Windows Into Shattered Psyches

Artists are nuts, or so it has been argued. From William Blake to Vincent Van Gogh, the genius of the individualistic artist has been linked to visions, erratic behavior, manic creative drive and poor social skills. While bringing about great paintings and lousy movies, it also raises the question: What of the truly insane who make art?

This inquiry is pursued in two exhibitions on view in Los Angeles. “The Collection: Traces Upon the Wunderblock” includes about 200 drawings and books made by psychiatric patients and collected in the early 1900s by psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn. Organized by Catherine de Zegher, director and chief curator of the Drawing Center in New York, the show opens at UCLA’s Hammer Museum today and runs through Sept. 17. “L’Art Brut: Jean Dubuffet and the Outsiders” includes lithographs by modern artist Dubuffet along with work by the mad or naive artists he collected, such as the schizophrenic Adolf Wolfli, and continues at Louis Stern Fine Arts through July 22.

The Prinzhorn Collection features obsessive calligraphy, sexually explicit rituals and delicately painted scenes of isolation and alienation--in short, much of what one might see at any exhibition of contemporary art. In fact, the possible parallels with work produced by today’s artists led to the decision to debut the Prinzhorn Collection in America.

De Zegher observes in her introductory catalog essay that much of the art being made now is either narrowly introspective or clinically objective, tendencies that can be seen in the art of the Prinzhorn Collection.

“In contemporary art, on the one hand you have a kind of scientific and rational thinking stemming from the conceptual period of the ‘60s and ‘70s; on the other you have the legacy of the gestural and unconscious approach of the Abstract Expressionists, a narcissistic activity to valorize the personal,” she said in a telephone interview. “Contrary to what one could think, the Prinzhorn Collection is bringing these two things together.”

During the early 20th century, many artists were influenced by the Prinzhorn Collection as well as by tribal art and children’s art. Artists perceived the creative efforts of those who had evaded the rigorous training of the academy to be closer to some form of spiritual truth. The German Expressionists were fascinated by evidence of unfettered emotion, whereas the Surrealists admired the connections to the subconscious.

Swiss artist Paul Klee heard Prinzhorn lecture, and after seeing the collection, called it, “direct spiritual vision.” He modeled his own line drawings of divine beings after those of “Prinzhorn master” Johann Knopf, whose childlike angel is topped with an outsize halo of radiant detail. A pair of doves flank the tiny body of the angel, whose nose is also shaped like the symbolic bird of peace.

Max Ernst encountered the art of the insane during his studies at the University of Bonn in 1911, when he also began reading Freud. He saw in the art of the mad an aesthetic of disruption that was a founding element in the development of Surrealism. He brought a copy of the book documenting the Prinzhorn drawings, “The Artistry of the Mentally Ill,” to Paul Eluard in 1922, just as the poet was collaborating with Andre Breton on the first Surrealist text. The hallucinatory visions of the art of the insane became a model for Ernst and other Surrealists.

Jean Dubuffet admired the transgressive nature of the art in the Prinzhorn collection, as well as the tribal, naive and folk art that he labeled “art brut,” meaning “raw,” as opposed to “cultured.” He collected such works and showed them in Paris in 1949 with a text extolling the untutored artists as radical geniuses, free of conventions. Dubuffet visited asylums for inspiration for his own work, and a survey of the art he admired is on view at Louis Stern’s gallery. “Dubuffet felt their vision was not polluted by social mores and the academy,” Stern explains, “so that everything that comes out is raw and pure.”

That purity now commands a price: $40,000 for the brightly crayoned picture of nesting lozenge shapes by Wolfli, a Swiss schizophrenic suffering from hallucinations. He was discovered by Dubuffet, as was the Swiss artist Aloise, a schizophrenic whose obsession with Kaiser Wilhelm led to drawings of voluptuous women in romantic settings. The repetitive animal patterns of the Italian Carlo, a paranoid schizophrenic, are in the show along with Dubuffet’s own drawings and paintings, such as “Perdeurs de temps,” with three cartoonish figures lost in their wanderings across a brown canvas.

Princeton University art historian Hal Foster’s essay on the Prinzhorn Collection goes to great lengths to deny the visionary or transgressive aspects of the art of the insane. Those suffering from schizophrenia and other mental illness, he writes, are frantically attempting to establish order and predictability in their world, not generate chaos. The intentions of the insane artists are exactly opposite of the interpretation of their work by so-called sane artists.

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Prinzhorn’s unusual study of art history at the University of Vienna before entering the field of psychiatry and psychoanalysis contributed to his belief that personal expression, particularly through drawing, could be healing. He gave art materials to his patients as part of their treatment. In fact, the titular reference to the wunderblock in the show’s title refers to a child’s toy consisting of a waxed board covered with a thin sheet of plastic. Using a pointed stick, the child draws on the plastic and when the plastic is lifted, the marks disappear, but traces remain on the dark board. Sigmund Freud used the wunderblock as a metaphor for the unconscious and the way the psyche records material.

The collection of about 5,000 drawings and paintings on paper by about 450 artists was gathered from asylums in Germany, Switzerland and Austria by doctors at the psychiatric clinic of the University of Heidelberg starting around 1909. The collection grew considerably after Karl Willmans became director of the clinic in 1918 and hired Prinzhorn as his deputy to oversee the project.

Despite using the term Bildnerei, or image-making, rather than Kunst, or art, Prinzhorn believed in the aesthetic worth of these drawings, and he hoped to house the collection in a museum in the 1920s. That notion was defeated with the rise of the Nazis and World War II. In fact, the Nazis, who exterminated the mentally ill, used the avant-garde’s support of such art as evidence of their immorality. This led to the 1937 Nazi exhibition of “degenerate art” that included many of Europe’s Modern artists--Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky.

The abstract or Expressionist methods of these artists were used by the Nazis for their own political gain, demonizing as atavistic and mentally ill the Jewish avant-garde, even though many of the artists represented were not Jewish. With this painful history, the Prinzhorn Collection languished in obscurity, but in 2001, it will be housed at the University of Heidelberg.

What is the aesthetic impact of the Prinzhorn collection? Artists seeing the work some time after Cubism and before Surrealism must have found startling the freedom of execution. Few of the renderings adhere to the conventions of representation used in the 19th century. By today’s freewheeling standards, however, the works in the Prinzhorn Collection appear more eccentric than shocking.

The exhibition is rife with recurrent sexual and spiritual fantasies, along with an abhorrence of all sorts of mechanical devices. August Natterer’s watercolor of “The Miraculous Shepherd (II)” shows a figure lying naked against a blue background with legs up-stretched and hair blown back while a shepherd carrying a staff and his dog stand on his stomach. Stefan Klojer’s pencil drawing of a naked, pregnant woman carrying a second, pregnant body before her is presented against a background of complicated script.

Josef Forster’s lyrical painting of a gagged, floating figure tethered to the ground by ropes also includes text. Joseph Schneller’s “Hyperodrom” represents a complex sadomasochistic ritual in the mode of an Assyrian relief. Oskar Herzberg creates a choir of white-robed castrati on stage before a distinctly phallic form, possibly representing a conductor.

In the informative and readable catalog accompanying the show, Sander L. Gilman asks, “Are crazy people more creative than others?” Gilman, a professor of human biology and Germanic studies at the University of Chicago, notes that British psychiatrist R.D. Laing saw “madness as a creative response to an untenable world.” The 19th century Romantics valued the perceptions of the mad. In his essay, Gilman surveys the vacillating perception of madness since the time of Aristotle, who asked, “Why are men of genius melancholics?” In the end, however, he warns against that, saying that the visual inventiveness of these works should not overshadow that they are the manifestations of extreme psychological suffering.

Putting aside the long-standing romance with the crazy artist, these works offer a rare view of the human mind in states of extreme disassociation. But is it art? De Zegher, at least, hopes that the contemporary artist will draw lessons from the Prinzhorn Collection, which can “paradoxically reinform an art scene that increasingly engages in a hyper-narcissistic activity.”

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“THE PRINZHORN COLLECTION: TRACES UPON THE WUNDERBLOCK,” UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443-7020 Dates: Today to Sept. 17 Times: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Prices: $4.50, adults; $3, seniors, non-UCLA students, UCLA faculty or staff and alumni association members; $1, UCLA students; free to museum members and children 17 and under. Free on Thursdays. Phone: (310) 443-7020.

* Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. (310) 276-0147.