Prinzhorn collection on show at Benaki Museum

President of the Republic Karolos Papoulias is to inaugurate an exhibition of the Prinzhorn collection called “Cause of Death: Euthanasia” on Thursday night, at the Benaki Museum on Pireos Street.

The collection belongs to the University of Heidelbert psychiatric clinic and has toured several European cities before coming to Athens for the first time through collaboration of the Greek Psychiatric Society, the Goethe Institute in Athens and the arts organisation “Aion”.

The exhibition features 96 works of art produced by 18 mental patients ultimately killed in the “euthanasia programme” of Nazi Germany in gas chambers, in the specially designed psychiatric wards of the 3rd Reich or through gradual starvation.

Their works were collected by the psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn, primarily on their artistic merits, after World War I.

The exhibition will run at the Benaki Museum until February 13, 2011.