"In the early 1920s, the German art historian and psychiatrist, Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933), amassed a remarkable collection of some 5000 paintings, drawings, manuscripts, objects, and collages made by the patients of psychiatric hospitals throughout much of Europe. His interest, unique at the time, lay as much in their value as art as in their importance for the study of mental illness ... The works; all created between 1890 and 1920, sprang from the patients' urgent need to impose order on chaos, to communicate, from a 'drive towards expression' as Prinzhorn put it. Particular themes and motifs recur in the works: mechanical inventions; religious images; sexual fantasies; obsessive patterning on paper and in embroidery; fantastic beasts; intricate internal and external worlds. By the 1930s, when the Nazis declared such work 'degenerate', the Collection itself had fallen in to disrepair. Only in recent years has it been retrieved and restored. The images provide a fascinating insight in to the nature of artistic expression and the links between creativity, rationality, and illness - compelling subjects which remain intensely relevant to this day."--Jacket.