The Prinzhorn Collection's "Ten Masters"

Who were the ten masters?

In Artistry of the Mentally Ill, Hans Prinzhorn devoted detailed chapters to ten patients whose work he considered exceptional. To protect their identities he gave each a pseudonym. From the 1970s, curators at Heidelberg dropped the pseudonyms and restored the artists' real names. They are:

What kind of work did they make?

The ten worked in very different ways. Karl Genzel carved small, expressive wooden figures. August Natterer, an electrician, drew detailed images of a vision he had experienced, including a drawing known as Witch's Head that became one of the collection's most reproduced images. Franz Karl Bühler made powerful drawings and paintings, and Prinzhorn gave one, Der Würgengel ("The Strangling Angel"), a prominent place facing the book's title page. Several worked with words and images together.

Prinzhorn analysed their work as images, using ideas from art history and psychology, not just as symptoms. That approach, and the book's many illustrations, made it influential far beyond psychiatry.

Why did artists love the book?

Artists in the 1920s were searching for ways of making images that broke with academic tradition. Prinzhorn's book seemed to offer proof that powerful art could come from outside it. Max Ernst gave a copy to the poet Paul Éluard, and the Surrealists drew on its ideas. Paul Klee kept a copy in his studio at the Bauhaus. Jean Dubuffet was deeply impressed and visited the collection in Heidelberg in September 1950.

What happened to the artists under the Nazis?

Under the Nazi regime, works from the collection were used in the "Degenerate Art" exhibitions of the late 1930s, set beside modern art to suggest that both were products of sickness. Some of these works were lost.

From 1939 the regime murdered tens of thousands of psychiatric patients and disabled people in the programme known as Aktion T4. Franz Karl Bühler was murdered at Grafeneck in 1940. Wilhelm Werner, another artist in the collection, who had drawn his own forced sterilisation, was murdered at Pirna-Sonnenstein the same year. Research suggests about 30 of the collection's artists were killed. Prinzhorn himself, who died in 1933, had publicly supported Nazism in his last years.

Where can you see the Prinzhorn Collection?

The collection was neglected after the war and rediscovered in the 1960s. Restoration and research followed, led by curators including Inge Jádi and Bettina Brand-Claussen. A touring exhibition, Beyond Reason: Art and Psychosis, was shown at the Hayward Gallery in London. Since 2001 the Sammlung Prinzhorn has had its own museum at Heidelberg University Hospital, in a former chapel, directed since 2002 by Thomas Röske.

Key dates

Where to go next

Read the wider story in art from the asylum, or see how Jean Dubuffet built on Prinzhorn's work.