GALLERY OF MIRACLES & MADNESS

At the end of the First World War, the German doctor Hans Prinzhorn began collecting the paintings, drawings and sculpture of schizophrenic patients that would astonish and delight the world. The Prinzhorn collection as it was called inspired a new generation of artists, including Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. What the doctor could not have known however was that these works would later be used to prepare the ground for mass-murder. Adolf Hitler soon perceived Modernism's interest in madness as a threat - a Jewish-Bolshevik plot aimed at degrading the Aryan soul. Hitler was a failed artist of the old school and he stripped modernist works from German galleries and shamed them in exhibitions of 'Degenerate Art' alongside the 'insane' material of Prinzhorn's collection. He ridiculed the avant-garde and destroyed the cream of Germany's modern art collections. This action was mere preparation in Hitler's onslaught against so-called 'degenerate' people, and Prinzhorn's artists were caught up in both. By 1941, Hitler's regime had killed 70,000 psychiatric patients. It was an extermination campaign that served as the prototype for the Final Solution. Bringing together inspirational art history, genius and madness, and the wanton cruelty of the fanatical 'artist-Führer', this astonishing story lays bare the culture war that paved the way for Hitler's first extermination programme, the psychiatric Holocaust. 16 pages of colour and black and white photos and four pages of maps and list of names of the principal artists. 304pp in large softback.