Whenever I am in Heidelberg, which is not often, the Prinzhorn Collection is my first port of call. The Prinzhorn Collection is the world’s first, largest, and best collection of art by psychotic patients, founded by the psychiatrist Dr. Hans Prinzhorn. To Prinzhorn belongs the honor, to my mind a considerable one, of having recognized artistic merit in the productions of psychotic persons and not merely pathological manifestations of grossly disordered psyches. It bespeaks a laudable openness and largeness of spirit in him as well as an admirably independent aesthetic judgment. These do not always go together. The sensitive book he published in 1922 about the art of psychotics, The Art of the Mentally Ill, is still in print and is a classic in its admittedly small field. Four years after Prinzhorn’s death in 1933, items from the collection were placed alongside works of celebrated modern artists in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition arranged by the Nazis, with the implication that madness and modernism were indistinguishable. The Nazis probably destroyed some of the works they took from the collection, but more than 5,000 works that were collected by Dr. Prinzhorn between 1919 and 1921 from asylums all round Germany have survived.

Nazism managed by the extremity of its evil to besmirch everything that came before and after it. Doubts have therefore often been expressed in Germany about the ideological propriety of the collection, its origins, its purposes,