Prinzhorn Collection

The Prinzhorn Collection (Sammlung Prinzhorn) is housed in a former neurological clinic building at Voßstraße 2 in the Bergheim district of Heidelberg, in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It holds one of the most important collections of art made by people with psychiatric diagnoses. The core was assembled between 1919 and 1921 by the psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn, who was then assistant at the Heidelberg psychiatric clinic and gathered about 5,000 works from asylums across Germany and neighbouring countries. In 1922 he published the book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), which influenced artists such as Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Jean Dubuffet and helped inspire the later idea of Art Brut. The collection includes drawings, paintings, sculptures, textiles and writings made between roughly 1840 and 1930 by patients who had no formal art training. In 1933 and after, the Nazi regime used some of these objects in the Degenerate Art propaganda, and the collection was also a reminder of the victims of the patient murders carried out under the Nazi euthanasia programme. After the war it remained in the university clinic and was later given a museum in 2001, with the present exhibition rooms in the converted 1930s building. The curatorial approach is thematic, with rotating special exhibitions drawn from the holdings, accompanied by research on the biographies of the artists. The collection treats the works as art while documenting their medical and historical context, including the circumstances of institutionalisation. Visitors should be aware that some themes concern illness, confinement and persecution. The museum is a short distance from the Old Town and is a useful addition for those interested in modern art history and the history of psychiatry in Germany.