Franz Pohl (1868–1940)Krannert Art Museum, p. 32. was the pseudonym of Franz Karl Bühler, a

schizophrenic Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations (typically hearing voices), delusions, and disorganized thinking. Other symptoms include social withdra ...

outsider art Outsider art is art made by self-taught or supposedly naïve artists with typically little or no contact with the conventions of the art worlds. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates e ...

ist and one of the "schizophrenic masters" profiled by

Hans Prinzhorn Hans Prinzhorn (6 June 1886 – 14 June 1933) was a German psychiatrist and art historian. Born in Hemer, Westphalia, he studied art history and philosophy at the University of Vienna, receiving his doctorate in 1908. He then went to England to ...

in his field-defining work ''

Artistry of the Mentally Ill ''Artistry of the Mentally Ill: a contribution to the psychology and psychopathology of configuration'' (german: Bildnerei der Geisteskranken: ein Beitrag zur Psychologie und Psychopathologie der Gestaltung) is a 1922 book by psychiatrist Hans Pr ...

''. Bühler was a metalsmith by trade until 1898. In that year he was committed to a mental institution after being pulled on a cold winter day from a canal in Hamburg, into which he had jumped to escape imaginary pursuers. He remained in an asylum for the rest of his life. As he "receded into an autistic existence", he produced a large number of drawings and writings. Many of his drawings were collected by the psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, as part of his collection of approximately 6,000 works by 516 mental patients. Bühler's work was especially appealing to Prinzhorn for its

Expressionist Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...

character.Krannert Art Museum, p. 16. When Prinzhorn published some of Bühler's drawings in 1922 in ''Artistry of the Mentally Ill'', he gave Bühler the pseudonym "Franz Pohl". In 1940, Bühler was killed during the first Nazi mass-murder programme,

Aktion T4 (German, ) was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of 4, a street address of ...

, targeting the mentally ill. He was murdered in "a specially adapted home for disabled people at Grafeneck castle, in Swabia."

Notes

References

*Krannert Art Museum. 1984. ''The Prinzhorn Collection: selected work from the Prinzhorn Collection of the art of the mentally ill : Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, November 10, 1984 to January 6, 1985 nd others'. Champaign, Ill: University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign. . * {{DEFAULTSORT:Pohl, Franz 1864 births 1940 deaths Outsider artists People with schizophrenia 19th-century German painters 19th-century German male artists 20th-century German painters 20th-century German male artists German male painters