n LOCAL HISTORY

Mike Jempson contrasts two exhibitions, a century apart

A FEW weeks before Christmas, while visiting friends in Germany, I came across an intriguing little museum in Heidelberg. Its sole purpose is to house and display works of art created by people who spent time in mental hospitals prior to 1922.

Its current exhibition coincided with the Looking To The Light project at the Glenside Hospital Museum.

The Bristol exhibition featured works by artists who drew their inspiration from the museum, which catalogues the development of mental health treatments, as well as the patients and staff of what began in 1861 as a municipal lunatic asylum.

The Heidelberg exhibition focused on a collection of works by patients, put together by art historian Hans Prinzhorn (18861933). Having also trained in England to be a singer, he took up psychiatry after his second wife became ill. Combining his interests, he produced a seminal work, Artistry of the Mentally Ill. First published in 1922, an English translation had to wait 50 years.

Prinzhorn was more interested in the aesthetic value of artefacts made by patients than in their diagnostic potential.

His book was a sensation at the time, but not for being a breakthrough in the treatment of mental illness. Instead it influenced the artistic movements of the early 20th century, especially Dadaism and Surrealism, and gained notoriety among the fascists of National Socialism.

It became a source of inspiration among the avant-garde when multi-talented German