Art, power, and the asylum: Adamson, healing, and the Collection

Abstract

Out of the crowded asylums of Europe in the early 1920s, the optimism of their creation lost, there emerged a new gaze on art. Not a school or an avant-garde movement, but rather a point of view that has extended the territory of what is art as much as Marcel Duchamp's gesture of putting a signed urinal in an art gallery (Fountain, 1917). In 1921, the psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler wrote A Psychiatric Patient as Artist on the work of Swiss asylum patient Adolf Wölfli, and, in 1922, Hans Prinzhorn published The Artistry of the Mentally Insane, a study of “ten schizophrenic masters” (Prinzhorn was an art historian before he became a psychiatrist). Prinzhorn's book and Sigmund Freud's 1899 publication The Interpretation of Dreams were central texts for the Surrealists. The Surrealists compared the creations of asylum patients to those of children and non-European premodern creators using the problematic concept of the “primitive”: artists who supposedly worked instinctively, accessing the unconscious without knowing what they made from it, denied autonomy, intent, and authorship.