Neenah Public Library

The gallery of miracles and madness, insanity, modernism, and Hitler's war on art, Charlie English

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

mapsillustrationsplates

index present

non fiction

The gallery of miracles and madness

bibliography

1222055523

Charlie English

insanity, modernism, and Hitler's war on art

"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

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

adult