The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

The extraordinary, little-known story of Hitler’s war on modern art.

In the first decades of the 20th century, Hans Prinzhorn was an art historian. When World War I came, he received training in medicine and psychiatry, and as a psychiatrist began to put together an extraordinary collection of raw and powerful works by his psychiatric patients.

The Prinzhorn collection, as it was known, inspired a new generation of artists, including Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali – but it would later be used to destroy them.

When Hitler rose to power – a failed and rejected artist of the old school – he turned his propaganda on the modernists, launching an exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’ which pilloried the work. After, the artworks were stripped from German museums and either sold or destroyed.

The likes of Dali fled, but the Prinzhorn artists could not. They became the first victims of Hitler’s mass murder.

Bringing together an inspirational piece of history from the art world with the tragic cruelty of a fanatical art-dictator, this is an astonishing story that shows the conflicting cultures in play during the Second World War.