
<p><strong>Mari Vallikivi</strong> is an art historian based in Viljandi, Estonia. She has worked as the director of the Kondas Centre art museum since 2003. Estonian outsider art has been her research focus over the last 15 years.</p>


Mari Vallikivi


<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignright"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Heiki_Saga_Kirikud-ja-korrusmajad.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Heiki_Saga_Kirikud-ja-korrusmajad-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Heiki_Saga_Kirikud-ja-korrusmajad-203x300.jpg 203w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Heiki_Saga_Kirikud-ja-korrusmajad-691x1024.jpg 691w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Heiki_Saga_Kirikud-ja-korrusmajad-532x788.jpg 532w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Heiki_Saga_Kirikud-ja-korrusmajad-684x1013.jpg 684w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Heiki_Saga_Kirikud-ja-korrusmajad-760x1125.jpg 760w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Heiki_Saga_Kirikud-ja-korrusmajad-912x1350.jpg 912w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Heiki_Saga_Kirikud-ja-korrusmajad.jpg 1102w" data-sizes="auto" width="1102" height="1632" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Heiki Säga. Churches and Towerblocks, 2022. Kondas Centre Collection </figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>In-between systems and services</strong></h2>



<p>Outsider art or <em>art brut</em> in Estonia has not been researched much until recent years. As an object of research, outsider art is closely linked to developments in the fields of psychiatry and special care services and in the wider society – in Estonia, attitudes towards people with psychological special needs (mental disability, psychiatric diagnoses) have only recently started changing for the better. We have very little knowledge about older, that is, historical art created by people with special mental health needs, and we know almost nothing about such artworks made between 1920 and 1990. In the current state of research, we lack facts, so we can only make educated guesses when it comes to outsider art from the past. Estonian psychiatric hospitals, such as the clinic in Tartu (established in 1877), Jämejala near Viljandi (1897), Seewald in Tallinn (1903) and Pilguse in Saaremaa (1913), all simultaneously functioned both as medical institutions and care facilities until World War II. According to the Central Bureau of the Republic of Estonia in 1929, care was provided to around 3,000 mentally ill people. During the Soviet occupation, people with special mental health needs were increasingly institutionalised and the number of both people in special care and the number of care homes (or as they were called at the time, homes for invalids) increased. The political agenda of Soviet period care facilities was tied to ideas of re-education through labour (for people for whom such an approach was applicable)<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="1" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003990000000000000000_1817"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1817-1">1</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1817-1" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="1">The duty to work in accordance with ability was applied to people in institutional care before the Soviet period as well.</span>. Recreation and leisure were not prioritised, although cinema and literature as art forms that could be submitted to ideological control in closed facilities were preferred as entertainment. Painting and drawing were not priorities, although there were people who did draw. It can definitely be said that valuable works that were created despite everything in care facilities and psychiatric hospitals during the Soviet period have been lost or destroyed because preserving these was not considered important.</p>



<p>After the Soviet occupation, especially from the 2000s onwards, social services were restructured and since then, one of the main objectives in special care has been deinstitutionalisation.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Establishing a centre</strong></h2>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_Too_ja_puhkus-3.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_Too_ja_puhkus-3-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_Too_ja_puhkus-3-211x300.jpg 211w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_Too_ja_puhkus-3-722x1024.jpg 722w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_Too_ja_puhkus-3-555x788.jpg 555w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_Too_ja_puhkus-3-714x1013.jpg 714w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_Too_ja_puhkus-3-793x1125.jpg 793w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_Too_ja_puhkus-3-952x1350.jpg 952w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_Too_ja_puhkus-3-1269x1800.jpg 1269w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_Too_ja_puhkus-3.jpg 1292w" data-sizes="auto" width="1292" height="1833" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Ingrid Kivimeister, Work and Leisure, 2016. Kondas Centre Collection</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>In 2003, I started working as the director of the Kondas Centre, an art museum that had just opened in Viljandi. The permanent exhibition presents the works of the naïve painter Paul Kondas (1900–1985), a school teacher from Viljandi and Suure-Jaani. As he was also a self-taught artist, the centre&#8217;s mission is to research and introduce phenomena that often remain outside the established art world, such as self-taught and naïve artists and Sunday painters. A year after the museum was opened, I started going on research trips around Estonia to find artists who had a high drive to create art but modest knowledge and skill compared to professionals. Many of the original artists I met during the fieldwork between 2004 and 2008, were already elderly, and by now, almost all of them have left this world. Interviewing them, I found that these artists had mostly held simple jobs, lived in small towns and villages away from large centres and had had extremely limited contact with professional cultural fields. After a more active period of researching the legacy of naïve artists, my focus shifted towards art created by people with special mental health needs. The first exhibitions of works by artists in need of additional support<sub><sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="2" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003990000000000000000_1817"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1817-2">2</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1817-2" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="2">In the Estonian context, the expression &#8220;supported artist&#8221; is tentative and somewhat misleading, since the care system generally lacks professional instructors.</span></sub> were shown in the museum already in 2004 and 2005.<em> </em>Before 2018 <em>art brut</em> was not exhibited in a systematic way at the Kondas centre; however, 2017 could now be considered a turning point as a new funding opportunity became available in connection to the centenary of the Republic of Estonia. In 2018, Estonia celebrated 100 years since it gained independence and among other programmes, the state offered additional arts funding as part of their One Hundred Art Landscapes programme. The Kondas Centre applied with the idea of holding the first ever exhibition of artists in need of additional support from all over the country. In 2003, the art historian Sigrid Saarep had organised a landmark event – the first international conference of outsider art and the exhibition <em>Offending the Medusa</em>. In the exhibitions displayed at various locations in Tallinn, works created at the Tallinn Support Center Juks were exhibited alongside self-taught artists. It can be said that Juks is more or less the only institution within the Estonian special care system employing professional art teachers. After <em>Offending the Medusa</em>, no systematic research into outsider art was done until 2017.</p>



<p>The first challenge we faced when starting the project as part of the One Hundred Art Landscapes programme was to find information about artists and how to reach them both in institutions and homes. How many could there even be in Estonia? We had many questions and not so many answers.</p>



<p>According to studies, there are up to 55,000 people with special mental health needs living in Estonia. That is as many as there are inhabitants in Narva, the third-largest city in Estonia. About 11,000 people receive either permanent or temporary care services, but in offering creative services to people in special care, we are lagging behind Western Europe by 20 to 30 years.</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignright"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Juri_Karpov_Abstraction-I_Kondas-Centre-Collection-1.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Juri_Karpov_Abstraction-I_Kondas-Centre-Collection-1-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Juri_Karpov_Abstraction-I_Kondas-Centre-Collection-1-300x212.jpg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Juri_Karpov_Abstraction-I_Kondas-Centre-Collection-1.jpg 1000w" data-sizes="auto" width="1000" height="707" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Jüri Karpov, Abstraction I, 2017. Kondas Centre Collection</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>As a first step, I turned to the list of special care facilities provided on the web page of the Social Insurance Board and began visiting these. Although these institutions are not generally very open, buzzwords like the &#8220;centenary art programme&#8221; and &#8220;art exhibition&#8221; opened doors to many support and day care centres. These visits allowed us to meet people creating art in the facilities, as well as the conditions and opportunities for crafting and making art on site but more broadly also how the system of special care operates. Sometimes differences of opinion appeared and it became clear we had a different understanding of what art is – in the facilities the personnel rarely thought that the people who live there make ‘art’, but rather they ‘draw things’. I witnessed how artworks made during the day were binned in the evening because &#8220;they will make new ones&#8221; the following day. Notably, weaving looms were present in almost all of the facilities – as a relic of the Soviet period attitude that the patents need to work, I assume – but high-quality paper, pencils and paint were much harder to find.</p>



<p>Before spring 2020, when care facilities were almost entirely closed due to the pandemic, I managed to visit around 25 special care facilities across the country – from Võru to Saaremaa and Pärnu to Narva. By early 2023, the Kondas centre had bought over 500 artworks thanks to the support of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and collected valuable material, interviewed artists as well as activities supervisors. The primary criterium for purchase was the level of artistry and in some cases, the remarkable story behind the piece.</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block aligncenter"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Lembar_Linder-United-States-of-EST.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Lembar_Linder-United-States-of-EST-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Lembar_Linder-United-States-of-EST-300x261.jpg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Lembar_Linder-United-States-of-EST-905x788.jpg 905w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Lembar_Linder-United-States-of-EST.jpg 933w" data-sizes="auto" width="933" height="812" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Lembar Linder, United States of EST, 2003. Kondas Centre Collection</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_suhtlemispildid_Riided.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_suhtlemispildid_Riided-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_suhtlemispildid_Riided-142x300.jpg 142w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_suhtlemispildid_Riided-484x1024.jpg 484w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_suhtlemispildid_Riided-372x788.jpg 372w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_suhtlemispildid_Riided-479x1013.jpg 479w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_suhtlemispildid_Riided-532x1125.jpg 532w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_suhtlemispildid_Riided-638x1350.jpg 638w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_suhtlemispildid_Riided-851x1800.jpg 851w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_suhtlemispildid_Riided-931x1969.jpg 931w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Copy-of-Ingrid_Kivimeister_suhtlemispildid_Riided.jpg 1000w" data-sizes="auto" width="1000" height="2116" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Ingrid Kivimeister, Communication image: Clothes, 2016. Kondas Centre Collection</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Artists’ stories</strong></h2>



<p>On several occasions, these trips made me wonder about the source of creativity. For example, sometimes art is the only means of communication with the world, as was the case with Ingrid, a woman whose colourful images of communication are now part of the Kondas collection. Ingrid (b. 1952) is deaf and mute and lives in a care home in Sillamäe in Ida-Viru County, located in a hospital complex in the former closed Soviet city. Ingrid is mentally disabled and nobody ever taught her sign language, yet she started using drawing to communicate: whenever she needs something or has run out of something – hand cream, toilet paper, soap, clean clothes – she draws it on paper and brings it to a carer at her facility. Thanks to a volunteer from Sweden who worked at the care home years ago, Ingrid has been provided with high quality art supplies. In her case, making art is not just a practical need but also a way to express thoughts and feelings. An attentive observer, she depicts events around her; often she seems to mentally divide the surface of the paper in two, depicting two seemingly unrelated themes. Ingrid relieves stress and tension by drawing colourful squares in her notebook.</p>



<p>Jüri (b. 1971) lives in the largest special care home in south Estonia, in the city of Võru, where he was relocated as an adult after his mother died. He graduated from the Urvaste special-needs school but after coming to the care home, he stopped communicating. It took a long time before he began drawing with others in the activities room. Increasingly, his semi-abstract works began including dates and a few words. When he was asked something, he wrote the reply on paper; sometimes he would secretly hide scissors in his pocket and would cut up his shoes, unscrew skirting boards, or even his entire bed. When Jüri saw his works in the Kondas centre in 2018, he suddenly became extremely social, began speaking and once, disappeared in the city of Võru for two days. After this incident, his treatment was altered. In recent years, he does not draw as often and most of his works are black and white.</p>



<p>Based on these two brief examples, we can see that creating art is a tool for people who need additional support to better perceive and analyse the world around them, but it also provides others with the opportunity to understand their inner world.</p>



<p>Making talented creators visible and recognising their work helps people who need additional support to gain better conditions for making art and help society understand that different people should be met on equal grounds, which, in turn, helps create more cohesion in society in general.</p>


Copy of Ingrid_Kivimeister_Töö_ja_puhkus

Shifting Timelines

The Bumpy Road of Estonian Outsider Art


<p><strong>Thomas Röske</strong> has been head of the Prinzhorn Collection of the Psychiatric University Clinic in Heidelberg since 2002. He studied the history of art, musicology and psychology at Hamburg University and obtained his doctorate in 1991 with a book about Hans Prinzhorn. He now teaches art history alternately at Frankfurt University and at Heidelberg University. He has published mainly on German Modernism and Outsider Art. Since 2012, he has been the president of the European Outsider Art Association.</p>


Thomas Röske


<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Piecing together a lost history</strong></h2>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-details-block details"><p>By Mari Vallikivi</p></div>



<p>One of the largest collections of art works by psychiatric patients created before the emergence of contemporary psychopharmacology is located at the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg. The museum housing this collection is located in the building of the old clinic (<em>Altklinikum Bergheim</em>) at Heidelberg University.</p>



<p>Among the first who started looking more closely at the creative works of mentally ill people was Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926), the founder of scientific psychiatry and the founder of the experimental psychology laboratory at the University of Tartu. He worked at Heidelberg University from 1891 to 1903 and before that also in Tartu, Estonia (1886–1891). In 1887, he became a professor of psychiatry and the head of the University of Tartu psychiatric hospital, but due to the language barrier, the daily work with patients turned out to be &#8220;extremely troublesome&#8221;&nbsp;<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="1" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003990000000000000000_1749"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1749-1">1</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1749-1" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="1">Allik, J. 2022. <em>Eesti psühholoogia lugu</em>. Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 66.</span>, as Kraepelin writes in his memoirs. The majority of the patients at the hospital were Estonians but there were also Germans, Latvians, Russians, Finns and Jewish and Polish people but the professor struggled to find a common language and due to the pressure of the Russification<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="2" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003990000000000000000_1749"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1749-2">2</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1749-2" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="2">In the second half of the 19th century, the Russian Empire, which Estonia was part of at the time, led a policy of supressing the right of self-determination and autonomy of ethnic minorities.</span> policy, in 1891, he returned to Germany. In Tartu, Kraepelin developed the nosological classification of mental illnesses, with two of the most significant groups of illnesses being maniacal depressive illnesses and <em>dementia praecox</em> (contemporary term: schizophrenia).<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="3" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003990000000000000000_1749"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1749-3">3</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1749-3" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="3">Allik, J. 2022. <em>Eesti psühholoogia lugu</em>. Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 68</span> During his time there, the conditions for patients in the facility were also improved. It is highly likely that it was then that medical professionals started collecting materials, such as writings, scribbles and drawings, as part of patients’ medical records for the first time in Tartu. This was all seen as part of their case history that contributed to their diagnosis.&nbsp;</p>



<p>There are not many works in the Prinzhorn collection from the period Kraepelin worked at Heidelberg but among them, for example, is a handkerchief embroidered by Jane Grier (1856–1902) that will also be displayed at the exhibition <em>If you could understand something from the dreams you had?</em> at Tartu Art Museum (17 June – 15 October 2023). Kraepelin also used patients&#8217; artworks as teaching materials; for example, in 1896, he “sought to demonstrate the ‘degenerate’ in symbolism with patient drawings”, and during diagnostics exercises, he combined art by patients with mental illnesses with reproductions of modern art.<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="4" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003990000000000000000_1749"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1749-4">4</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1749-4" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="4">Brand-Claussen, B. 2021. Between Respect and Ostracism<em>. The History of a Crazy Collection, Introduction to the Prinzhorn Collection</em>, 6</span></p>



<p>Years later, Kraepelin&#8217;s former assistant and the head of the Heidelberg University psychiatric hospital Karl Wilmanns (1873–1945), together with Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933), who had studied both medicine and art history and started working at the clinic as an assistant in 1919, began expanding the collection of patients&#8217; art for research purposes in the same year. Wilmanns and Prinzhorn wrote to asylums and private clinics of German-speaking countries to ask for drawings, paintings, sculptures and scribbles expressing the patients&#8217; psychosis to be sent to their facility in Heidelberg. Their request did not go unanswered and the collection in Heidelberg received nearly 5,000 new works. In 1922, Hanz Prinzhorn published a book titled <em>Artistry of the Mentally Ill</em> (<em>Bildnerei der Geisteskranken</em>), in which he stated that artworks of mentally ill people &#8220;resemble art&#8221; and are thus not merely support material in establishing a fitting diagnosis.<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="5" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003990000000000000000_1749"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1749-5">5</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1749-5" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="5">Outsider Art Now, 2017. Outsider Art Museum, 48</span> The book was less influential in the field of psychiatry but still carries significance in the field of art. It had a considerable impact on both the Expressionists and the Surrealists. Alongside Expressionist art, a few works from the Prinzhorn collection were also displayed at the Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) travelling exhibition in Nazi Germany from 1937 to 1942. Kraepelin died in 1926 before the Third Reich was established; however, he believed that &#8220;a policy of reasonable racial hygiene&#8221; (<em>verstandige rassenhygiene</em>) could provide a solution to issues related to ‘degeneration’ in Germany, referring to the view that certain cultural influences contribute to the downfall and weakening of a race.<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="6" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003990000000000000000_1749"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1749-6">6</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003990000000000000000_1749-6" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="6"><a href="https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2016.15111414">Rael D. Strous</a> etc, 2016. Reflections on Emil Kraepelin: Icon and Reality. <em>The American Journal of Psychiatry</em>. 173 (3), 300-301 </span>He was convinced that society must protect itself from mentally ill people, just like it should from those with contagious illnesses and many of his attitudes were later echoed in his students, several of whom became prominent Nazi psychiatrists. Yet, despite Nazi policies on ‘degenerate’ art, the collection remained nearly untouched and was preserved in a cupboard in the archive of the Heidelberg psychiatric clinic.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The exhibition at the Tartu Art Museum looks at a ground-breaking era in the histories of both psychiatry and art and makes visible the links between Tartu and Heidelberg. Alongside works from the Prinzhorn Collection, the exhibition displays works by psychiatric patients from early 20th century Tartu.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Forget me not</h2>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-details-block details"><p>By Thomas Röske</p></div>



<p>The impressive embroidered handkerchief, dated 1897, is the only surviving work by Jane Grier (1856–1902). It was illustrated on a colour plate by the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in his important psychiatric textbook of 1913 as an &#8220;example of the peculiar works of art&#8221; by people diagnosed with <em>dementia praecox</em> (later <em>schizophrenia</em>). For his diagnostic view, accordingly, only the “loss of taste in screaming color combinations and strange shapes” asserted itself in the textile.</p>



<p>The unmarried governess and lady’s companion Grier, born in Ireland as the daughter of a ship&#8217;s doctor, was living with her mother and sister in Dresden-Neustadt in 1892 when she felt watched and became increasingly agitated. Because she laughed often for no reason, dressed conspicuously, and behaved <em>indecently</em>, her mother sent her to the city&#8217;s mental hospital for two months. Further stays here, and at the Pirna institution followed. Grier died in Dresden hospital at the age of 46.Her embroidery on a men&#8217;s handkerchief reveals little structure at first glance. Grier initially stitched messages to assistant doctor Willführ in Dresden in four of the corner cartouches for him to remember her. The rest of the needlework, however, is unevenly spread over the handkerchief, loops of whole bundles of yarn are sewn onto some sections, others are not designed. But for the most part, the yarn was not placed haphazardly. Grier used a bundle of threads to frame one of the cartouches. With another, she apparently wanted to design an even more lavish decoration. The loops of different coloured yarn bundles used for this are not symmetrical, but they do form an equally weighted, <em>Baroque</em> whole. Only after this decoration does the embroidery thread seem to have taken on a life of its own, with at least the heart shape on the edge of the cloth probably being intentionally pictorial. In increasing the adornment around her plea not to forget her, the embroiderer, perhaps emotionally overwhelmed, lost control of the composition.</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Miss_G_6053_recto-veebi.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Miss_G_6053_recto-veebi-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Miss_G_6053_recto-veebi-300x300.jpg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Miss_G_6053_recto-veebi-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Miss_G_6053_recto-veebi-788x788.jpg 788w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Miss_G_6053_recto-veebi-1013x1013.jpg 1013w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Miss_G_6053_recto-veebi-1125x1125.jpg 1125w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Miss_G_6053_recto-veebi-1350x1350.jpg 1350w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Miss_G_6053_recto-veebi-1800x1800.jpg 1800w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Miss_G_6053_recto-veebi-1969x1969.jpg 1969w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Miss_G_6053_recto-veebi.jpg 2048w" data-sizes="auto" width="2048" height="2048" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Jane Grier, <em>Forget Me Not</em>, 1892. Prinzhor Collection, Heidelberg</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>


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