The Witch's Head Landscape: A Pictorial Illusion from the Prinzhorn Collection*

In his book Artistry of the Mentally III of 1922, Hans Prinzhorn presented the Swabian electrotechnician August Natterer (1868-1933) as one of ten “masters” to whom he devoted brief monographs. He gave him the pseudonym Neter, described his life and reproduced his oeuvre, or rather a very specific selection of his works. His choice concentrated on paintings that in his view portrayed “schizophrenic experiences quite nakedly” (Prinzhorn 1972, 171). Consequently, Prinzhorn only included those works that illustrated his ideas of non-intentional, authentically schizophrenic painting. The result was that he allowed the representational side of Natterer's oeuvre that lacked a certain mystery to go by the board, for he viewed it as “soberly realistic” and “amateur” (1972, 163). He only reproduced poetically loaded works that were replete with the desired mystery, such as Natterer's Antichrist (ill. 1) or Miraculous Shepherd which shortly after were to be discovered by the Surrealists.1

Prinzhorn failed to include a reproduction of Natterer's Witch's Head-Landscape2 (ill. 2) presumably because he considered it too grotesque and banal. Many puzzled later over the drawing and found plenty to say about it, but did not subject it to a close examination. The findings of such an examination and the history of the picture's genesis make it very clear that the intention and autonomy of a work get lost when people attempt to interpret it within a narrow conceptual framework as paranoid and incoherent, as some primal text of the mind or as coded events from the dreamworld.