Künstler - - Stift Admont

Else Blankenhorn
*Karlsruhe 1873–1920, Konstanz-Reichenau Clinic
The upper-class young Else was the favourite of her possessive father and shaken
by his crises.
Else Blankenhorn resided in the private clinic Kreuzlinger Bellevue from 1899 to
1902, overlapping with her father at times.
As a result of sexual abuse, Blankenhorn suffered from a “hypochondriacal”
system of “shredded nerves”, causing her mind to separate itself from her body.
She returned to the clinic in 1906 after the death of her father, fearing that her
mother would be murdered, that people were trying to poison her, that she was
pregnant and that her brain was perforated.
In 1919, she was placed in the public clinic Konstanz-Reichenau, possibly for
financial reasons.
While Blankenhorn ceased her painting lessons at Bellevue quickly, she
continued to work alone energetically and autodidactically, displaying talent:
watercolours, intensely coloured oil painting and visionary studies between
Symbolism and early Modernism which shone like gold.
Else Blankenhorn also wrote and composed a great deal, but hid all of this from
the doctors.
In her “psychological reality”, she was the angelic “Else von Hohenzollern”, the
wife of the German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II.
According to the medical files, she painted a home for the married couples buried
in the churchyards, who were to be redeemed. She created great amounts of
paper money for the hungry dead whom she had to “exhume”, whose vast sums
seemed to anticipate the coming inflation...
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