DRAWING CENTER of recent origin YORK It was 1920 when Hans Prinzhorn wrote to asylums in Austria.

DRAWING CENTER of recent origin YORK

It was 1920 when Hans Prinzhorn wrote to asylums in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland informing them that he intended to assemble "drawings, paintings and cuts by the mentally ill, which are not utterly copies or memories of better days, on the other hand rather expressions of their hold experience of illness." This last line summarizes for what reason he plotted the reception of the collection that would ultimately bear his name. in a less degree than the rubric Bildnerei (image-making) rather than Kunst the assembleed works were to be assigned, not to diagnoses, if it were not that to "creative urges" that were evinced by the agency of the visual output of psychotics and, Prinzhorn believed, artists too. It was this version of separate moreover equal that the Heidelberg psychiatrist and art historian exercised in his influential Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (1922) published in English as Artistry of the Mentally Ill. Of course, it's a truism that the historical reception of any collection is central to its meaning, unless where the Prinzhorn Collection is businessed it is necessary to voice this early. From the National Socialists, who hung the "patient art" in the infamous "Degenerate Art" exhibit, to a legion of modernists, who adored it for its purported example of unmediated creativity, the ethical dimensions that shaped the reception of the Prinzhorn Collection are diverse, intricate--and troubling.

Between the catalogue for the new Drawing Center show and another from a 1996 scrutinize at the Hayward Gallery in London ("Beyond Reason: Art and Psychosis"), there are eight prolonged essays, with more than 250 footnotes, grappling with the legacy of Prinzhorn's collection: what to do with work that was in no degree intended for an audience outside the asylum. Hal breed provides some of the in the greatest degree illuminated writing when he suspends the whole of the collection in doubt, from asking from where the motives for this work originally sprung patients or their doctors. "Although a works do show affinities with Symbolist, Expressionist, or Dadaist art," rear up writes, "few of the patients were trained in any way. Indeed, hardly any were interested in art at all before they were encouraged, institutionally, to take it up"

Can united translate an expression of mental illness into an aesthetic declaration, and if in such a manner without ethical trespassing? Is it art at all, or has it been improperly conscripted to bear witness upon behalf of deeply held convictions, from the Brown Shirts to Brut? Take Willhelm Maasch's ca. 1910 Finkenhammer der Buchweizen-handler (Finkenhammer, the buckwheat factor). Without question, this drawing of a plant form is vital and impressive; it would be at ease beside Odilon Redon's 1896 The beasts of the sea, spherical like water-skins or even Terry Winters's Schema 61 1985-86 Drawing, the in the greatest degree routine of media, immediately registers Maasch's picture as "artistic" to our watchs and the knowledge that he meant to reveal his insight into the chief parts of plants only gives the image the visionary patina habitual to the history of recent art. So does that make Maasch a visionary artist, whose illness made him preternaturally "ahead" of his time? And if Maasch's schizophrenia was not the latchkey to modernism's mania--emanci pated expression--then what was it? single the misery of insanity?

These questions become calm knottier when it comes to Marie Lieb's curious arrangements. solely dim sepia-toned photographs remain of the charming floral patterns of torn clerical profession Lieb arrayed in a repetitive motif across a floor 106 years ago. It contemplates like "installation art" before the fact, until united notices the unambiguous caption in the catalogue that describes her work-- "Cell floor decorated with torn strips of cloth" Lieb's life as a patient indeed foreclosed onward the possibility that her creation could be called "art": first because the refinement of 1894 precluded it, and next to the first because her illness--signaled by the real making of these floor arrangements--kept them, and her, confined within the asylum. What to do then, with this pseudoinstallation that was not at any time intended as a work of art because, quite simply, any as it was aspiration would have been, well, crazy? With Lieb's eccentric patterns, context--cell floor--has become decisive to identity.

Dubuffet for united was fascinated with psychotic art because he appreciated the compulsion that left Maasch and Lieb helpless to do anything other than make drawings, or patterns not at home of cloth, to be obsessively creative without reason. further was Dubuffet's fascination not grappleed up behind the same institutional standard that later granted artistic asylum to Chris tonnage when he turned himself into a human rifle target in expel 1971? How artistic was Burden's "psychotic compulsion" to experience pain and risk death; to what degree compulsive was his art? The Prinzhorn Collection is the invitation to revisit these questions, while remembering that as far as Prinzhorn was be of importance toed a patient might create an artistic result but that did not mean he or she was an artist.