From Marginalia to the Museum: The Transfiguration of the Doodle by Gottfried Keller, Hans Prinzhorn, and Jean Dubuffet

In 1922 German art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn published his groundbreaking monograph Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, which psychologically and aesthetically analyzed the art of the mentally ill. Tucked away in a footnote is reference to an episode in Gottfried Keller’s novel Der grüne Heinrich (1855, 1879/80) when the title artist creates a monstrous web of doodles. This essay explores the implications of Keller’s doodle for Prinzhorn’s thesis along with the re-evaluation of doodling as a legitimate creative gesture. It concludes by following the doodle into the museum through the artworks of Jean Dubuffet, a pioneering force behind outsider art who was influenced by Prinzhorn’s Bildnerei and wielded the doodle as critique against traditional notions of art. Doodles’ journey from marginalia to museum-worthy artworks reveals their subversive power to give voice to those marginalized by society, while also exposing the weaknesses and paradoxes of an outsider art for effecting true institutional reform.