Paul Goesch

Paul Goesch: The Cathedrals That Were Never Built

The drawings are small, made in watercolour and gouache, and they show doorways. Commemorative arches, architectural canopies, the facades of chapels — thresholds in saturated colour, ornamented past any possibility of construction, at scales that refuse to resolve. Are they the size of a shrine or a city? Paul Goesch produced hundreds of them, most from inside psychiatric institutions, over the two decades before the SS came for him. They are portals, and what lies on the other side is holiness, or enlightenment, or utopia. Not one of them was ever built.

A Berlin Childhood

Goesch was born on 30 August 1885 in Schwerin, the son of a lawyer and judge, and grew up in Berlin where his father taught at the university. He struggled academically and socially as a boy, and came to art, literature and architecture through private tutoring rather than school success.

The formative event of his adolescence was religious. Raised Lutheran, he converted to Catholicism as a teenager — overwhelmed, in his own account, by the stunning splendour of the church. It is worth registering what that means for an architect: his first serious aesthetic experience was of a building doing spiritual work on a person standing inside it. He spent the rest of his life drawing that experience.

An Architect's Training

In 1903 he matriculated at the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg to study architecture. He studied painting for six months in San Remo and travelled through Italy, France and Germany meeting other artists. As a student he is reported to have met both Sigmund Freud and Rudolf Steiner — two men who would shape, respectively, how he was treated and what he believed.

A conventional career followed, briefly. He took a post at Kulm, now Chełmno in Poland, in 1911, and served as its city architect from 1915 to 1917. He worked as a government building manager in Cologne and earned a Government Builder diploma. He worked for a time as a construction foreman. In 1914 he began making the fantasy architecture drawings, and after that the conventional career mattered less and less.

Dornach

In 1913 Goesch joined the Anthroposophical Society, and in 1914 he took part in constructing the first Goetheanum at Dornach in Switzerland — Rudolf Steiner's extraordinary double-domed temple, the landmark building of architectural Expressionism. Anthroposophy taught that the material and spiritual worlds were continuous, and that buildings could be shaped to express that continuity. Goesch's entire visual output is an anthroposophist's proposition rendered in watercolour.

The Glass Chain

Between 1919 and 1921 he was fully inside Berlin's avant-garde. He joined the November Group and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, both socialist artists' organisations of the revolutionary moment, and he became a member of the Glass Chain — Bruno Taut's secret correspondence circle, in which a handful of architects exchanged utopian letters and drawings under pseudonyms while Germany had no money to build anything at all. In 1920 he collaborated with Taut on a restoration project in Magdeburg.

The recognition was real, not marginal. In 1920 the Galerie Flechtheim in Düsseldorf showed his work alongside Kandinsky, Klee and Picasso.

The Diagnosis

Running underneath all of it was illness. Goesch was first hospitalised in 1909, at twenty-four, during psychoanalysis. A psychotic episode in 1917 put him in the provincial asylum at Schwetz in West Prussia until 1919. He was eventually diagnosed with dementia praecox — what would now be called paranoid schizophrenia. From 1921 his difficulties increased steadily, and he became a patient at a psychiatric institution in Göttingen where his own brother-in-law was the director.

He painted continuously through it. He specialised in watercolour, producing hundreds of images, many on mythological and religious subjects, returning again and again to the Virgin Mary. He wrote and illustrated fairy tales. He wrote poetry influenced by Stefan George and published it in the magazine *Charon*.

Rejected by Prinzhorn

In 1919 the psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn was gathering artwork by asylum patients across Germany, the collection that would become the founding document of outsider art. Goesch submitted twenty-nine drawings on paper and an extensive drawing book.

Prinzhorn left him out of the 1922 publication, *Artistry of the Mentally Ill*, for a precise reason: Goesch had received formal instruction in painting. He was too trained to be an outsider and too ill to be an insider. He fell into the gap and stayed there for forty years, surfacing in group exhibitions only after the Heidelberg collection was rediscovered in the 1960s.

Degenerate, Then Murdered

By the mid-1920s modernism had swung toward functionalism and the New Objectivity, and Expressionism was over. Goesch's moment passed while he was in hospital.

In 1934 he was transferred to the Brandenburg psychiatric hospital at Teupitz, where he was forbidden to paint and put to manual labour. In 1937 the Nazi touring exhibition of "degenerate art" condemned his work. In 1940 SS personnel removed him from the institution and murdered him under Aktion T4, the programme that killed psychiatric patients as "life unworthy of life." The most reliable evidence puts his death on 22 August 1940, probably at Brandenburg's old prison.

Why Paul Is Called a Genius

The claim here is specific and it is not about buildings, because he never built one. Goesch's achievement is a body of imagery in which architecture stops being shelter and becomes an instrument of transition — the arch, the canopy, the chapel front conceived purely as a threshold between one state of being and another. He arrived at this through a rare convergence: Beaux-Arts-adjacent technical training at Charlottenburg, Steiner's anthroposophy, Catholic conversion, and an illness that dissolved the ordinary constraints on what a wall might look like.

The result is work of genuine strangeness. It is stylistically varied and deliberately ambiguous in scale, which is why it unsettles: you cannot locate yourself in relation to it. That the Galerie Flechtheim hung him with Kandinsky, Klee and Picasso in 1920, that Taut admitted him to the Glass Chain, and that the Canadian Centre for Architecture now holds 234 of his drawings, are the outside verdicts.

The honest counter-case is substantial. Goesch built nothing and influenced no one directly; his ideas entered architecture, if at all, through Taut and the general Expressionist ferment rather than under his own name. His work was excluded from the Prinzhorn canon and forgotten for decades, and its recent revival — a monograph, an exhibition at the Clark Art Institute — arrives freighted with the moral weight of how he died, which is not the same as artistic quality. It is also fair to ask how much of the strangeness is authorship and how much is illness, a question no one can answer.

What survives that scrutiny is the drawings themselves, which are not the productions of a sick man that happen to be interesting. They are careful, learned, formally controlled works by a trained architect who spent thirty years thinking about one problem: what a door to the transcendent would look like.

Legacy

Goesch has had three afterlives — as a footnote in the Glass Chain story, as a case in the history of art brut, and most recently as an Expressionist visionary in his own right, reappraised in a new book and a North American exhibition. The Canadian Centre for Architecture's holding of 234 drawings makes him, improbably, one of the better-preserved paper architects of the twentieth century. The Nazis murdered him for being mentally ill and condemned his work for being modern. The portals outlasted both verdicts.

Achievements

• Movement: Expressionism