’Miraculous survival’: asylum patient whose art documented his sterilisation by the Nazis | World news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/06/miraculous-survival-asylum-patient-whose-art-documented-his-sterilisati
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Forty-four pencil drawings on the backsides of a shop order book are all that remain of the life of Wilhelm Werner. But his artistic response to the forced sterilisation programme he underwent in Nazi Germany, a bundle of leaves flimsily held together in a worn leather cover, is receiving growing recognition in the art world almost eight decades after his death.
The detailed sketches, like scenes from a puppet show, are believed to be the only works of art by one of the 400,000 people who suffered forced sterilisation under the Nazis’ programme to eliminate “undesirables”.
The sketch book is to be the focal point of a major permanent collection of so-called outsider art – at the Prinzhorn gallery in Heidelberg, southern Germany from May.
“These drawings are immensely precious both historically and artistically,” says Thomas Röske, art historian and director of the Prinzhorn, which owns Werner’s drawings in its collection of 6,000 works by patients of psychiatric institutions, dating back to 1840 and the largest of its kind in the world.
“Most work produced by patients was destroyed during the Nazi period,” he says.
