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Public interest in art created by people suffering from mental
illnesses has been growing in recent years, while the topic is
still relatively exotic in the academic world. In a unique research
project at Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK, art works produced
around 1900 by patients in mental asylums and hospitals in
Switzerland have been recorded, documented, and examined. Their
authors worked on many of them for long periods, always with
dedication, and often revealing remarkable technical and artistic
prowess. They saw their art as a contribution to public life, as
their own invention and expression of their ideas, but also as an
act to compensate for the dull life at, and criticism of, the
institutions they were being treated. This field of art, and of art
history, is subject to the dynamics of academic standards and,
consequently, of inclusions and exclusions. This new book,
featuring a manifold selection of previously unpublished art works,
questions our contemporary understanding of art, making the reader
revisit his or her own concept of what constitutes art and to
engage with these artists and their work.
Elisabeth Faulhaber was born in south west Germany in 1890. By the
time she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Doesen near
Leipzig in 1914, she had worked in a factory, been a chambermaid
and a waitress, and had had a child out of wedlock. She was an
inmate of the hospital for six years, dying of tuberculosis in
1921, at the age of 31.She wrote, she drew and - according to
hospital notes - scribbled unstoppably on furniture, floor, walls.
A handful of her drawings survive, and six small notebooks. These
now form part of the Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg. The
notebooks show Elisabeth Faulhaber to have been intelligent and
questioning. She was also often muddled to an extreme. Her work is
imbued with sensibility. The notebooks varied subject matter and
range of graphic invention show a wonderful artistic talent.Sarah
Jacobs rendition of the notebooks contains more than 550 drawings
by Faulhaber but, although the rendition contains one page for
every page of the notebooks, it is not a facsimile. Instead, black
and white photographs of the drawings have been reversed, and then
partly erased so that what is presented is both faithful to the
original, and insistently the opposite. Freely translated extracts
from the Faulhaber 's texts have also been included, together with
a selection of the poems and songs which Faulhaber copied into her
notebooks. These have been left in the original German. The
rendition has been produced in association with Sammlung Prinzhorn,
UniversitaetsKlinikum, Heidelberg.Sarah Jacobs is an artist living
in London.
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