Outsider Art

Here’s a question that escalated into a hot-button, life-or-death issue in Germany in the years after the public debut of the Prinzhorn Collection. If works made by the mentally ill can be classified as art, then does art that resembles those creations imply some degree of madness on the part of its maker?

Hitler thought so. Expressionists with an affinity for the raw imagery of the mentally ill were denounced as degenerate under the Nazi regime and persecuted. Many mentally ill artists themselves suffered an even worse fate: The Prinzhorn Collection’s director after 1933 also headed the Nazi program to exterminate “incurables.”

Problematic ethical issues course turbulently beneath the surface of “The Prinzhorn Collection: Traces Upon the Wunderblock,” a fascinating show now at the UCLA Hammer Museum. Organized by Catherine de Zegher of the Drawing Center in New York, together with the Prinzhorn Collection’s director, Inge Jadi, and Laurent Busine, director of exhibitions of the Palace of Fine Arts in Charleroi, Belgium, the show includes more than 200 drawings, paintings and books made by psychiatric patients between 1890 and 1920. They represent a sampling of the larger collection spearheaded by medically trained art historian Hans Prinzhorn for Heidelberg. Initially, the works were collected to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric patients.

If the exhibition and reception of such “outsider art” has posed special ethical challenges over time, so has it promised unique insights into the very nature of the creative impulse. Work like this, generated apart from the machinery of the art world, is prized for its purity and authenticity, traits that sound quaint to irony-minded artists of today, but when the Prinzhorn Collection was being assembled, in the early 1920s, those qualities were the holy grail of the avant-garde.

Early modernists who were chafing against traditional norms in both society and art romanticized what they perceived as the mentally ill’s state of total freedom, a condition akin to that of children and “primitives.” While Freud was theorizing about the unconscious, Surrealists, especially, were trying to channel it--through automatic writing and drawing--and visualize it.

Artists suffering from schizophrenia (the common diagnosis of the Prinzhorn collection’s patients), were believed to have natural, uncontrived access to the founts of their being. The wunderblock of the show’s subtitle refers to Freud’s concept of the psyche as a repository. The material that seeps in leaves no trace upon the surface, in the same way that marks made on a wunderblock, a child’s toy consisting of a waxed board covered by a sheet of clear plastic, remain visible on the block below even when the upper sheet is lifted.

Those who made the drawings and other works here may not have acted entirely free of intellectual strategy or societal influence (many were actively encouraged and rewarded), but the results feel terrifically uninhibited. References to the “outside” world season the psychic stew from which they were ladled up, but more often than not, the images seem to emerge from or even illustrate an alternate world, with its own idiosyncratic systems and structures.

The mesmerizing drawings of Barbara Suckfull, for instance, picture common objects like table settings, but each item is outlined by tightly repeated patterns, and the space between them is dense with fine script, so that the ordinary scene radiates a prickly physical energy. Josef Heinrich Grebing took the conventional forms of maps, charts and calendars that he used in his healthier life as a businessman and reinvented them using both familiar and indecipherable symbols corresponding to his own skewed reality. And Heinrich Hermann Mebes, a former watchmaker, applied his dexterity at working tiny miracles to a set of mystical-religious illuminations that are tight, vibrant and thoroughly odd.

The human figure recurs on page after page, alone or doubled, nude or in uniform, with wings or on stage. In a humble twist on the Machine Age utopia championed outside the institution’s walls, contraptions resembling airships, bicycles, wagons and other types of vehicles crop up often, too. A sense of urgency pervades much of the work here and is typified by line after line of insistent script describing the images drawn, unfolding a narrative or simply repeating and repeating a single message, as in Emma Hauck’s letters to her husband, imploring “Come, Sweetheart, Come,” until the overlapping words form a tangled smudge. These were anguished individuals, as writers on the collection repeatedly point out, not the romantic visionaries they are made out to be by those who dismiss the context of their creative efforts.

Even Prinzhorn himself (1886-1933) was prone to idealize these men and women, but then again, he was busy building self-styled aesthetic theories around their work. He had received a doctorate in art history before studying psychiatry and psychoanalysis. When he started work as an assistant in the psychiatry clinic at Heidelberg University, a collection of visual works had already been assembled as a teaching aid for the clinicians. Prinzhorn solicited additional works from clinics and asylums throughout Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland, expanding the collection to 5,000 objects before leaving his position as its director in 1921. The following year he published the widely influential book, “Bildnerei der Geisteskranken” (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), which made the rounds among artists’ circles in France, especially, and was the initial launching point for Jean Dubuffet’s postwar conception of Art Brut.

Prinzhorn hoped to establish a museum for the collection, and next year, his dream will be actualized, on a site in Heidelberg. This show marks the first time that works in the collection have appeared in the U.S., but exhibitions of outsider art--including not just the work of institutionalized patients but other self-taught artists working outside the mainstream--have been regulars on the museum circuit; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted one of them, “Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outside Art,” in the early ‘90s.

Ironically, the current show’s jargon-choked catalog evokes an alternate world of its own, but a useful and far more thoughtful volume from an earlier exhibition in London is also available at the Hammer.

Art galleries in Germany exhibited parts of the Prinzhorn Collection in the 1920s and ‘30s, alongside contemporary art similarly naked in its expression of primal impulses, chaos and lust. While the Nazis exploited the resemblance between the two, declaring it evidence of a general “lowering of the dignity of man,” others saw it, conversely, as reason to raise the dignity of the mentally ill. The latter, thankfully, have won in the end, allowing for intriguing shows like this to be staged, where those potent and feared impulses can be openly confronted.

* “The Prinzhorn Collection: Traces Upon the Wunderblock,” UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., through Sept. 17. Closed Monday. (310) 443-7020.