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Karl BrendelKarl Brendel (1871-1925) was a schizophrenic outsider artist and one of the "schizophrenic masters" profiled by Hans Prinzhorn in his field-defining work Artistry of the Mentally Ill. He was the son of a freight transporter and one of nine children, attending school through the age of 14 and becoming employed as a bricklayer. He married a widow with three children in 1895 and had two children of his own with her. However, from 1892 on Brendel was sentenced 12 times for assault and battery and property damage, and had to serve a prison term in 1902. The first records of his mental illness come from 1906, when the prison doctor notices megalomaniacal delusions and abnormal physical sensations; Brendel claims that he has already experienced a sacrificial death, and that he is Jesus Christ. Brendel's first artistic expressions come from 1912, when he begins modeling obscene figures out of chewed bread. Although none of his bread sculptures survive, he also began woodcarving at this time. His favorite subjects for carving were animal reliefs and depictions of his religious hallucinations, particularly the Christ motif. Christ was commonly depicted as a hermaphrodite, a combination that Prinzhorn hypothesizes "is grounded roughly as follows: every living thing is dominated by the desire for the opposite sex as an eternal, basic urge transcending everything else... how would it be if dual creatures combined femininity and masculinity and were freed from the urge and the striving for power by the opposite part? We can conceive of higher beings only in such combinations" (Prinzhorn 1972, p. 117). Resources - Hans Prinzhorn, Artistry of the mentally ill: a contribution to the psychology and psychopathology of configuration, translated by Eric von Brockdorff from the second German edition, with an introduction by James L. Foy, (Wien, New York: Springer-Verlag), 1972. ISBN 3540055088.
Brendel, Karl
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