Gugging | |
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Geography | |
Location | Austria |
Organisation | |
Type | Psychiatric hospital |
Links | |
Lists | Hospitals in Austria |
The Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic was a psychiatric institution located in the suburb of Maria Gugging on the outskirts of Vienna, Austria. [1] During the Nazi era hundreds of mental patients were murdered or abused at Gugging as part of the Nazi Aktion T4 program.
In the post-war era, several of its patients became known for their Outsider Art and are referred to as the Gugging Artists. Today, several artists live in a dedicated art center at the former clinic site, known as the Art Brut Center Gugging (or just Gugging) which also includes the Gugging Museum and the Gugging Gallery.
The Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic was founded in 1889. [2] It is named after the neighborhood of Maria Gugging, a suburb in Klosterneuburg. [3]
Historian Herwig Czech told the Austrian Press Agency that Gugging was the scene "of some of the most barbarous medical crimes committed in Austria" during the Nazi Regime. Approximately 400 patients were murdered by Doctor Emil Gelny by poisoning and electric shock. Rudolf Lonauer was the attending doctor for 112 deaths and typically murdered his patients –mainly women –with an overdose of drugs. Patients also died from lethal injection, malnutrition, and infectious diseases. New research has also shown that between November 1940 and May 1941 a total of 675 people were taken from the clinic to the Hartheim Killing Facility near Linz, where they were gassed. Of these, 116 were children and teenagers between the ages of four and 17. [4]
By 1940, rumors of patient murders at Hartheim began to spread. Anna Wödl, a nurse and the mother of a disabled child living at Gugging, attempted to save the life of her son by petitioning against his relocation to Hartheim. She was assured that he would not go to Hartheim, but was instead taken to another children's institution, Am Spiegelgrund, where he was murdered soon after arrival. [5]
In the late 1950s, psychiatrist Leo Navratil (1921-2006), of the Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic, had his patients produce drawings for diagnostic purposes. The following year he discovered artistically talented individuals in his ward –a finding that was confirmed by Jean Dubuffet, the French artist who coined the term Art Brut (also known as Outsider Art). Navratil's first book Schizophrenie und Kunst (Schizophrenia and Art) was published in 1965. Attracted to the clinic by this work, many Viennese artists visited Gugging. In 1970 the first exhibition of the "Gugging Artists" took place in a Vienna gallery. Thereafter, the "Gugging Artists" were frequently presented in galleries and museums.
The "Center for Art and Psychotherapy" was founded by Navratil in 1981. He invited artistically talented patients to live in the house, which serves as living space, studio, gallery and meeting place. With the founder's retirement in 1986, Johann Feilacher became his successor. Feilacher stressed the role that art played at Gugging and went on to change its name to the "House of Artists" (German : Haus der Künstler). Within Europe, the House of Artists is regarded as a model for psychiatric reforms based on art therapy as a means to reintegrate clients into society.
Presently, a cultural center is located next to the House of Artists. It is known as the "Art / Brut Center", and consists of a museum, a gallery and a public studio. The museum contains the works of the Gugging artists, and also hosts traveling Art Brut exhibitions, which include artists such as Martin Ramirez and Adolf Wölfli. The museum building also hosts a public studio that is open to all, but is mainly used by individuals who have undergone or are receiving psychiatric treatment. Together the museum, the gallery, the "House of Artists" and the public studio, are known as the Art / Brut Center Gugging.
In early 1994 David Bowie and Brian Eno visited the Gugging psychiatric hospital to interview and photograph the celebrated artist-patients famous for their "Outsider Art". [6] Artistic materials favored by the Gugging's residents had a powerful influence on production strategies in the studio [6] during the Bowie / Eno collaboration. In March 1994 a three-hour piece (mostly dialog) further inspired the process of the 1995 concept album Outside .
Philipp Weiss's Ein schöner Hase ist meistens der Einzellne is based on the real-life story of Ernst Herbeck (1920–1991) and August Walla (1936–2001), two schizophrenic artistic patients of Gugging. Projekttheater Vorarlberg performed a production of the play at Alte Hallenbad Feldkirch from December 2013. [7]
Aktion T4 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 Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in early 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with Aktion T4. Certain German physicians were authorised to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death". In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia note", backdated to 1 September 1939, which authorised his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to begin the killing.
Outsider art is art made by self-taught individuals who are untrained and untutored in the traditional arts with typically little or no contact with the conventions of the art worlds.
Adolf Wölfli was a Swiss artist who was one of the first artists to be associated with the Art Brut or outsider art label.
Leo Navratil was an Austrian psychiatrist and author.
Oswald Tschirtner was an artist from Austria who had schizophrenia. He was known by the "pseudonym" of O.T.
Klosterneuburg, frequently abbreviated to Kloburg by locals, is a town in the Tulln District of the Austrian state of Lower Austria. It has a population of about 27,500. The Stift Klosterneuburg, which was established in 1114 and soon after given to the Augustinians, is of particular historical importance.
The Vienna Secession is an art movement, closely related to Art Nouveau, that was formed in 1897 by a group of Austrian painters, graphic artists, sculptors and architects, including Josef Hoffman, Koloman Moser, Otto Wagner and Gustav Klimt. They resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists in protest against its support for more traditional artistic styles. Their most influential architectural work was the Secession exhibitions hall designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich as a venue for expositions of the group. Their official magazine was called Ver Sacrum, which published highly stylised and influential works of graphic art. In 1905 the group itself split, when some of the most prominent members, including Klimt, Wagner, and Hoffmann, resigned in a dispute over priorities, but it continued to function, and still functions today, from its headquarters in the Secession Building. In its current form, the Secession exhibition gallery is independently led and managed by artists.
Judith Scott was an American fiber sculptor. She was deaf and had Down Syndrome. She was internationally renowned for her art. In 1987, Judith was enrolled at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California, which supports people with developmental disabilities. There, Judith discovered her passion and talent for abstract fiber art, and she was able to communicate in a new form. An account of Scott's life, Entwined: Sisters and Secrets in the Silent World of Artist Judith Scott, was written by her twin sister, Joyce Wallace Scott, and was published in 2016.
Am Spiegelgrund was a children's clinic in Vienna during World War II, where 789 patients were murdered under child euthanasia in Nazi Germany. Between 1940 and 1945, the clinic operated as part of the psychiatric hospital Am Steinhof later known as the Otto Wagner Clinic within the Baumgartner Medical Center located in Penzing, the 14th district of Vienna.
Paul Gösch, also Goesch or Göschen, was a German artist, architect, lithographer, and designer of the early twentieth century; he was associated with the main elements of German Expressionism.
The Hartheim killing centre was a killing facility involved in the Nazi programme known as Aktion T4, in which German citizens deemed mentally or physically unfit were systematically murdered with poison gas. Often, these patients were transferred from other killing facilities such as the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna. This was initially a programme of "involuntary euthanasia" permitted under the law ostensibly to enable the lawful and painless killing of incurably ill patients; these murders continued even after the law was rescinded in 1942. Other victims included Jews, Communists and those considered undesirable by the state. Concentration camp inmates who were unfit for work, or otherwise deemed troublesome, were also executed here. The facility was housed in Hartheim Castle in the municipality of Alkoven, near Linz, Austria, which now is a memorial site and documentation centre.
Projekttheater Vorarlberg is a theatrical group in Austria, established in 1988 by Sieglinde Müller and Dietmar Nigsch. It puts on two productions a year and has performed all over the Austria, South Tyrol and Bavaria since 1995. The group is directed by Susanne Lietzow. In 2006 the group received the Nestroy Theatre Prize for their production of Hans Carl Artmann's How much, Schatzi?.
August Walla (1936–2001) was an Austrian outsider artist.
Anna Zemánková was a Czech painter. She was one of the world's most important artists of art brut. However, her high artistic culture, the diversity of her work, and her clear inner vision make her a departure from the original definition of art brut, and she figures in this category as a solitaire. Eighteen of Zemánková’s works were included in the seminal 2013 Venice Biennale. Her works were exhibited in New York, Paris, and on solo exhibitions in Lausanne and Prague. She is represented in the world's most important art brut collections and auctioned at Christie's.
Galerie St. Etienne is a New York art gallery specializing in Austrian and German Expressionism, established in Vienna in 1939 by Otto Kallir. In 1923, Kallir founded the Neue Galerie in Vienna. Forced to leave Austria after the 1938 Nazi invasion, Kallir established his gallery in Paris as the Galerie St. Etienne, named after the Neue Galerie's location near Vienna's Cathedral of St. Stephen. In 1939, Kallir and his family left France for the United States, moving the Galerie St. Etienne to New York City. The gallery still exists, run by Otto Kallir's granddaughter Jane at 24 West 57th Street.
Albert Reuss was an Austrian-born British painter and sculptor. He was born in Vienna and fled to Britain in 1938 following the Anschluss, Adolf Hitler’s annexation of Austria to the German Reich. In the process, Reuss lost many members of his family, and the reputation he had built up as an artist in Vienna. He continued to work as an exiled artist, but his style changed dramatically, reflecting the trauma he had suffered. Many public collections in Britain hold his work, most notably Newlyn Art Gallery in Cornwall, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere and the Albertina both in Vienna, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel.
Creative Growth Art Center is a nonprofit arts organization, based in Oakland, California, that provides studios, supplies, and gallery space to artists with developmental, mental, and physical disabilities. It is one of the oldest and largest art center for people with disabilities in the world. It is currently located at 355 24th Street in Oakland, California.
Philipp Weiss is an Austrian writer and playwright. In September 2018, he published his critically acclaimed debut novel, Am Weltenrand sitzen die Menschen und lachen.
Ein schöner Hase ist meistens der Einzellne is a 2013 play by Austrian playwright and writer Philipp Weiss. It is based on the true story of two schizophrenic patients of the Gugging mental institution which uses artistic therapy. The play premiered at Feldkirch's Alte Hallenbad Feldkirch on 13 December 2013 in a production by the Projekttheater Vorarlberg theatrical group.
Maria Gugging is a suburb of the town of Klosterneuburg in Austria.