Marian Henel—Tapestries and Madness

Henel’s works show various themes, but none of them are classic. Instead, they present rape, violence, nude women, ejaculation, menstruation, urination, and defecation. They are also filled with Bosch-like creatures, witches, frogs, insects, and cats; faces with grimaces; fantastic landscapes; and everything we expect from a top-notch nightmare.

They are done with amazing quality and a stunning sense of composition and color. And they were created in a mental hospital.

Henel’s life

Marian Henel (1926–1993) was a highly controversial figure. Not much is known about his life before he ended up in a mental hospital in Branice, Poland. Described by the press as a “devilish spawn” or “lecher from Branice,” he is a character marked by sexual disorders and ambiguity. In 1960 (when he was 34 years old), he was convicted of arson and became a resident of Branice, where he stayed until his death in 1993.

Henel was born in 1926 and was raised in a rural environment before and during the Second World War in Poland. His father was unknown; his mother claimed that she became pregnant after being raped. She drew her livelihood from alms received from people in nearby villages. She died when Henel was six. The commune took care of the child, entrusting it to the family who maltreated him.

For this reason, Henel ran away from his guardians at 13 and found employment with several farmers. He completed six grades of primary school. His appearance—short height, about 150 cm (4 ft. 11 in.), disproportionate build, obesity, and specific facial expression—made him the object of mockery and jokes. For this reason, he spent most of his free time alone, most willingly spying on women bathing.

Later, he was an agricultural worker at a state-owned farm. Due to the barn burning, he ended up in prison, from which he was transferred, after about a year, to the Hospital for the Nervous and Mentally Ill in Branice. That place helped him find his enormous artistic talent.

Art Therapy

In 1968, Marian Henel joined the Studio of Psychopathological Art Expression, founded in Branice by occupational therapy instructor Stanisław Wodyński. This studio offered workshops in painting, drawing, graphic arts, sculpture, and weaving, where patients engaged in creative self-expression as part of their treatment. At first, he started to draw on sheets of paper torn from squared notebooks, made using a two-color, red and blue pencil. The drawings depicted erotic, copulatory, and defecation scenes. These notes, like secret messages, circulated around the hospital rooms.

But Henel was much more drawn to the weaving workshop by the opportunity to work in a separate room with a large vertical loom, 3 m (9 ft. 10 in.) wide.

Now, these tapestries, which are a testament to the illness rooted in an uncontrollable sexual drive and created during art therapy, are considered among the world’s most remarkable examples of “art brut”—the art of marginalized and excluded people.

Techniques and Themes

Henel’s tapestries were designed on graph paper, where each square corresponded to one knot in the fabric. Then he worked on a frame with stretched warp, tying knots from wool yarn by hand. The material for weaving the carpets came from waste at a carpet factory in Kietrz. In wool bales weighing over 100 kg, he sought the longest possible pieces, formed them into balls, sorted them by color, and laboriously gathered his material supplies.

Initially, he crafted carpets on commission, following supplied designs and instructions. But Marian Henel was also designing his own compositions. He depicted nude overweight women, occasionally men, nurses in white coats and caps, buttocks turned toward the viewer, and erotic scenes. Among Henel’s designed and executed images are portrayals of ejaculation, menstruation, urination, and defecation. There are also depictions of hangmen, witches, ghosts, and human-animal hybrids. When looking at Henel’s tapestries, “one must keep in mind that in mental illness, the perception of the world is altered by psychotic experiences, delusions, and hallucinations,” writes Dr. Anna Steliga in an essay accompanying the exhibition.

Grotesque fairy-tale animals—frogs or toads, snakes, flies, scorpions, cats, and various insects—are also depicted. Steliga highlights the magical aspect of these figures and their complex symbolism across cultures and religions. The toad symbolizes lust and pride but also an overweight woman. The worm symbolizes sin. The beetle reflects darkness and androgyny. The owl is a symbol of wisdom and solitude. Bats are creations of evil spirits or the specters of the dead. The butterfly is associated with lustfulness and a carefree spirit.

During more than twenty years of therapy, Henel pursued his other passion—photography. Henel took hundreds of photos, repeatedly adjusting angles and compositions to achieve the desired effect. He developed the photos himself, also when he posed erotically. He progressively modified his image towards a male-female chimera. He ate more to give his body curves, made his own padded bras and stockings, shaved his body, and dressed in nursing uniforms and wigs for the photos. He also became interested in animation, using dolls dressed to resemble him to depict successive stages of sexual intercourse.

Eleven extraordinary carpets (out of 13 probably preserved) and dozens of Henel’s self-portraits and staged photographs can be viewed at the Ethnographic Museum in Wrocław, Poland. The exhibition was prepared in collaboration with the National Museum in Wrocław, a team of doctors from the Bishop Józef Nathan Specialist Hospital in Branice, and Dr. Bogusław Habrat, a medical researcher specializing in addiction prevention and treatment at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology in Warsaw.

Dr. Piotr Oszczanowski, Director of the National Museum in Wrocław, asks, on the occasion of the exhibition: Did Henel find solace in his works, allowing him to forget who he was and what he felt daily? Were they his refuge, or quite the opposite—a further provocation tool?

We will never find the answers to these questions, so we can only gaze for hours at his tapestries.

Madness. The Case of Marian Henel—the Lecher from Branice.

Through February 16th, 2025, the Ethnographic Museum, Wroclaw, ul. R. Traugutta 111-113.