patients living in Gugging, it is rather unlikely that he felt the need to express autonomy and self-determination through art. As Navratil emphasised in his writings the patients could get artistically active whenever and wherever they liked, that they could sell their works and were therefore not equated with the masses of psychiatric patients,487 so the clinic in Gugging can be seen as the opposite of a socially, creatively or mentally restricting institutional setting. That Tschirtner’s psychiatrist Navratil often had to convince him to work and get artistically active might have even achieved the opposite: As Hartmut Kraft could

484 Ferentschik, Gorsen, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern und sein Kosmos, p. 52. 485 The Landesheilanstalt Neustadt in Holstein is known for willingly cooperating with the Nazi regime in order to conduct the euthanasia programme in 1941/42. For further information have a look at: Bettina Schubert, ’Psychiatrie im Wiederaufbau: Das Landeskrankenhaus Neustadt in Holstein zwischen Euthanasie-Aktion und Reform, unpublished PhD thesis (Lübeck, 2017), p. 1 486 Bader, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, pp. 21 – 24. 487 Navratil, Einleitung, p. 33. 121 prove, Tschirtner felt the need to please his psychiatrist and therefore drew according to Navratil’s wishes but was never able to fully grasp the potential art could have for his own needs and requirements within the healing process. Instead of viewing art as a means to express autonomy and self-determination within the institution he might have rather seen it as stressful and as an external intervention, at least during the first years when Navratil worked with him before Feilacher tried to meet Tschirtner’s wishes and interests a bit more when choosing the topics. In contrast to Tschirtner’s works Louis Soutter’s artworks can be definitely interpreted as means to express autonomy and self-determination. Soutter felt like a prisoner within the care home and fought for his release both verbally and physically for the rest of his life, although he was not as geographically restricted as Wölfli was and could regularly leave the institution until the late 1930s. For Soutter art and creative designing might not have functioned as means to fight local restriction but he addressed social injustices within his works and used art in order to portray his tortured psyche and body after he had lost his right of decision, a topic he responded to in ’Obscure est ma passion’. Within his artworks he could not only freely choose topics, themes and stylistics but also document the pain he endured in the institution, so the artwork did not only offer him the possibility to gain self-determination and autonomy but also made it possible to denounce both the clinical stuff and medics as well as his family who caused this situation and to take revenge on them. In addition, he was neither seen as a professional painter by the clinical stuff nor allowed to work as a violinist anymore and even deprived of his instrument, a procedure that was part of the removal of personal possessions and markers of individuality and identity within the process of entrance into the care home, a factor Goffman described as a typical characteristic for a total institution. He was not only equated with the rest of the residents but also socially excluded and isolated from the outside world, a pain he addressed in ’La corde fatale’. Through the means of art he was able to evoke memories of times where he could socially interact with the outside world without being controlled by an authority and to visualise how meeting people outside the care home once more would be, a dream that came true within his paintings against all resistance. In contrast to Louis Soutter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner has committed himself to a mental health facility without being forced by the outside. Instead of entering a public mental health facility he was taken care of in private sanatoria with Bellevue leading the way where he received professional and individual treatment, as the numbers of patients were very reduced and small compared to the ones of the Waldau asylum. In addition, he was also able to live within an intellectually stimulating environment. Bellevue was known as a meeting and gathering point

122 for members of the lower upper and higher middle classes such as intellectuals, businessmen, 488 artists, writers and philosophers who searched for means to renew both Germany’s political system as well as the status of the Fine Arts within the Weimar Republic.489 Kirchner could not only find dialogue partners he could approach in order to discuss his ideas about the status of modern art and the contemporary artist in Bellevue but was also treated as a mentally competent patient. The sanatorium’s stuff carefully distinguished between patients suffering from melancholy or dementia and those who have become addicted to sleeping pills or all other kinds of substances and provided Kirchner with effective treatment, as they were not interested in locking the inmates up but in making them recover as soon as possible in order to reintregrate them in society again.490 There is no evidence that Kirchner has ever been restricted in his possibilities to leave the facility or has ever been undermined as an artist. Instead, he had always been treated as a free individual and had the possibility to carry on working as he was used to without having to adapt to the sanatorium’s timetables or any other restrictions. As Kirchner was even integrated into his psychiatrist’s family who also built up amicable relations with him after he had been released from the institution,491 it is rather unlikely that he restricted Kirchner as an individum or as a painter in any way. Therefore, there was no need for him to use art as a means to express autonomy and self-determination while he was living in the sanatorium. Finally the case of Blalla W. Hallmann leads to a similar result as it has already been made for Tschirtner. As Hallmann explained in an interview with Hartmut Kraft, he was not interested in getting artistically active during most of the time he spent in mental health facilities and had to be directly asked and challenged in order to start drawing by the clinical stuff who provided him with material. 492 Therefore, it is rather unlikely that Hallmann perceived the psychiatry and the people working in it as restrictive forces within his life both on a geographical and on a social or intellectual level. As he only opened up partly about his stay within the psychiatry in the last years of his life,493 there is no evidence available that Hallmann wanted to use art as a means to express autonomy and self-determination.

488 Katja Gertrud Doneith, ’Binswangers Privatklinik Bellevue 1881 – 1885’, unpublished PhD (Tübingen 2008), pp. 45 / 48. 489 Gockel, Pathologisierung, p. 111. 490 Doneith, Privatklinik Bellevue, p. 51. 491 Gockel, Pathologisierung, p. 126. 492 Kraft, Grenzgänger, pp. 237 – 238. 493 Hartmut Kraft, ’Auf dem Weg zu Blalla’, in Hartmut Kraft (ed.), Ecce BLALLA! - Abstürze und Höhenflüge: Leben und Werk von Blalla W. Hallmann (1941 – 1997), Exhib. Cat. Museum für Sepulkralkultur Kassel, Krankenhaus-Museum Bremen, LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn, Sammlung Prinzhorn Heidelberg 2013/14 (Cologne: Salon-Verlag, 2013), pp. 5 – 11, pp. 7 – 9. 123 7. Conclusion

In 1884 the French realist painter Gustave Courbet painted one of the most famous self- portraits of the 19th century (Fig. 22). In front of an indefinite background the painter has raised both arms letting the sleeves flying in the wind in order to tear his long brown hair, scratching deeply into his scalp with both hands. He is facing the observer and opens his dark brown eyes with a flounce setting them directly onto the beholder as if he wants to entrance him telling him all about his pain, despair and suffering. He embodies the typical romantic idea of the mad artist who is tortured from the inside, misunderstood by the people surrounding him but capable of creating the most fantastical and extraordinary artworks which stand the test of time. This concept though dates back to a time much longer ago than the Romantic era. After the antique philosophers have already become aware of the connex between ingenuity and madness, between creativity and mental illness the idea that extraordinary performances and achievements can only be reached by a mad genius has been transported over time to the late 19th century. Based on antique concepts like the Platonic mania or Aristotle’s homo melancholicus, Renaissance ideals like the furor divinus and the Enlightenment’s imaginations of the Bildungsgenie contemporary thinkers like Cesare Lombroso and Auguste Morel used the concept of the mad genius in order to lay the foundations for the science and pathologisation of the artist. By conceptualising ideas about creativity and degeneration the discussion about the traits and nature of the genius entered psychiatric circles and led to the idea that underneath all the ill and forgotten patients of mental health facilities artists could be hidden, a topic which was especially popular in this master thesis’ research areas Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Proceeding from this point of view, psychiatrists dived into the artworks patients made within these institutions for the first time asking whether they show signs of their creators’ illness and if they can be used within the process of diagnosis. After Manuel Réja had labelled these works as artworks for the first time the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn and the Swiss medic Walter Morgenthaler set the course for the acceptance and recognition of psychiatric patients as artists in the 1920 with their monographies ’Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler’ and ’Bildnerei der Geisteskranken’. Although the works of psychiatric patients have been classified as degenerate art during the nationalsocialist era, the paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations of the people living in mental health facilities are a part of the contemporary art scene which cannot be erased anymore. After Jean Dubuffet, Leo Navratil and Roger Cardinal had presented concepts for the classification and localisation of these works within

124 modern artistic trends professional collections could be set up such as the gallery and museum gugging in Lower Austria, the Prinzhorn collection in Heidelberg and the collection Dammann in Switzerland which make a continuing research on the characteristics, intentions and styles of psychotic art, especially within the 19th and 20th century, possible. One of these research questions focuses on the function of art as a type of therapy in the oeuvres of psychiatric patients both on a stylistic and a motivic level which was examined for the cases of the Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli, the German painter Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern and the Austrian Art Brut representative Oswald Tschirtner. By adopting a biographical and work-orientated point of view three artworks of these three very different individuals have been in the focus of the investigation and have shown a very ambivalent picture. Adolf Wölfli definitely used art as a type of therapy in order to come to terms with the traumata of his childhood such as the early loss of his parents and the tragic circumstances that led to his referral to the Waldau asylum after he had tried to abuse a minor. By thematically depicting the peaks of these experiences such as his trial and imprisonment after the assault and the separation from his mother and by using stylistic features such as a highly ornamental style Wölfli tried to fight back panic attacks and paranoid delusions and to directly communicate with the beholder making hi munderstand both his actions and emotions. Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern in contrast only used art as a type of therapy on a narrative level while he spent half a year in the asylum in Neustadt in Holstein. Even though he tried to get even with state and religious institutions such as the local authorities and the Christian Church who he made responsible for his referral to the mental health institution where he was treated for hebephrenia, he completely set himself free from the stylistic and motific features of his early work after he was released and became a professional artist in the 1950s. As he wanted to criticise prude moral standards and to attack the feigned innocence of religious hierarchies, he rather used art in order to provoke, shock, scare and confront all social classes with their dark sides, lies and secrets instead of using it to heal himself. His intentions hereby completely differed from the ones Oswald Tschirtner had during his lifelong stay in the Haus der Künstler in Gugging. Having started to draw under the influence of his psychiatrist Leo Navratil who believed in the healing forces art could have on a mentally affected patient Tschirtner never deliberately used art as a type of therapy whether on a stylistic nor on a thematic level. Although there are topics appearing in his oeuvre that might be interpreted as tries to express desires and wishes, Tschirtner felt rather forced to draw and needed thematic instructions in order to get creatively active. In contrast to these three artists who were autodidacts and discovered their artistic abilities

125 and talents in the psychiatry under the influence of a psychosis or in the last case a willing psychiatrist the second research question focused on professional artists. It asked how and to which extent a psychosis and the psychiatry as a habitat could influence their work on a stylistic, motific and thematic level and whether the stigmatisation of psychosises as means of destruction has to be reconsidered by asking if they can also function as promoters of stylistic change and creative regeneration. Therefore, three artworks of the Swiss painter Louis Soutter, the German expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the German Outsider Blalla W. Hallmann have been examined with regard to how their themes and stylistic characteristics changed due to the referral to the mental health facility, with one artwork dating from the time period before the referral, one emerging during this time and one originating from after the release. The first artist Louis Soutter represents a prime example for the question of how motifs, techniques and styles can be changing within the psychiatry, as he started as an academic painter who depicted traditional topics such as human beings, flora and fauna with conventional materials such as watercolours and pencils but broke fresh ground when he was isolated from society. After the referral to a care home for mentally affected men Soutter felt imprisoned, socially expelled and deprived from his status both as a musician and as an artist. Instead of continuing following the rules of his academic training he discovered the ink drawing and the finger painting as new techniques and liberated himself more and more from a naturalistic way of depicting in favour of highly stylised, reduced and deformed forms, a neglection of colours, a loss of three-dimensionality and a removal of correct perspectives. By focusing on the human being as an individual and in social interaction he demonstrated how he suffered from social and economic neglection within the institution and therefore broke away from his old topics. The psychosis itself though was not the main reason that led to his artistic reorientation but more the restrictions he had to endure in his new environment both on a local, social and on an economic level. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner by contrast changed his works both stylistically as well as thematically by depicting himself as an artist before his referral to the sanatorium in Bellevue, as an ill person during the toughest time of his psychosis and as a successful businessmen after his release but was never influenced by the psychiatry as a habitat in order to do that. He rather used his self-portraits as propagandistic means that should underline his physical sickness and reflected on the conept of the physically affected genius in order to spare him from military service which has been the trigger factor within the development of his psychosis. The case of Kirchner does not only show that behind the works of psychiatric

126 patients there can be a greater intention than just finding occupation in an inversatile daily routine but that they can be used as lifesaving devices and that the type of the psychiatry, the psychiatrist in charge and the dealing with other inmates and patients must be considered as well when interpreting the functions of artworks within these environments and questions of stylistic regeneration. The last case example Blalla W. Hallmann anon shows that not only the psychiatry as a habitat but also the psychosis itself can be the trigger factor for a stylistic change, independently from the working place. Due to the influence of schizophrenia Hallmann could leave his naturalistic way of depicting behind him and had to go through a period of geometrically and symmetrically designing, of dissolving structures and losing every relation to reality before he could regenerate himself and his work to a new sociocritical one. Instead of displaying religious topics he could liberate forces of distruction, attack and provocation with the help of the psychosis that supported him in losing all personal restrictions in order to get even with the corruptive, sadistic, immoral and humiliating hierarchies, institutions and general sides of mankind. The works he created during his stay within the psychiatry might not seem as qualitatively valuable as the later ones but they must have their right to exist as trigger factors for an exposure of inner powers and forces that could motivate and accompany a creative regeneration towards a scorching critism on the existing social system and structures. Proceeding from these comparative analysises, it becomes clear that the reasons, intentions, backgrounds and circumstances how and why both professional and non-professional artists got artistically active within psychiatries of the 19th and 20th century were and are versatile. While some of them used art as a type of therapy to deal with their past as well as with their reception order into a psychiatric institution, others drew or painted in order to keep themselves occupied, to please their environment or to meet with the clinical stuff’s and the psychiatrists’ expectations. Within these contexts art also functioned as a means to exert autonomy and self-determination within highly restricted environments, as it offers the patients the opportunity to liberate themselves from small local entities, to lift themselves up above all other patients by individualising themselves, to criticise their environment and to decide about contents, styles and timelines of their daily routine themselves. Especially in the cases of Adolf Wölfli, Louis Soutter and partly also of Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern art was a means of fruition within total institutions being a more or less livesaving device. By reflecting on these research questions this master thesis has tried to offer an extended view on art production within psychiatric institutions in the last 120 years by using interdisciplinary

127 approaches and by not only focusing on the typical psychiatric patient who only got artistically active within the institution but by integrating the mentally ill professional as well. It tried to show that art was never only restricted to the private sphere of the inmate but integrated within wider contexts of meaning, functioning as a means of propaganda, attack, treatment or processing. Therefore, it does not only stand on its own but enters an interactive process with the beholder, making him aware of hierarchies, structures of powers, injustices and organisational principles. As this thesis relied on only a small amount of case examples which were theoretically substantiated, further research would be neccesary in order to increase its representativity. A closer look at the intentions of other Gugging artists and the function of art within their lives as well as at other representatives of the avantgarde and the Art Brut movement would offer new insights and add to the picture a bit more. Therefore, this master thesis shall be the start of a wider examination on the functions and intentions of art in psychiatric institutions of the 19th and 20th century under the aspect of individual fruition.

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Christoph Wetzel, Das große Lexikon der Symbole, 2nd edition (Darmstadt: WBG, 2011).

Irmgard Wilharm, ’Einleitung: Geschichte, Bilder und die Bilder im Kopf, in Irmgard Wilharm (ed.), Geschichte in Bildern: Von der Miniatur bis zum Film als historische Quelle (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus Verlag & Media UG, 1995), (Geschichtsdidaktik 10), pp. 7 – 24.

Martin M. Winkler, Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo’s New Light (Cambridge: University Press, 2009).

Norbert Wolf, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1880 – 1938: On the Edge of the Abyss of Time (Cologne: TASCHEN, 2003).

Lisa Zeitz, ’Den Schweizer Kirchner zeigen’, Weltkunst 153 (2019), digitally available under: [https://www.weltkunst.de/ausstellungen/2019/02/den-schweizer-kirchner-zeigen, accessed 20/09/2019].

8.3 Internet Sources Annkristin,’Rezension: Foucault “Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft“’, Blog Mental Illness: Vor- und Darstellungen des Wahnsinns im historischen Wandel, [https://wahnsinn.hypotheses.org/2279, accessed 30/08/2019].

141 Annette Baumann, ’Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’, Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, [https://hls- dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/021959/2007-08-13/, accessed 17/09/2019].

Daniel Baumann, ’Adolf Wölfli: Bibliography’, Adolf Wölfli Foundation, [http://adolfwoelfli.ch/index.php?c=e&level=9&sublevel=3, accessed: 03/08/2019].

Martina Conrad, ’Zwischen Euphorie und Entsetzen: Künstler im Ersten Weltkrieg’, Documentary SWR2 Wissen, 24.21 – 25.23, [https://www.swr.de/swr2/wissen/kuenstler-im- ersten-weltkrieg/-/id=661224/did=12863894/nid=661224/1y96j48/index.html, accessed 17/09/2019].

Karin Dammann, Gerhard Dammann, ’Collecting madness: Sammlung’, Collecting Madness: Outsider Art aus der Sammlung Dammann, [http://collectingmadness.com/sammlung/, accessed 07/08/2019].

Christof Goddemeier, ’Geschichte der Psychiatrie: Wahnsinn ist keine Krankheit’, aerzteblatt.de, [https://www.aerzteblatt.de/archiv/102595/Geschichte-der-Psychiatrie- Wahnsinn-ist-keine-Krankheit, accessed 30/08/2019].

Martina Gschwilm, ’Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Maler und Modell’, Hamburger Kunsthalle, [https://www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/sammlung-online/ernst-ludwig-kirchner/maler-und- modell, accessed 18/09/2019].

Hartmut Kaelble, ’Historischer Vergleich’, Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte: Begriffe, Methoden und Debatten in der zeithistorischen Forschung, [http://docupedia.de/zg/Historischer_Vergleich#cite_note-1, accessed 10/08/2019].

Alice Maniaci, ’Il Ruolo Sociale dell’Artista’, Arte in Costruzione, [http://arteincostruzione.blogspot.com/2015/04/il-ruolo-sociale-dellartista.html, accessed 16/08/2019].

Tine Nehler, ’Selbstbildnis als Kranker’, Die Pinakotheken, [https://www.pinakothek.de/kunst/meisterwerk/ernst-ludwig-kirchner/selbstbildnis-als- kranker, accessed 20/09/2019].

N.N., ’Blalla W. Hallmann: GOTT IST DIE LIEBE, 1993’, NO Art Gallery, [http://www.no- art.info/_gallery/de/hallmann.html, accessed 20/09/2019].

N.N., ’Louis Soutter: Obscure est ma passion’, Mutual Art, [https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Obscure-est-ma-passion--ruckseitig-La- mo/99AEC04E665C66C7, accessed 15/09/2019].

Robin Pape, ’Tschirtner, Oswald: Österreichischer Künstler und Anstaltsinsasse’, Biographisches Archiv der Psychiatrie, [https://www.biapsy.de/index.php/de/9-biographien- a-z/146-tschirtner-oswald, accessed 10/09/2019].

Hannah Rieger, ’Art Brut’, Leben in Art Brut, [https://livinginartbrut.com/index.php/de/home- de-at/art-brut, accessed 02/09/2019].

142 Hannah Rieger, ’Oswald Tschirtner’, Living Art Brut, [https://livinginartbrut.com/index.php/de/kuenstler/kuenstler-r-z/oswald-tschirtner, accessed 11/09/2019].

Eva Zeltner, Blalla W. Hallmann: Kurzbiographie, Blalla W. Hallmann Blog, [https://blalla- hallmann.de/, accessed 20/09/2019].

143 9. Visual Sources

Fig. 1: Adolf Wölfli, Die Assiisen des Mittellandes, 1904, Black-and-white drawing, 99,5 x 74,5 cm, Art museum Berne

Fig. 2: Adolf Wölfli, Detail of Die Assiisen des Mittellandes, 1904, Black-and.white drawing, 99,5 x 74,5 cm, Art museum Berne

144 Fig. 3: Adolf Wölfli, Detail of Die Assiisen des Mittellandes, 1904, Black-and-white drawing, 99,5 x 74,5 cm, Art museum Berne

Fig. 4: Adolf Wölfli, Detail of Die Assiisen des Mittellandes, 1904, Black-and-white drawing, 99,5 x 74,5 cm, Art museum Berne

145 Fig. 5: Adolf Wölfli, Waldau asylum, 1921, coloured pencil drawings, measurements unknown, provenance unknown

Fig. 6: Adolf Wölfli, Der hohe Adel und nidrige Adel v. der englisch-großbrittanischen Union Kanada, 1911, coloured pencil drawing, measurements unknown, provenance unknown

146 Fig. 7: Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Gefangener Nr. 28 von einem Eisbären zerrissen? Am 13.1. begraben... und das alles mit lächelnder Miene!, 1933/34, Black-and-white drawing, measurements unknown, provenance unknown

Fig. 8: Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Der Friedenshabicht führt den Friedensengel zum Elysium, 1953, coloured pencil drawing, 73 x 102 cm, S.u.G. Poppe collection Hamburg

147 Fig. 9: Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Die Schlangenverführung, 1955, coloured crayons painting, 73 x 51 cm, Gallery Brockstedt Hamburg

Fig. 10: Oswald Tschirtner, Das Jüngste Gericht, 1972, ink drawing, 21 x 15 cm, Mumok Vienna

148 Fig. 11: Oswald Tschirtner, Schutzmantelmadonna, 1972, ink drawing, 21 x 15 cm, Mumok Vienna

Fig. 12: Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenster, Moses und der brennende Dornbusch, 1971, ink drawing, subsequently coloured, 14,8 x 10,5 cm, Gugging museum

149 Fig. 13: Louis Soutter, Deux vases, 1904 – 1909, aquarelle with gouache, watercolour and pencil, 49 x 38,5 cm, Private collection

Fig. 14: Louis Soutter, Obscure est ma passion, 1934, ink drawing, 31 x 22,5 cm, Private collection

150 Fig. 15: Louis Soutter, La corde fatale, 1937, revised in 1942, finger painting made of ink and gouache, 50 x 64,8 cm, Aargau Kunsthaus

Fig. 16: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Selbstbildnis mit Modell, 1910, oil on canvas, 150,4 x 100 cm, Kunsthalle Hamburg

151 Fig. 17: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Selbstbildnis as Kranker, 1918, remastered in 1930, oil on canvas, 59 x 69,3 cm, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich

Fig. 18: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Selbstbildnis, 1925/26, oil on canvas, measurements unknown, E.W. Kornfeld collection

152 Fig. 19: Blalla W. Hallmann, Die Katzenbändigerin, 1958, egg tempera on wood, 124 x 104 cm, Hartmut Kraft private collection

Fig. 20: Blalla W. Hallmann, Ohne Titel, 1969, pencil drawing, 43 x 35, 5 cm, Hartmut Kraft private collection

153 Fig. 21: Blalla W. Hallmann, Gott ist die Liebe, 1993, acrylic on glass, 120 x 110 cm, provenance unknown

Fig. 22: Gustave Courbet, Selbstbildnis als Verzweifelter, 1884/85, oil on canvas, 45 x 55 cm, Private collection

154 10. Bibliography of the Visual Sources

Fig. 1: Adolf Wölfli, Die Assiisen des Mittellandes, 1904, Black and white drawing, 99,5 x 74,5 cm, Art museum Berne, taken from: Adolf-Wölfli-Stiftung Kunstmuseum Bern (ed.), Adolf Wölfli: Zeichnungen 1904 – 1906 (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1987), p. 21.

Fig. 2: Adolf Wölfli, Detail of Die Assiisen des Mittellandes, 1904, Black and white drawing, 99,5 x 74,5 cm, Art museum Berne, taken from: Wikimedia: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Assiissen-des-Mit-tel-Landes.jpg, accessed 21/09/2019].

Fig. 3: Adolf Wölfli, Detail of Die Assiisen des Mittellandes, 1904, Black and white drawing, 99,5 x 74,5 cm, Art museum Berne, taken from: Wikimedia: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Assiissen-des-Mit-tel-Landes.jpg, accessed 21/09/2019].

Fig. 4: Adolf Wölfli, Detail of Die Assiisen des Mittellandes, 1904, Black and white drawing, 99,5 x 74,5 cm, Art museum Berne, taken from: Adolf-Wölfli-Stiftung Kunstmuseum Bern (ed.), Adolf Wölfli: Zeichnungen 1904 – 1906 (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1987), p. 21.

Fig. 5: Adolf Wölfli, Waldau asylum, 1921, coloured pencil drawings, measurements unknown, provenance unknown, taken from: Wikimedia, [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Waldau-Wolfli.jpg, accessed 21/09/2019].

Fig. 6: Adolf Wölfli, Der hohe Adel und nidrige Adel v. der englisch-großbrittanischen Union Kanada, 1911, coloured pencil drawing, measurements unknown, provenance unknown, taken from: Elka Spoerri, Alfred Bader (eds.), Adolf Wölfli, Exhib. Cat. Kunstmuseum Bern 1976, 2nd edition (Bern: Verlag des Kunstmuseums, 1976), p. 21.

Fig. 7: Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Gefangener Nr. 28 von einem Eisbären zerrissen? Am 13.1. begraben... und das alles mit lächelnder Miene!, 1933/34, Black-and-white drawing, measurements unknown, provenance unknown, taken from: Alfred Bader, Geisteskranker oder Künstler?: Der Fall Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (Bern-Stuttgart-Vienna: Huber, 1971), p. 44.

Fig. 8: Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Der Friedenshabicht führt den Friedensengel zum Elysium, 1953, coloured pencil drawing, 73 x 102 cm, S.u.G. Poppe collection Hamburg, taken from: Alfred Bader, Geisteskranker oder Künstler?: Der Fall Friedrich Schröder- Sonnenstern (Bern-Stuttgart-Vienna: Huber, 1971), p. 79.

Fig. 9: Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Die Schlangenverführung, 1955, coloured crayons painting, 73 x 51 cm, Gallery Brockstedt Hamburg, taken from: Peter Gorsen, ’Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, 1892-1982: Gefangen zwischen Welterlösung und gesellschaftlicher Ausgrenzung’, in Ingfried Brugger, Peter Gorsen, Klaus Albrecht Schröder (eds.), Kunst & Wahn, Exhib. Cat. Kunstforum Wien 1997 (Cologne : DuMont, 1997), pp. 361 – 369, p. 363.

Fig. 10: Oswald Tschirtner, Das Jüngste Gericht, 1972, ink drawing, 21 x 15 cm, Mumok Vienna, taken from: Mumok Vienna, [https://www.mumok.at/de/das-juengste-gericht, accessed 21/09/2019]

155 Fig. 11: Oswald Tschirtner, Schutzmantelmadonna, 1972, ink drawing, 21 x 15 cm, Mumok Vienna, taken from: Mumok Vienna, [.https://www.mumok.at/sites/default/files/styles/adaptive_gallery/adaptive- image/public/G_615_294_Tschirtner_dig_Web.jpg?itok=Q1m3kEOI, accessed 21/09/2019].

Fig. 12: Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenster, Moses und der brennende Dornbusch, 1971, ink drawing, subsequently coloured, 14,8 x 10,5 cm, Gugging museum, taken from: Hannah Rieger, ’Oswald Tschirtner’, Living Art Brut, [https://livinginartbrut.com/index.php/de/kuenstler/kuenstler-r-z/oswald-tschirtner, accessed 21/09/2019].

Fig. 13: Louis Soutter, Deux vases, 1904 – 1909, aquarelle with gouache, watercolour and pencil, 49 x 38,5 cm, Private collection, taken from: Artnet.com: [http://www.artnet.com/WebServices/images/ll00038lldx94GFg6eECfDrCWvaHBOcXJ5D/l ouis-soutter-deux-vases-(two-vases).jpg, accessed 21/09/2019].

Fig. 14: Louis Soutter, Obscure est ma passion, 1934, ink drawing, 31 x 22,5 cm, Private collection, taken from: Artnet.com: [http://www.artnet.com/WebServices/images/ll00368lldkeVJFgBYeR3CfDrCWvaHBOcEnT F/louis-soutter-obscure-est-ma-passion,-r%C3%BCckseitig-la-mort-du-fils.jpg, accessed 21/09/2019].

Fig. 15: Louis Soutter, La corde fatale, 1937, revised in 1942, finger painting made of ink and gouache, 50 x 64,8 cm, Aargau Kunsthaus, taken from: SIK ISEA, [http://www.sikart.ch/abb373/25512D1.jpg, accessed 21/09/2019].

Fig. 16: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Selbstbildnis mit Modell, 1910, oil on canvas, 150,4 x 100 cm, Kunsthalle Hamburg, taken from: Wikimedia, [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1b/1910_Kirchner_Selbstbildnis_ mit_Modell_anagoria.JPG/400px-1910_Kirchner_Selbstbildnis_mit_Modell_anagoria.JPG, accessed 21/09/2019].

Fig. 17: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Selbstbildnis as Kranker, 1918, remastered in 1930, oil on canvas, 59 x 69,3 cm, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, taken from: Wikimedia, [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/76/Ernst_Ludwig_Kirchner_Selb stbildnis_als_Kranker_1918-1.jpg/700px- Ernst_Ludwig_Kirchner_Selbstbildnis_als_Kranker_1918-1.jpg, accessed 21/09/2019].

Fig. 18: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Selbstbildnis, 1925/26, oil on canvas, measurements unknown, E.W. Kornfeld collection, taken from: Lisa Zeitz, ’Den Schweizer Kirchner zeigen’, Weltkunst 153 (2019), digitally available under: [https://www.weltkunst.de/ausstellungen/2019/02/den-schweizer-kirchner-zeigen, accessed 21/09/2019].

Fig. 19: Blalla W. Hallmann, Die Katzenbändigerin, 1958, egg tempera on wood, 124 x 104 cm, Hartmut Kraft private collection, taken from: Emsdettener Kunstverein (ed.), Blalla W. Hallmann: Arbeiten 1958 – 1990 (Emsdetten: Emsdettener Kunstverein, 1991), (Schriften des Museums Oberdeutsche Galerie in Regensburg, 12), p. m.

Fig. 20: Blalla W. Hallmann, Ohne Titel, 1969, pencil drawing, 43 x 35, 5 cm, Hartmut Kraft private collection, taken from: Hartmut Kraft (ed.), Ecce Blalla!: Abstürze und Höhenflüge -

156 Leben und Werk von Blalla W. Hallmann (1941 – 1997), Exhib. Cat. Museum für Sepulkralkultur Kassel, Krankenhaus-Museum Bremen, LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn, Sammlung Prinzhorn Heidelberg 2013/14 (Cologne: Salon, 2013), p. 48.

Fig. 21: Blalla W. Hallmann, Gott ist die Liebe, 1993, acrylic on glass, 120 x 110 cm, provenance unknown, taken from: NO Art Gallery, [http://www.no- art.info/hallmann/werke/_images/1993_gott-liebe.jpg, accessed 21/09/2019].

Fig. 22: Gustave Courbet, Selbstbildnis als Verzweifelter, 1884/85, oil on canvas, 45 x 55 cm, Private collection, taken from: Wikimedia, [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Courbet#/media/Datei:Gustave_Courbet_auto- retrato.jpg, accessed 21/09/2019].

157 Statutory Declaration

I declare that I have authored this thesis independently, that I have not used other than the declared sources / resources, and that I have explicitely marked all material which has been quoted either literally or by content from the used sources.

This paper has not been submitted in the same or in a similar form as a bachelor thesis / master thesis / diploma project / dissertation.

Salzburg, 29th September 2019 ------Date, signature

158