Cephalopods

This article covers the concept of drawing itself. For children's drawings see children's drawing # Kopffüßler , for the falsely so-called animal class cephalopods .

Cephalopods on a fresco in Nørre Alslev, Denmark (13th century)

Cephalopods are figures that consist only of legs and a head-like structure to which the functions of head and body are transferred at the same time.

Cephalopods are a simplified representation of a whole person. The following applies to children's drawings : The image of humans begins with the cephalopod. In addition, the motif of the cephalopod plays an important role from prehistory to current art production, from ethnographica (Africa, Asia, Oceania) to the design of our time.

The cephalopod motif is used in advertising as well as in ritual objects (e.g. initiation) or in modern (e.g. Pablo Picasso , Joan Miró , Alfred Kubin ) and contemporary art (e.g. Horst Antes , Peter Gilles, KH Hödicke, Gustav Kluge , Sigmar Polke ). In addition, the representation of cephalopods can be found in the pictures of psychiatric and neurological patients as well as in the so-called Art brut (e.g. in Oswald Tschirtner , Augustin Wilhelm Schnietz).

literature

• H. Kraft: The cephalopods. A transcultural study on the psychology and psychopathology of visual design. Hippokrates, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-7773-0576-6 .
• H. Kraft: The birth of the image of man - the cephalopods. Salon Verlag, Cologne 1999, ISBN 3-89770-014-X .
• H. Kraft: Crossing the border between art and psychiatry. Deutscher Ärzte-Verlag, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-7691-0483-8 .
• H. Prinzhorn : Bildnerei the mentally ill. Springer, Berlin 1922, DNB 361587430 .