Prinzhorn Collection: Why “Mad Art” Still Challenges the Museum

Prinzhorn Collection beyond “mad art”: Thomas Röske and the crisis of the museum gaze

25 Years Museum Prinzhorn Collection, 28 June 2026 – 31 January 2027. In Heidelberg, the anniversary exhibition of the Prinzhorn Collection becomes more than a celebration. It becomes a reflection on the mechanisms through which museums construct visibility, legitimacy, and even the idea of what can be called art.

Read the Italian version on Artribune

There are anniversaries that museums use to reinforce their own mythology. Others become an opportunity to question the structures on which institutions are built.

The Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg, home to one of the world’s most important collections of works created by psychiatric patients, seems to belong to the second category.

For twenty-five years, the museum has played a crucial role in dismantling the paternalistic and sensationalistic gaze historically attached to so-called “mad art,” restoring dignity and visibility to works that for decades were treated more as pathological evidence than as cultural production. Yet today, according to director Thomas Röske, even that achievement risks becoming insufficient.

Because institutional recognition can also neutralize.

What emerges in this conversation is not simply a reflection on psychiatric art, but a broader questioning of the museum itself: the white cube, the category of art, and the invisible mechanisms through which institutions decide what deserves to be seen and legitimized.

Röske no longer seems interested in proving that these works deserve a place inside art history. His position is more unsettling than that. Perhaps these works exceed the category of art altogether.

We interviewed Dr. Thomas Röske, Director of the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg, ahead of the museum’s 25th anniversary exhibition.

Interview with the Director of the Prinzhorn Collection

Professor Röske, what do these 25 years of the Prinzhorn Collection really represent?

We achieved a lot over these 25 years, but I want to change something: the point of view. When we started with the museum, we tried to present the patients’ works as works of art: we mounted them, framed them, placed them at the right height, lit them properly, and accompanied them with labels. We wanted to give all these works the same dignity as works of art, and I believe we were quite effective in that. Today, however, I feel the need to go further: not only to continue destigmatizing mental illness and psychiatric patients, but also to change the way we look at and present these works.

And today, what is it that you feel needs to change?

Many people come to us and ask: why not simply call them art? But the term art is not neutral. It is heavily charged ideologically, and it excludes many of the works we have in the collection. These works were not made for the art market. They carry a particular message, they are often strongly charged on an irrational level as well, and they have a function that does not coincide with what we normally expect from art. That is why today I would like to present them more as something special, and to encourage the public to reflect on the conditions in which they were made and on the ideas of the patients who produced them.

At the center of Röske’s reasoning there is a decisive shift: the problem is no longer inclusion inside the canon, but the limits of the canon itself.

Is this also a critique of the white cube?

The white cube represents, in an almost ideal way, a form of decontextualization. Some critics argue that one should speak neither of biography nor of the conditions in which art works were produced, but simply look at them. I do not believe that is really possible. One always looks from within one’s own history and culture. No one is an empty visitor.

The statement sounds simple, but it destabilizes one of the central myths of modern exhibition-making: the idea of neutral viewing. In Röske’s vision, there is no innocent gaze and no neutral museum space. Every display already carries an ideology.

How does all this translate into the exhibition for the 25th anniversary?

The exhibition will consist of examples of a new approach to presenting works from the Prinzhorn Collection. We have two very well-known works that exist only in photographs: a life-size doll by Katerina Detzel and Marie Lieb’s floor piece, made of strips of fabric arranged on the floor of a hospital room. I would like to reconstruct the doll, because in a photograph one can imagine something, but one does not really have that impression of presence. One has it only when the real scale is there in front of you. And I would like to do the same with Marie Lieb’s work, reconstructing the pattern she had created on the floorboards.

So the new direction of the Prinzhorn Collection also passes through the physicality of the works.

For me, this is not an abstract theory: it is a question of presence, of how a work comes to occupy space and body again. This can also be seen clearly with Else Blankenhorn. Her Banknotes are not simply images to be framed. They are paper objects, with a front and a back: on both sides there are angels and numbers. And they make sense only if one looks at them as objects, as an irrational currency, not just as images. Only then does one understand that there is something here that goes beyond the idea of a work of art, at least for its time.

One of the most interesting aspects of this exhibition is precisely this insistence on presence. Röske seems less interested in classification than in encounter. The works are no longer treated primarily as images to decode, but as objects that reclaim scale, materiality, and physical space.

And where, then, does August Natterer fit within this new reading?

I do not want to turn Natterer into an icon, but his singularity is undeniable. When he was making his drawings, no one in Germany was doing anything similar. Anyway, they were not meant as art works by him – and not seen as such by others. They were not in line with the expressionist style of his time, and only today we see them as proto-surrealism. Natterer was trying to reconstruct visions, images he had seen in the sky, with the dexterity of a technical draftsman. He was not drawing in order to be framed and hung on the wall: he wanted to bear witness to images that only he had seen. In the exhibition, we will reconstruct a part of his vision as a huge morphing image.

Are there other aspects of psychiatric works you want to stress in this exhibition?

There is, for example, an extraordinary work by Emma Mohr: a tapestry measuring about 80 by 80 centimeters that on one side shows around fifty images, with herself at the center, and on the other side hand-stitched letters to the German emperor and his ministries, in which she complains about how she was treated in a German asylum in the 1870s. In a work like this, image, autobiography, and a demand to be heard cannot be separated.

Again and again, these works resist separation: image and testimony, form and biography, object and survival strategy continue to exist inside the same gesture.

In earlier exhibitions you demonstrated the relationship between the Prinzhorn Collection and the great twentieth-century artists

For many years I was interested in showing how Klee, Schlemmer, Baselitz, Max Ernst, the Surrealists, Kirchner, and others responded to the collection. I thought this helped the public understand that these works, too, deserved to be taken seriously. Today, however, I find myself saying: who cares? For me, the point now is another one: these works are strong enough on their own. They deserve to be seen as something special.

This may be the real turning point of the exhibition. For decades, psychiatric works often entered institutional discourse through their influence on recognized modern artists. Röske now seems ready to reverse that hierarchy. The comparison is no longer necessary. The works no longer need validation through modernism.

What is the hardest misunderstanding to dismantle, even today, when one looks at the Prinzhorn Collection?

There is still an expectation today of so-called “mad art” of how works by people with mental illness look: confused, without concept, without structure. For me, this is a crucial point. Many of these works are not like that at all. And it is precisely for this reason that the collection remains so important: because it forces us to reconsider not only our idea of art, but also the certainties with which we think we look at it.

In the end, the exhibition suggests something larger than a revision of psychiatric art. It questions the cultural reflexes through which viewers construct normality, authorship, and artistic legitimacy.

And perhaps that is precisely why the Prinzhorn Collection still feels so contemporary.

25 Years Museum Prinzhorn Collection
28 June 2026 – 31 January 2027

Prinzhorn Collection
Voßstraße 2
69115 Heidelberg
Germany

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