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Collection of artworks by psychiatric patients finds permanent home

Annette Tuffs Heidelberg

A collection of 5000 artworks by German psychiatric patients, dating back to the 1920s, has finally found a permanent home after four decades stored in a hospital cellar.

The works, which were collected by the art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn between 1919 and 1922, and which have been exhibited across Europe as the Prinzhorn collection since the 1960s, will be housed in a new museum in Heidelberg, in the grounds of the university’s psychiatric hospital.

The opening of the museum last week was accompanied by a public protest from an organisation of psychiatric patients, who have claimed for the past few years that its new home would be unsuitable because Heidelberg’s psychiatric hospital carried out euthanasia on some of its patients between 1933 and 1945.

From 1933 to 1945 the hospital’s director, Carl Schneider, who was friendly to the Nazi regime, said the collection showed that modern art in Germany was of a pathological nature. The protesters (the Bundesverband Psychiatrie-Erfahrener) claimed that the collection should be transferred to Berlin and exhibited at a memorial site for the euthanasia victims of the Nazi regime.

But the decision to house the collection in Heidelberg was defended by the art historian and psychiatrist Inge Jàdi, who has been the collection’s custodian for almost 30 years, and by Christoph Mundt, the current director of the psychiatric hospital.

They pointed out in a public statement that the collection has a long history connected to Heidelberg university hospital, outside the Nazi period of 1933-45. The collection was exhibited in a small museum in Heidelberg between 1922 and 1933 and shown in Paris, Geneva, Basel, and nine German towns during that period. After the 1960s, when it was rediscovered, it was exhibited all over Europe.

Jàdi and Mundt pointed out that almost all the artists who contributed to the collection had died before the hospital introduced euthanasia, and the museum building itself was never used by Carl Schneider. They emphasised that siting the museum site within the area of the hospital could help to reduce the stigma of psychiatric disease.
 
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