- Summary
- "The thousands of paintings, drawings, and pieces of sculpture Hans Prinzhorn gathered from German asylums in the early 1920s displayed a raw, expressive power that would change the course of art history. When a new generation of modernists discovered his collection--Max Ernst, André Breton, and Salvador Dalí among them--they borrowed its ideas to inform their own investigations of the human psyche. But by the 1930s, Prinzhorn's artist-patients and their delicate creations had begun to attract attention of a different kind. Rejected from art schools as a young man, Adolf Hitler saw modernism's interest in madness as a threat: a Jewish-Bolshevik plot aimed at degrading the Aryan soul. Once in power, he ordered modernist paintings and sculpture to be stripped from German galleries and publicly shamed in exhibitions of "degenerate art", alongside "insane" material from the Prinzhorn collection... By 1941, his regime had killed 70,000 psychiatric patients in an extermination campaign that would serve as the prototype from the Final Solution. This is the spellbinding, emotionally resonant story of those artists, of modernism's obsession with the schizophrenic realm, and Hitler's use of that connection to achieve his own genocidal ends"--Dust jacket flap.
- Format
- Book
- Author/Creator
- English, Charlie, author.
- Published
- New York : Random House, [2021]
©2021
- Locale
- Germany
- Edition
- First US edition
- Contents
-
The man who jumped in the canal
The hypnosis in the wood
A meeting at Emmendingen
Dangerous to look at!
The schizophrenic masters
Adventures in no-man's land
Pleasant little pictures
Dinner with the Bruckmanns
Glimpses of a transcendental world
Art and race
A cultural revolution
The sculptor of Germany
Cleansing the temple of art
To be German means to be clear
The sacred and the insane
The girl with the blue hair
Foxes with white coats
Choking angel
You will ride on the gray bus
In the madhouse
Landscapes of the brain.
- Notes
-
Includes bibliographical references and index.
The man who jumped in the canal -- The hypnosis in the wood -- A meeting at Emmendingen -- Dangerous to look at! -- The schizophrenic masters -- Adventures in no-man's land -- Pleasant little pictures -- Dinner with the Bruckmanns -- Glimpses of a transcendental world -- Art and race -- A cultural revolution -- The sculptor of Germany -- Cleansing the temple of art -- To be German means to be clear -- The sacred and the insane -- The girl with the blue hair -- Foxes with white coats -- Choking angel -- You will ride on the gray bus -- In the madhouse -- Landscapes of the brain.
