Resistance to Degeneration Discourse in Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore how the 1922 publication of Artistry of the Mentally Ill by Hans Prinzhorn, a German psychiatrist, attempts to resist the prevalent degeneration discourse that transformed the concepts of mental illness from a source of inspiration into a symptom of degeneration. Artistry of the Mentally Ill contains the works of ten “schizophrenic masters” from the inmates of psychiatric institutions from the German speaking countries. This phobic association between genius and mental illness led to the stigmatization of every avant-garde artist (such as Max Leibermann, Kandinsky among others) as morally degenerative or insane. This 1922 intervention of the book in the cultural arena with its catalogue and analysis of the configurations of the images made the argument that mental illness does not add new components to the artist. Prinzhorn argues that pictorial creative power is present in every person and there is no essential connection between degeneration and creative impulse as propagated by Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau and Emil Kraepelin. My article will primarily focus on the cultural context of this conflict between politicization of aesthetics and the critical responses emanating from the body of this text.