Art From the Asylum: Prinzhorn, Bethlem and the Psychiatric Collections

Why did psychiatrists collect patients' art?

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many asylum doctors kept drawings, writings and objects made by their patients. At first they treated them as medical evidence, clues to a diagnosis. A few doctors began to see something more: work of real originality, made by people with no training, often over many years. Those doctors' collections became the foundation of art brut.

Who was Walter Morgenthaler?

Walter Morgenthaler was a psychiatrist at the Waldau clinic near Bern, Switzerland, where Adolf Wölfli was a patient from 1895 until his death in 1930. In 1921 Morgenthaler published a monograph on Wölfli, Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler ("A psychiatric patient as artist"). It was one of the first books to treat a psychiatric patient as an artist rather than a case, and it made Wölfli known well beyond Bern. Read our profile of Adolf Wölfli.

What is the Prinzhorn Collection?

The Prinzhorn Collection is a collection of art by psychiatric patients held at Heidelberg University Hospital in Germany. In 1919 the clinic's director, Karl Wilmanns, asked a young assistant, Hans Prinzhorn, to expand a small existing collection. Prinzhorn, who had trained in art history as well as medicine, wrote to hospitals across Germany and beyond. By the time he left in 1921, the collection held more than 5,000 works by about 450 patients.

In 1922 Prinzhorn published Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, translated as Artistry of the Mentally Ill. Deliberately avoiding the word "art", he analysed the works as images, not just symptoms, and devoted long chapters to ten "schizophrenic masters", whom he gave pseudonyms. The book was richly illustrated and was read eagerly by artists. Max Ernst gave a copy to the poet Paul Éluard, Paul Klee kept one in his studio, and Jean Dubuffet was deeply impressed by it. See the artists of the Prinzhorn Collection.

What happened to the Prinzhorn Collection under the Nazis?

The Nazi regime turned the collection against modern art. Works from it were shown in the touring Entartete Kunst ("Degenerate Art") exhibitions of the late 1930s, placed next to work by modern artists to suggest that modernism was a form of madness. Some of those works were never recovered.

Worse followed. From 1939 the regime murdered tens of thousands of psychiatric patients in the programme known as Aktion T4. Artists represented in the Prinzhorn Collection were among them, including Franz Karl Bühler, one of Prinzhorn's ten masters, who was killed at Grafeneck in 1940. Research suggests about 30 of the collection's artists were murdered. Prinzhorn himself, who died in 1933, had publicly supported the rise of Nazism.

The collection was neglected after the war and rediscovered in the 1960s. A dedicated museum, the Sammlung Prinzhorn, opened at Heidelberg in 2001.

What about Britain's asylums?

Bethlem Royal Hospital, the original "Bedlam", has the longest history of any British psychiatric hospital. Its archives and museum, set up in the late 1960s, care for almost 1,000 works of art by patients, including collections gathered by doctors at Bethlem and the Maudsley Hospital. Since 2015 they have been shown at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, south London, which shares an Art Deco building with the Bethlem Gallery, a gallery for artists with experience of mental illness. See where to see outsider art in the UK.

Who was Edward Adamson?

Edward Adamson (1911–1996) was an artist who began working at Netherne Hospital in Surrey in 1946 and is often called the father of art therapy in Britain. Rather than interpreting patients' pictures, he gave them a studio, materials and freedom, and kept almost everything they made. He was a founder member of the British Association of Art Therapists in 1964.

When he retired in 1981, Adamson estimated that his collection held around 100,000 objects. The paintings and drawings are now held by Wellcome Collection in London, and other parts are cared for elsewhere, including some sculptures that were stored at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind before Wellcome acquired them in 2024.

Is it right to call patients' work "outsider art"?

That question runs through the whole field. Many of these artists had no say in how their work was collected, kept or shown, and some collections were built without anything like consent. Today museums such as the Sammlung Prinzhorn and the Bethlem Museum of the Mind name the artists, research their lives and present them as individuals. We look at these issues in ethics, the market and hoaxes.

Where to go next

Meet Adolf Wölfli, Aloïse Corbaz and Martín Ramírez, or read how Jean Dubuffet built on these collections.