- August Klotz
August Klotz (1864-?) was a German
schizophrenic outsider art ist and one of the "schizophrenic masters" profiled byHans Prinzhorn in his field-defining work "Artistry of the Mentally Ill ".He was the son of a prosperous
Swabia n merchant, and worked in his father's business as a wine and champagne salesman for many years. Besides a case ofgonorrhea , he was healthy until an attack ofinfluenza in 1903, at which point he fell into a deep depression, involvinghallucination s and evenself-mutilation .He was placed in an asylum where he began drawing right away. He rubbed figures into his wallpaper with fat and called them "Freemason signs." He may have also experienced an unusual form of
grapheme-color synaesthesia in which letters correspond to numbers, which when added up correspond to colors.Fact|date=February 2007 Klotz loved playing word games, and this same playfulness is also apparent in his drawings and watercolors.Unlike most outsider artists, Klotz displayed little consistency in his work. Prinzhorn saw him as a shining example of the creative impulse at its most basic. "He always allows himself to be driven by momentary impulses so that his pictures generally incorporate the unconscious components of pictorial creation in a rare state of purity... he composes completely passively, almost as a spectator, and afterward tries to interpret his configurations" (Prinzhorn 1972, p. 143).
Resources
* Prinzhorn, Hans. "Artistry of the mentally ill: a contribution to the psychology and psychopathology of configuration". Trans. Eric von Brockdorff. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag, 1972. ISBN 3-540-05508-8.
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