The Brooklyn Rail

Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut finds itself a long way from home. After showing at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), and Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, it has landed at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, thanks to co-curators Valérie Rousseau, Joana Masó, Carles Guerra, and Edward Dioguardi.

The exhibition is international and itinerant—precisely the state of its subject, the radical Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles (b. 1912, Reus, Spain–d. 1994, Granges-sur-Lot, France), before he began working at the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, Lozère in 1940. Tosquelles, a Marxist Republican exiled during the Spanish Civil War, was interned at the Septfonds concentration camp in Southern France where he offered psychiatric help to fellow prisoners and traumatized frontline soldiers. At the hospital, Tosquelles developed and put into practice “institutional psychotherapy,” which aimed at de-hierarchizing power structures and doctor-patient relationships, as well as promoting the idea of an “asylum-village,” where individuals were encouraged to work, integrate with surrounding rural communities, and create (as a form of occupational therapy avant la lettre) art, theater, and cinema. All this at a time when the world itself had gone mad: the pathologies of European Fascism ran rampant, and those declared mentally ill risked actual euthanization, or “soft-euthanization,” the gradual termination of funds for psychiatric hospitals.

The show traverses disciplinary boundaries and biases—what Aby Warburg called the grenzpolizeiliche Befangenheit (“border guard bias”) of art history; it is equal parts the history of psychiatry (and anti-psychiatry), a meditation on the relationship between creativity and madness, and a chronology of artist-writer Jean Dubuffet’s still problematic “discovery,” collection, and promotion of art brut, i.e., “works produced by persons unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part (contrary to the activities of intellectuals).”¹

Tosquelles’s asylum provided shelter and refuge for those suffering from mental illness, as well as for persecuted Jews, political dissidents, members of the Résistance, and intellectuals associated with the literary and artistic avant-garde, including poet Paul Eluard and Tristan Tzara. Tosquelles’s Saint-Albans turned into a breeding ground for new ideas about psychology and what would become anti-psychiatry. He published and distributed handbound copies of Jacques Lacan’s 1932 thesis On Paranoiac psychosis as it relates to the Personality. Tosquelles welcomed an array of intellectuals including Frantz Fanon (from 1952–53), who had just published Black Skin, White Masks,, and was working on his study of colonial psychopathology. George Ganguilhem, author of The Normal and the Pathological (1943) also spent time there.

Enter Dubuffet, a man of many contradictions. He distrusted doctors and psychiatric institutions and maintained paradoxically that the art of the insane did not exist: “there is no more an art of the insane than there is an art of dyspeptics or those with knee problems.”² Yet, starting in the summer of 1945, first in Switzerland then in France, he visited hospitals in hopes of acquiring works created by patient-artists. Tosquelles did not meet with Dubuffet at first, he thought of him as an “aesthete” and was skeptical of his attempts to potentially commodify art originally produced for therapeutic purposes. Dubuffet did, however, forge relationships with other doctors affiliated with the hospital, including Lucien Bonnafé, Jean Oury, and Roger Gentis. Lucienne Peiry’s newly published compendium of Dubuffet’s writings on Art Brut and his correspondence with doctors helps us understand this history.³

Dubuffet also visited Dr. Gaston Ferdière, whose patient, writer-thespian-artist Antonin Artaud was being treated in a nearby hospital in Rodez. A drawing by Artaud of Dubuffet’s wife Lili is included in the show, and reciprocally, Dubuffet’s 1947 portrait of Antonin Artaud with Tufts. Dubuffet was territorial from the get-go—was this art to remain in the jurisdiction of medicine and psychiatry, or did it belong in his newly invented sub-genre of counter-cultural art, Art Brut?⁴ He did not want his new collection to be either a simple resuscitation of the Surrealist’s cult of l’art des fous or part of the vogue for “psychopathological art” collected and displayed at Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris. In a letter to friend and La Nouvelle Revue Française editor Jean Paulhan, dated November 15, 1945, Dubuffet wrote: “For art brut too I have problems. I’ve come to realize that I have a group of enemies forming against me, Dr. Ferdière, and his friend Bonnafé (from Saint-Alban, a friend of Eluard, Tzara, etc.), and it is expanding. And what is it that pits them against me…? I don't know why. All of this is surrealist obedience. A bunch of cads.”⁵

In the spring of 1944, at Eluard’s residence in Paris, Dubuffet first encountered the work of Auguste Forestier, prominent in the current exhibition, who made wood, leather and nail sculptures of boats and beasts (integrating, in one example, found cows’ teeth from the region). Forestier took up jobs at the asylum before he started to create art. He even tried to sell his works. Dubuffet sent him money for supplies. Other artist-patients at Saint-Albans included in the show, and who eventually made it into Dubuffet’s Collection de L’art Brut, now in Lausanne, Switzerland are Aimable Jayet, a butcher turned artist whose work combines purple-ink writings and human figures, Marguerite Sirvins, who created a wedding dress made entirely from bits of string stripped from her bed sheets, and a cell door carved by Clément Fraisse, a former shepherd, who once tried to set his parents’ farm on fire using banknotes. Another artist included in the exhibition, who was never a patient at Saint-Albans, is Joaquim Vicens Girornella, who made sculptural reliefs out of cork. His biography in some ways mirrors Tosquelles’ own. Forced to leave Spain in 1939, he was then imprisoned at the internment camp in Bram, France. As the wall label rightly points out, in 1948 Josep Solanes, a psychiatrist and comrade of Tosquelles, wondered if syndromes resulting from exile and dispossession required their own specific psychiatric treatments.

To their credit, the American Folk Art Museum’s iteration of this show gives thorough consideration of Tosquelles’s legacy in America, mentioning the critical work of Erving Goffman’s Asylums and Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness, published in English the same year as French philosopher Michel Foucault’s, Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (1961). And, it includes works of American artists in the AFAM’s permanent collection—among them Martín Ramírez, Judith Scott, Masaaki Iswasmoto, Melvin Way, and Gabriel Mitchell. The very end of the show examines mental health history in the United States.

Mitchell’s touching short film, Crazy Talk: What is Mental Illness? (2010), as described by his sister, Carmen Elena Mitchell, is “a pilot for a nine-hour cinematic ‘history of madness,’ modeled on Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). His idea was to transform madness from its traditional role as a deviation from ‘normal’ human behavior into a framework for understanding human normality as such.” Mitchell’s decision to include a clip from Miloš Forman’s film, One Flew Over the Cuckkoo’s Nest (1975) (based on Ken Kesey’s novel) hits home with American audiences. Protagonist R.P. McMurphy, who is not insane, is ultimately “cured’ via a full-frontal lobotomization by insane doctors. Thanks in part to Tosquelles’s legacy, things are better than they were then. But much work, and much healing, too, remains to be done. The exhibition raises timely questions about the current and ongoing post-COVID mental health crisis in America and elsewhere, and it resonates loudly with other major art exhibitions dealing with the same issues, such as the Palais de Tokyo’s recent Approaching Unreason.

1. Jean Dubuffet, “Art Brut in Preference to The Cultural Arts,” (1949), translated by Paul Foss and Allen S. Weiss in Art & Text 27 (December–February 1988): 33.
2. Ibid., p. 33.
3. Jean Dubuffet, Art Brut et créateurs d’Art Brut: Textes et lettres, 1945–1985, ed. Lucienne Peiry (Paris: L’Atelier Contemporain, 2023).
4. Denis Hollier, “The Artaud Case. Part II: The Case History,” in Kaira Cabañas, Specters of Artaud: Language and the Arts in the 1950s (231–238).
5. Jean Dubuffet, in Jean Dubuffet – Jean Paulhan: Correspondance 1944–1968 (Paris: Gallimard, 2003): 256–257.