Karl Brendel

This article deals with the wood carver Karl Genzel. On the painter and wood cutter, see Karl Alexander Brendel ; on the politician see Karl Peter Brendel .

Karl Brendel is the pseudonym for the schizophrenic wood carver Karl Genzel (born March 21, 1871 in Mühlhausen / Thuringia ; † August 21, 1925 in Eickelborn ), which Hans Prinzhorn used in his book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken .

Life

His father was a builder and haulier in Mühlhausen, where he grew up with three brothers and five sisters. From the age of six to fourteen he attended school and then trained as a bricklayer.

Since 1892 he has been sentenced to fines or imprisonment on several occasions for assault , insult , damage to property , pimping and resistance to state power .

In 1895 he married a widow with two children and moved the family to Bochum . This is where his daughters were born.

In a work accident in 1900, his left thigh was seriously injured, so that the leg had to be amputated in 1902. Also in 1902, his marriage ended in divorce.

He got by as a peddler and got as far as Lorraine . Because begging and assault, he was arrested 1906th

Since he became psychologically conspicuous when he was arrested, he was first admitted to the psychiatric institution in Merzig and later transferred to the Lengerich hospital (Westphalia) . With the diagnosis of dementia praecox , he was admitted to the provincial sanatorium in Eickelborn near Lippstadt in 1907 .

“In the institution, excessive productivity, fits of anger, hallucinatory experiences and requests for freedom alternate with inaction and resignation. Genzel likes to isolate himself in his cell, where he works, carves and keeps his knife. He fills notebooks and sheets with texts and drawings, rages madly against persecutors and naked women, skilfully glues bags (several thousand daily), leafing through magazines, sculpting figures from chewed bread, peeling willows, sewing sacks, decorating slippers and discovering (around 1912 ) wood carving ; he rages against lack of freedom, stays in bed for days, philosophizes, reads the Bible, argues, beats, carves, gossips, stuffs, is silent, writes, scolds ... for decades ”(Brand-Claussen, p. 223).

In November he succeeded in trying to escape and made his way to Mühlhausen, where he found shelter with his relatives. After a stroke he was brought back to Eickelborn, where he died six months later on August 21, 1925.

plant

Karl Brendel and his work, consisting of twenty-four sculptures and eight drawings, were discovered by Hans Prinzhorn in 1920 when he was looking for objects for his collection of works by people with mental illnesses.

Brendel began sculpting figures from chewed bread in 1912 and later turned to wood carving, encouraged by a member of the nursing staff. His first works were flat reliefs, often with patterned edges. Brendel carved in hard wood, which he painted or varnished afterwards. His later works show imaginative animals and sculptures with different views that reflect his religious delusions and often show male and female gender characteristics together. His works were brought close to exotic tribal art early on (Brand-Claussen, p. 219).

Two of his works, a cat and the head with a removable cranium, were selected by the Heidelberg clinic director Carl Schneider and an NSDAP functionary for the “Degenerate Art” exhibition and shown there. (Brand-Claussen, p. 226)

literature

• Bettina Brand-Claussen: “BoneWeltMuseumTheater”. Wooden sculptures by Karl Genzel from the Prinzhorn collection. In: Ingried Brugger et al. (Ed.): Art & Wahn. DuMont, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-7701-4274-8 , pp. 218-239.
• Barbara Freeman: Biographies of Outsider Artists. In: Maurice Tuchman (Ed.): Parallel Visions. Modern Artists and Outsider Art. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1992, ISBN 0-691-03213-0 , p. 26.
• Hans Prinzhorn: Bildnerei the mentally ill. 5th edition, Springer, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-211-82976-8 .
• John Maizels (Ed.): Raw Vision Outsider Art Source Book. Raw Vision, Radlett 2002, ISBN 0-9543393-0-4 .