Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art 9780226556314

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LEARNING FROM MADNESS

LEARNING FROM MADNESS Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art

Kaira M. Cabañas The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­55628-­4 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­55631-­4 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226556314.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press extends its appreciation for the support of the University of Florida College of the Arts and School of Art + Art History. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cabañas, Kaira Marie, 1974– author. Title: Learning from madness : Brazilian modernism and global contemporary art / Kaira M. Cabañas. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | ­Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018006266 | ISBN 9780226556284 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226556314 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Art and mental illness—Brazil. | Outsider art—Brazil. | Art—Brazil. Classification: LCC N71.5.C33 2018 | DDC 709.81—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006266 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Jesús

CONTENTS Introduction: Toward Discomfort  1 1 Clinical-­Artistic Tableaux  19 2 Common Creativities  47 3 Physiognomic Gestalt  83 4 Bispo’s Contemporaneity  111 5 Monolingualism of the Global  143 Coda  169 Acknowledgments  171 Notes on the Text  175 Illustration Credits  177 Notes  179 Index  225

INTRODUCTION: TOWARD DISCOMFORT When first approaching the relation between art and madness, I turned, perhaps inevitably, to the writings of Michel Foucault. But visual art makes few appearances in the course of his History of Madness. When it does appear, it serves as a privileged witness, showing how madness as the subject of painting coincides with specific worldviews. According to Foucault, images such as Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools (c. 1490–­1500) and Pieter Brueghel’s Mad Meg (1562) express how, during the Renaissance, the “fantasies born of madness held a power of attraction.”1 In contrast, in the classical age such creative expressions of madness in representation disappeared, to be replaced by “asylums, houses of confinement, gaols and prisons.”2 Foucault thus illustrates through painterly representations the difference between a time when madness was contiguous with life and the subsequent confinement of madness to the realm of unreason. In the concluding pages of his volume, Foucault invokes painters on the other side of the great confinement; namely, painters of the modern age. Here he no longer deals primarily with madness as painting’s theme but engages the status of the subject who paints. Foucault observes that the number of artists who “have ‘lapsed’ into madness has multiplied.”3 But he ultimately holds at bay an artist’s madness to instead speak to a historical ­reversal inaugurated by the work of modern artists such as Vincent van Gogh and ­Antonin Artaud. Foucault writes, “Hence-­forth and through the mediation of madness, it is the world that becomes guilty . . . in relation to the oeuvre: it is now arraigned by the oeuvre, constrained to speak its ­language, and obliged to take part in a process of recognition and reparation, to find an explanation for this unreason, and explain itself before it.”4 Here painting reveals neither the truth of madness nor the truth of reason but serves as a medium through which to challenge reason’s silencing of madness. Con­ sequently, such paintings put us on trial. These modern artists, each of whom literally went mad, embody the return of madness by making visible its exclusion through their painting and drawing. Foucault, however, does not dwell on how this making visible is formally achieved in their work.5 What is more, in the context of Foucault’s

Introduction

discussion, modern art such as that produced by Van Gogh and Artaud remains on this side of reason by the very fact that the works constitute an oeuvre, a body of work, and respond to what Foucault elsewhere describes as the “author-­function”—­the various social and institutional arrangements that give life to an author’s work.6 Foucault insists, “Where there is an oeuvre, there is no madness.”7 And in reference to Van Gogh: “[He] knew very well that his oeuvre and his madness were incompatible.”8 By attempting to trace how madness was silenced, Foucault’s archaeology poses the problem of how to find a language other than that of reason, a language that might allow madness to speak. Foucault would insist on writing “a history not of psychiatry, but of madness itself, in its most vibrant state, before being captured by knowledge.”9 Much ink has been spilled in the ­ensuing debate between Foucault and Jacques Derrida as to the possibility of even writing such a history. In this context, I do not intend to take a side in the debate or rehearse its primary terms, which includes Derrida’s engagement with the conditions of possibility for philosophical thought, given the extensive commentary in the critical literature.10 Derrida identifies those moments in which Foucault inscribed a difficulty or impossibility within the very language he used to write his history. Ultimately what I would like to isolate is Derrida’s observation that “by the simple fact of their articulation the proceedings and the verdict unceasingly reiterate the crime.”11 That is, Foucault repeats the initial act of separation his book aims to trace. He ­silences the silences he hopes to reveal. Foucault unwittingly isolates madness, makes a claim for it to speak for itself, without accounting for how he speaks from this side of reason.

· · · Beyond the scope of Foucault’s study (as well as the terms of the Foucault-­ Derrida debate) and crucial to the history of modern art is the creative expression of psychiatric patients, subjects diagnosed with a mental illness (most commonly, schizophrenia) and whose work, produced within the walls of psychiatric hospitals and asylums (and at times as part of occu­ pational or art therapy workshops) became the object of scientific and ­aesthetic scrutiny in the course of the twentieth century, including in the pages of Hans Prinzhorn’s Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill, 1922). Given the more familiar history of psychiatric patients’ work in Western Europe and its reception by the dadaists and surrealists as well as postwar French artists like Jean Dubuffet, one could suggest, albeit as a kind of shorthand, that with this study I track a similar history in the Brazilian context. This is in part true. But the book’s larger stake is to make a case for the singularity of Brazilian modernism in its approach to the so-­called art of the insane, as well as to track the afterlife of this reception for contemporary art in a global context. 2

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Furthermore, with Derrida’s critique present, I confess that when describing psychiatric patients’ works, I do so from this side of reason. What I offer is an account, which at times might be more appropriately singled out as a projection. Therefore, in what follows I do not speak about madness, nor do I explain what madness, or its subsequent delimitation as mental illness, is. I do, however, describe how art professionals and psychiatrists, and their respective discourses and institutions (the art museum and the asylum), often spoke for madness and how their statements reveal discursive differences and overlaps in orientation and approaches to madness and, more specifically, patients’ creative expression. Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art proposes a historical and theoretical account of how modern and contemporary art developed in dialogue with the creative work of psychiatric patients. Through a series of case studies in part 1, the book aims to discover the highly mediated and largely unexplored ways that the exhibition of patients’ work converged with modernist understandings of artistic creativity, consequently inflecting the teaching and practice of art and art criticism from the 1920s through to the 1960s. At the center of this interdisciplinary account stand two prominent psychiatrists: Osório César and Nise da Silveira. Both advocated nonaggressive psychiatric treatment, principally through the creation of painting studios for their patients. In the 1920s and 1930s in São Paulo, César’s publications and collaborations with avant-­ garde artists such as Flávio de Carvalho had profound effects on discussions of modern art and creativity, and his patients’ work was summoned as an example of how to move beyond academic conventions in art (chapter 1). In the 1940s in Rio de Janeiro, the leading art critic Mário Pedrosa’s reception of the work of Silveira’s patients deeply informed his theorization of Gestalt and modern aesthetic response. I argue that his ideas contributed to an understanding of geometric abstraction as expressive, thereby challenging the alignment of abstract geometry with rationality in the dominant art historiography and reception of concrete art (chapter 3). Consequently, this chapter also demonstrates how patients’ work is not uniformly aligned with a surrealist or art informel aesthetic, as continued to be the case in Western Europe. Accordingly, Learning from Madness offers a crucial transnational and global perspective, placing these moments in Brazilian art history in direct relation to European developments and, more specifically, in relation to France and Germany. The work of Silveira’s patients was exhibited in a groundbreaking exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 1949, while in the postwar years in Europe psychiatric collections such as the notable Prinzhorn Collection and Dubuffet’s collection of art brut, were not featured in art museums until the 1960s.12 Hence another aim of Learning from Madness is to track how Brazilian patients’ art was put to work by artists, critics, and institutions in ways that avow the continuities 3

Introduction

and ­discontinuities between Brazil and Western Europe. In so doing, I also engage the different receptions of patients’ work within Brazil, as evinced in the competing responses from avant-­garde artists based in São Paulo and those in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1940s and early 1950s. From the perspective of psychiatry and the emergence of patients’ work as an object of scientific study, the principal European and Brazilian psychiatrists of the 1920s engaged in this study (Prinzhorn and César) do share a general turn away from an exclusively diagnostic approach to this art in order to focus on the work’s intrinsic qualities (through psychological and aesthetic approaches attuned to the question of creativity), but they differ in their reception and application of Freudian psychoanalysis. Both contexts also demonstrate a turn away from the discourse of degeneration, which in psychiatry has its origin in the work of Cesare Lombroso,13 and toward an understanding of what I call “common creativities” shared by the sane and insane. Such an understanding of a shared source of creativity came to the fore with the exhibition of patients’ work in both France and Brazil in the 1940s (chapter 2). To be sure, the visual evidence of a common creativity was often underwritten by discussions of artistic quality and how the patients’ work looked “futurist” or “surrealist.” But such presumed formal similarities also became the target of conservative art criticism. In the Brazilian context, one might recall Monteiro Lobato’s inaugural and infamous polemic against Anita Malfatti’s painting in 1917, on the occasion of her second solo exhibition. Writing for the O Estado de São Paulo, the critic compares modern art to “abnormal” art, and in his article, also known under the title “Paranóia ou mistificação?” (Paranoia or mystification), the author displays knowledge of the work produced by patients as well as its link to psychiatric studies: “Psychiatrists study their patients, documenting the numerous drawings that adorn the inner walls of asylums. The only difference is that in the asylums this art is sincere, the logical product of a brain disturbed by the strangest psychosis; and outside of them, in public exhibitions ballyhooed by the press and absorbed by crazy Americans, there is no sincerity, no logic, being pure mystification.”14 The support of artists “who see normally” and make a “pure art” also reverberated in the European context, where such concepts had repeatedly informed the rejection of modern art since its inception. From impressionism to expressionism, modernism in its many manifestations was met with antagonism and incomprehension.15 Often subtending this response was a negative view of both the art of ­psychiatric patients and modern art, views frequently tied to cultural notions of degeneracy, perhaps nowhere more so than in the notorious Nazi-­mounted ­exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art), which opened in Munich in 1937. In Brazil, a few key studies have been published that address the emergence of art therapy studios and the historical crossovers with the visual arts. To this end, this study has benefited from the dedicated research of several 4

T o w a r d Di s c o m f o r t

individuals whose books provide an invaluable entrée into this history. On César, Heloisa Ferraz’s book Arte e loucura: Limites do imprevisível (Art and madness: Limits of the unpredictable, 1998) is an important resource, especially in the wake of the fire that destroyed César’s library and archive in 2005. On Silveira, Luiz Carlos Mello’s various publications, especially his recent Nise da Silveira: Caminhos de uma psiquiatra rebelde (Nise da Silveira: Paths of a rebel psychiatrist, 2014), provide a wealth of insight and information.16 Given the difficulty, at times, of accessing archival evidence as well as the threats to continued conservation of already archived materials, the archival digitization that accompanies Marcas e memórias: Almir Mavignier e o ateliê de pintura de Engenho de Dentro (Marks and memories: Almir Mavignier and the painting studio at Engenho de Dentro, 2012), edited by Lucia Riley and José Otávio Pompeu e Silva, is a significant contribution.17 Additional histories, largely written from the perspective of psychology and occupational therapy, also have provided useful background, describing how “art” emerges in the realm of psychiatry. These studies, however, do not necessarily engage how asylum art might be seen to impinge on understandings of modern art and its institutionalization from the perspective of art history.18 Rather than remain other to the institutions of modern art, and therefore in contrast also to other Latin American countries, in Brazil the creative work of psychiatric patients was claimed as art and exhibited in modern art venues as early as 1933, such that the history of the patients’ work is the constitutive inside of aesthetic modernism, rather than its outside. This has, now and again, also been the case with the work of children as well as naïf painters (e.g., Elisa Martins da Silveira) and self-­taught artists (e.g., Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, José Pancetti, José Antonio da Silva, Alfredo Volpi). The persistence of the latter group’s production within the canon of Brazilian modernism is an important chapter of this history. But for purposes of this study, I have chosen to focus on patient-­artists, who may be self-­taught or work in a naïf style. Accordingly, I focus on the crossovers between two modern institutions and their discourses: the psychiatric hospital and the modern art museum and the tensions that ensue between the clinical and critical discourse concerning how patients’ work was and is understood.19 The discursive framing of psychiatric patients’ work as art is a key to understanding genealogies of contemporary art in Brazil as well as contemporary art exhibitions. When viewed from the perspective of institutional exhibition practices, there is technically no art brut, or “outsider” art, in Brazil, at least in the specific way that this category was defined and redefined by Dubuffet and relies on the psychiatric patient’s work as an absolute alterity to the spaces of official artistic culture (see chapter 2). As a result, the institutional definition of modern art to which European and American modernisms have largely laid claim is put under pressure when one approaches the subject of what constitutes outsider art in Brazil. Psychiatric patients’ 5

Introduction

work, rather than exclusively remain within the purview of the country’s folk, naïf, or hospital museums, survives in the collections and exhibition programming of the principal institutions of modern and contemporary art, including the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-­USP), the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-­RJ), the Bienal de São Paulo, and, more recently, the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR).20 Each is addressed in these pages. These collections and institutional histories are being revisited today: for example, during the writing of this book, MASP exhibited for the first time 102 works by psychiatric patients from Juquery hospital outside São Paulo, works that César had collected in the 1930s and 1940s and then donated to the museum in 1974. In this way, the reception of psychiatric patients’ work is as vital to modern art institutional practices as Oswald de ­Andrade’s “Manifesto antropófago” (Cannibalist manifesto, 1928) is for aesthetic modernism, whereby he critically played on modernist primitivism by calling for the cannibalization of European influences. What is more, psychiatric art in Brazilian museums and Andrade’s manifesto each have afterlives in present artistic and cultural practices. While the history of psychiatric patients’ art forms part of important collections in both the art and psychiatric contexts, the theme of madness also has a presence in Brazilian literature, perhaps most prominently in Machado de Assis’s satiric novella O alienista (The Psychiatrist, 1881–­1882), although the subject appears to have been more personal for Lima Barreto, whose own internment was the subject of his autobiographical Diário do hospício (Journal of an asylum, 1919–­1920) and the unfinished novel O c­ emitério dos vivos (Cemetery of the living). Beyond the visual and literary arts, patients’ creativity has a high degree of visibility in the country’s popular culture. Silveira’s history is almost mythic, the subject of theatrical plays and most recently a film: Nise: O coração da loucura (Nise: The heart of madness) was released in April 2016. Directed by Roberto Berliner, the film stars Glória Pires as Silveira. (One might think of Pires as akin to French actress Juliette Binoche in the realm of art film, but the Brazilian also enjoys pop celebrity status thanks to her work in television dramas, or telenovelas). Arthur Bispo do Rosário (commonly known as “Bispo”), perhaps Brazil’s most famous patient-­artist, was also the subject of another film, O senhor do labirinto (The lord of the labyrinth), which was released in late 2014. Beyond these Hollywood-­inspired renditions, the figure of the eccentric or mentally unstable individual who produces art is also common in the popular telenovelas, including the character Tonho da Lua in Mulheres de areia (Women of sand, 1993), which also stars Pires playing identical twins, and Domingos Salvador in Império (2014–­2015). While I do not engage such representations in this book, they nevertheless point to the visibility of the subject as well as its currency in the popular imagination.

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· · · Art historian Rosalind Krauss’s account of the importance of the Prinzhorn Collection for the Euro-­American (i.e., US) context helps to further distill how the reception of psychiatric patients’ work came to signify differently in theory and in practice for modern art in Brazil. During an interview, Krauss remarked: Dubuffet’s interest in the Prinzhorn material arose from his conception of it as a corpus of radically anti-­Duchampian possibilities. Fascinated, like so many other Frenchmen, by the parable of Robinson Crusoe, that tale of the shipwrecked sailor washed ashore with a few remnants of his culture, [Hubert] Damisch examines today’s artistic production and asks: “If all else were washed away, would any of us, pressed against the very most extremes of necessity, expend any precious ounce of our remaining energy in the pursuit of art? That is to say, this parable sets up a model that is totally foreign to the promiscuity of the current institutional definition of art: this is art because it is in a gallery, because it is in a place that shows art; this is art because I, the artist, say so. To the contrary,” Damisch goes on, “as for the art of the insane, these works were driven by necessity. There was no audience. There was no public, no museum, no exhibition—­only an urgent drive to draw, to paint. What interested Dubuffet, was just this little guy in his tiny room obsessively scribbling or whittling and driven by necessity. And that’s what is interesting because Dubuffet too was obsessional, driven, or wanted to be. He constructed his own necessity. He tried to discover a form of art that would be necessary once again. That’s why the word art preoccupied him so.” Thus the significance of Dubuffet’s connection to psychotic art comes from its contrasting energy within a situation where art has no reason for being, since it is made out of compulsion. The idea that it is simply there because of some kind of an institutional definition would be wrong. It is there because the person who is making it, cannot not make it.21

In the passage-­within-­the-­passage by Damisch, he reiterates many of Du­ buffet’s projections of what it meant to produce work in an asylum: no audience, no public, no museum, no exhibition. In short, no intention on the part of the interned subject to make art with a capital A. Yet such a projection of isolation radically divorces this production from the history of psychiatric treatments and the active collection and exhibition of such works. As John MacGregor’s comprehensive volume The Discovery of the Art of the Insane illustrates, the histories of psychiatric institutions and asylum art reveal not only the presence of an audience (the psychiatrist) but also at times that of a public (often other patients, occasional visitors, or even the voices that many schizophrenics hear), a hospital museum collection with samples of asylum art, as well as exhibitions.22 One might recall 7

Introduction

1. Jazz band, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery, São Paulo, c. 1930–­1940. Núcleo de Acervo, Memória e Cultura, Museu Osório César, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery.

here, for example, the evidence that shows how Dr. Auguste Marie “encouraged his patients to collect objects from the grounds of the asylum and to arrange them for exhibition” in his Musée de la folie at the Villejuif Asylum outside Paris (one of the earliest assembled collections of such work). Thus, for Allison Morehead, the patients engaged not only in the construction but also in the actual curating of their work.23 Moreover, patients’ art often emerged in clinical contexts in which occupational therapy workshops—­ from shoemaking to sewing—­already thrived; Juquery hospital even had a jazz band (fig. 1). While these practices inside the asylum do not present a perfect homology to the spaces and practices of the art world outside it, they nevertheless show that collections and workshops on the inside of the asylum often served as effective disciplinary techniques in the service of a patients’ treatment. In short, such art was not exclusively the outcome of (ahistoricized) necessity alone. Krauss’s comments, which develop those of Damisch, are also telling in that she ultimately positions “necessity” against the legacy of the “institutional definition” of art. For Krauss, the fact that she understands the Prinzhorn material as driven by necessity (whether real or imagined) is what makes it relevant, and she explains how it offers “protection from the seductions of Duchamp’s institutional model.” The latter had led to a historical situation in which almost anything could be called art under the banner of “installation.”24 (Her arguments against “post-­medium” installation in favor of “reinventing the medium” may be familiar to some readers.25) What is curious is how the Prinzhorn material, insofar as it evinces an internal, psy8

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chological necessity, appears as a guise for supporting necessity in art’s production. To be sure, modernist accounts in the West (whether of Clement Greenberg or Michael Fried) once offered such models of necessity through attention to artistic conventions and medium specificity. For Krauss, Dubuffet saw psychotic art as breaking the rationale in which anything could be declared art and saw in this art a way to break “through the smugness of the institutional definition.”26 For the Brazilian artists and critics addressed in this study, the institutional definition of art was never quite so smug. In his lecture “Arte, necessidade vital” (Art, vital necessity, 1947), which was delivered in the context of an exhibition of Silveira’s psychiatric patients’ work, the modernist art critic Mário Pedrosa affirmed that all works, whether produced by children or patients, possess the same nature as works by great artists, “conforming to an identical psychological process of creative elaboration.”27 Such vitality common to all provides a point of departure for thinking of the afterlife of a different type of necessity, one not so closely hewed to medium specificity and one that remained at the core of Pedrosa’s aesthetic thinking as well as his professional activities. Thirty years after the lecture’s delivery, upon his return from exile in 1977, Pedrosa turned his attention to politics. But when it came to art, he dedicated himself to the creative work of psychiatric patients. In 1979 he organized an exhibition of the work of Fernando Diniz at the Galeria Sérgio Milliet. The following year, he organized an exhibition of works by Raphael Domingues that was presented at MAM-­RJ.28 What I hope becomes clear in the course of this study is how, in contrast to the particular absence of psychiatric patients’ art from the spaces of Western European and North American modern art museums in the postwar years (at least until the mid-­1960s), in the case of modernism in Brazil such patients’ art was internal and structural to the self-­fashioning of aesthetic modernism in the writing of leading art critics such as Pedrosa, Sérgio Milliet, Theon Spanudis, as well as for modern art’s institutionalization. Just as MASP revisited its collection history to bring to light an overlooked donation, it is also worth mentioning how Pedrosa imagined the role of the modern art museum in ways that cast in relief the unique characteristics of Brazilian art history and respond to the precariousness of the country’s material conditions. In the wake of the fire in 1978 that nearly destroyed all of MAM-­RJ’s collection, Pedrosa suggested that the museum be reorganized through his proposal for a Museu das Origens. In addition to calling for state funding, his new concept for MAM-­RJ included five museums: Museu do Índio, Museu de Arte Virgem (do Inconsciente), Museu de Arte Moderna, Museu do Negro, Museu de Artes Populares (Museum of the Indian, Museum of Virgin Art [of the Unconscious], Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Black People, and Museum of Folk Art). At the time, only the first three existed. As to why he advocated for such an association of museums, Pedrosa emphasized how all modern art was inspired by “povos 9

Introduction

periféricos” (peripheral peoples), and thus why not have MAM present that which “we have in abundance alongside a collection of contemporary Brazilian and Latin American art.”29 Here we face a museum conception that regards these other arts as constitutive of (rather than other to) modern art and in which Pedrosa returns to the origins of his aesthetic thinking, affirming the affect underpinning nonrationalist worldviews, a subject I explore more thoroughly in chapter 3. Pedrosa’s Museu das Origens posited a Brazilian break with the Euro-­ American model of a modernist art premised on its own autonomy. What I have elsewhere called Pedrosa’s strategic universalism also disidentifies with a European model of universality to respond to the historical specificity of Brazil, its populations, and the ways in which the interchange between the popular and modern, sane and insane, child and adult, as well as the legacy of colonization, is constitutive of both its modernity and a different understanding and practice of what is modern in the arts. In so doing, he is more aligned (although, to the best of my knowledge, this is nowhere explicitly stated) with the thinking of his contemporary Pietro Maria Bardi and with Bardi’s attempts at the helm of MASP to dehierarchize cultural production by working at the intersection of distinctions such as the modern and the popular in the name of a universal art production, a dehierarchization that also underpins the exhibition displays of Bardi’s life partner, the architect Lina Bo Bardi. In 1950, on the publication of the book version of Pedrosa’s Arte, necessidade vital (Art, vital necessity), Bardi wrote, “There is always an elegance of examination in Pedrosa’s way of observing.”30 Indeed, it is paradoxical that Bardi, formed by the struggle to modernize architecture under the fascist regime in Italy in the 1930s would support Pedrosa, an avowed Trotskyist who had recently returned from his first period in exile. In Italy, Bardi had responded to cultural debates about how to incorporate the past and the popular into a vision of romanità through his support of a modern, rationalist architecture subtended by rural and vernacular forms.31 In his newfound home in Brazil, his telescopic approach to cultural form was obscured from its initial politics and nationalist history. Even so, Bardi’s promotion of an expanded field of art would have found in Pedrosa echoes of his own aesthetic ambitions, though not a reflection of his politics. With his Museu das Origens, Pedrosa imagined a museum of modern art that would respond to the multiple origins of modern art but also to the contemporaneity of distinct artistic legacies, while Bardi put into practice what it meant for him to be a director of a modern museum of art (though not a museum of modern art) for almost fifty years.32 Other important figures, such as Walter Zanini, the first director of MAC-­USP, would extend these earlier developments in relation to the exhibition of patients’ art. In 1981 he included the comprehensive Arte Incomum (Uncommon art) section at the Bienal de São Paulo.

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· · · Part two of Learning from Madness moves beyond the modern era to engage with the exhibition of psychiatric patients’ art from the 1980s to the present.33 Having myself learned in the research for this book from the history of radical psychiatry and psychiatric reform, in confronting the work of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, I address what it means to respect the rights of the mad when approaching their work through the lens of contemporary art. Bispo, an “outsider artist,” represented Brazil at the 1995 Venice Biennale. Yet unlike the other Brazilian patients considered in this study, Bispo’s work was legitimated as art after his death. I speak to Frederico Morais’s recent publication Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Arte além da loucura (Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Art beyond madness, 2013) as well as this curator’s key role in Bispo’s canonization into contemporary art. Yet Bispo never alluded to his work’s artistic status; he insisted he was guided by voices. When asked in interview if he was going to transform into Jesus Christ, Bispo affirmed, “I’m not going to transform into Jesus . . . you’re already talking to him.”34 What can listening to the recordings of Bispo’s speech tell us about his works’ contemporaneity rather than its imputed status as contemporary art? I thus probe whether an insistence on Bispo’s work as contemporary art in the end abandons one type of epistemic control (psychiatry) to inscribe the work within another: a timeless aesthetic formalism to which the patient never laid claim. Finally, I close with a discussion of the exhibition of patients’ art in the global contemporary art circuit, a contemporary history of which Bispo also forms a part. I examine how psychiatric patients’ work has been included in international exhibitions (e.g., Eleventh Lyon Biennale in 2011, Thirtieth Bienal de São Paulo in 2012, Fifty-Fifth Venice Biennale in 2013) and pose the questions, Why does the outsider artist reappear at the moment when definitions of global contemporary art are at stake? In their turn to beauty, the poetic, and the encyclopedic as unifying themes, do these exhibitions’ curators overlook the divergent histories of the critical and the clinical? Here, as a countermodel to this trend, I turn to contemporary artists who in their work engage the history of radical psychiatry and the legacy of creative expression within it, among them Javier Téllez and Alejandra Riera. A note on terminology: In general I have opted for the use of patient-­artist and patient’s creative production to identify the subjects and the creative work produced in an asylum context. At times, I use asylum art, art of the insane, art of the alienated, psychopathological art, outsider art, and art brut when tracking how their creative expressions have been historically categorized within psychiatric practices as well as art history. Any slippages between my use of art and patients’ art to describe this work are also immanent to the context, defining the tensions that are also charted in each chapter. These tensions characterize the specific historicity of the relation between

11

Introduction

madness and modern art: between patients’ art as used for clinical diagnosis and as evidence for how to move beyond academic convention in art (chapter 1); between reports of the work’s spontaneous production and its encouragement within art therapy studios; between support for a common understanding of creativity and the legitimization of patients’ work based on style (chapters 1–­2); between claims to a vital necessity for art shared by all and a universal model of aesthetic reception that is underpinned by normative subjective response (chapter 3); and, finally, between claims that the patients’ work is contemporary art and a discussion of the work’s contemporaneity in relation to psychiatric history (chapters 4–­5). These tensions also respond to the broader tension I confronted in the writing of this book: between a history that includes the art of the mad and one that recognizes that, by naming it as such, I continue to frame it as other.

· · · In 1907 a volume was published in France that, for the first time, approached the creative expression of psychiatric patients from an artistic point of view: L’art chez les fous (Art among the mad). The author, Marcel Réja, had already published an article on the subject in the popular journal La revue universelle in 1901. Subsequently, with the opening of Dr. Auguste Marie’s Musée de la folie in 1905, Réja decided to expand his study to a full-­length book. Rather than summarize current psychiatric thinking, he turned to the art of the insane in an attempt to provide answers to the questions posed by all works of art, an approach more in tune, as MacGregor affirms, with the emerging discipline of the psychology of art.35 Réja, a man of letters, provides lengthy formal analysis of the patients’ ­visual production, noting resemblances to archaic forms in art, the repetition of geometric forms, lack of perspective, the use of discrepant proportions, and what he describes and understands as a deformation of conventions. But such deformations were not noted in order to reinforce a discourse of cultural degeneration or the genius-­insanity theory, as inherited from Lombroso. Réja explains, “We do not search for the point at which an artist is susceptible of being mad, but to what extent authentic madness could be accompanied by artistic manifestations.”36 Réja’s claims would have appealed to Parisian culturati and any public interested in the nature of artistic creativity. Consequently, his book makes only rare mention of the psychiatric label attached to a patient. Yet he does confess his interest in the production of patients with no prior artistic training and those for whom artistic expression appears only with madness and thus in the hospital context—­for Réja these are “assuredly the purest case[s], and the most interesting.”37 Réja also aligns such a purity of expression with “primitive” art as well as naïve and folk arts, noting the stylistic crossovers while defending the necessity of upholding the distinctions between them. Here, purity of vision and ex12

T o w a r d Di s c o m f o r t

pressive intensity become aesthetic criteria, ones that will be echoed in subsequent studies as well as in modern artists’ responses to this art, from the German expressionists to Dubuffet’s conceptualization of art brut. But curiously, given his inaugural role in publishing an aesthetic evaluation of psychiatric patients’ art, Réja, the literary figure and art critic, did not exist. His real identity was Paul Meunier, a doctor who was briefly associated with Marie and who published studies on patients’ dreams in clinical circles. At times, against his own intentions as Réja, he reveals his familiarity with the mentally ill through direct contact, as when he writes about the author of one work, “The ideas of grandeur impelled him to believe that he knows and is capable of everything.”38 Yet what is interesting in this context is his dogged attempt to hold his medical orientation at bay when writing about the patients’ work and discussing the various forms of their artistic expressions, from drawing and painting, to poetry and dance. I cannot help but detect a certain irony in the double identity of Réja-­Meunier, which could be understood as a split personality if considered in light of the particular psychotic subjects his work engaged. But in keeping the psychiatric diagnosis at a critical remove from an investigation into the nature of the artistic expression, Réja-­Meunier inhabits, in exemplary fashion, a kind of double consciousness whereby he strategically disidentifies with his own language, methods, and context (psychiatry) to look at the art of psychiatric patients from a nonpathological point of view.39 He steps out of his discipline, his field of expertise, to engage the work on other terms. Rather than assimilate the work to fit a priori diagnostic categories, Rejá’s L’art chez les fous in­ augurated a new paradigm with regard to patients’ art: from a discourse on degeneration to a discourse on the nature of artistic activity. And with this shift, he temporarily abandoned the realm of psychopathology and the clinical. (In different ways this is also true of Prinzhorn, who was also trained as an art historian, and César, who also published art criticism.) This tale of double identity understood as a double consciousness has allowed me, in writing this art history, to strategically disidentify with my own language, my methods, in order to look at the history of modern art through the history of modern psychiatry’s therapeutic treatments and its approach to patients’ art. This admittedly partial stepping out of art history is in part motivated by my concern that the historicity and specificity of such psychiatric patients’ work is presently being tamed at the hands of art history and contemporary curatorial practice, which often evaluates this work on the basis of formal qualities rather than reckoning with its role within psychiatric discourse and institutional practices. What is more, in the face of the at times homogenizing effects of global contemporary art history and exhibition practices, one can too easily forget that these individuals did not historically entertain the same rights as “normal” modern subjects and were often exposed to therapies that are out of fashion today (e.g., forced labor, lobotomy, Cardiazol convulsion, electroshock). Consequently, even 13

Introduction

the discursive condition of authorship must be questioned, bracketed off, since it is retroactively applied. While the double consciousness evoked here is one I framed between the disciplines of art history and the history of psychiatry, it also extends to historiographic differences within the discipline of art history, between the narratives that can be constructed about art in the United States and Western Europe as well as in Brazil, and thus what a global art history could mean in practice. With the emergence of the global contemporary and at a moment when global art history is in academic fashion—­from exhibition practices to scholarly publications, from commercial galleries to academic positions, including my own—­hegemonic constructions and power relations have not disappeared. They subsist, but in a new guise. Recently, I argued that the cumulative effect of many global art exhibitions—­from those that take up the legacy of pop art to those on minimal art (or those that present the work of individual artists such as Lygia Clark)—­is to continue to evaluate the art of all cultures through the tool kit of the West. That is, “other” art histories are put to work as “global art” in exhibitions that display confidence in the ability of similar forms to be read as a global art history.40 It follows that, rather than provincializing American and European narratives of modern art, the origin of such purportedly global art continues to be framed in the language of the West.41 I do not mean to neglect the evident crossovers and transatlantic exchanges between these contexts, but I do mean to insist on discontinuities rather than continuities, defamiliarization rather than familiarization, to parse the specificities of each context and history. To be sure, I consider the import of this study to be largely historiographic. What it lacks in formal description and ekphrasis, I hope it makes up for in its critical examination of the borders of art’s histories. Along these lines, in the research for this study, I was also exposed to material that tested my own assumptions about the early decades at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. I had restricted MoMA’s role to guardian of the modernist myths of originality and aesthetic autonomy, myths tethered to an ideology of cultural freedom. During a conversation, the art historian Suzanne Hudson drew my attention to MoMA’s Armed Services Program, which organized two exhibitions related to occupational therapy in 1943.42 The exhibitions, at the core of Hudson’s current research, aimed to affirm the value of creative production as rehabilitation for disabled members of the armed forces. Knowledge of these exhibitions shifted my understanding of the relation of modernism, MoMA, and the arts during war in the United States (I return briefly to these exhibitions in chapter 3). More broadly in relation to the discipline of art history, we might also recall how one of the origins of art-historical methodology was also a scene of psychiatric therapy: art historian Aby Warburg delivered “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual” in April 1923, when he was still a patient at Ludwig Binswanger’s Kruezlingen Sanatorium.43 14

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To repeat, in what follows I do not describe what madness is. Yet with regard to what I endeavor to call the “psychological double consciousness” of the mad and the not mad, the former exist in the clinical files I cite and are present in the reproductions of their work, as well as in the work of contemporary artists and the Ueinzz theater performances with which this study concludes. Such a double consciousness also carries with it an attention to the effects of inscribing any subject within one’s own language and methods. In short, the imperative is, following Foucault, an ethics of discomfort: “Never to consent to being completely comfortable with one’s own presuppositions. Never to let them fall peacefully asleep, but also never to imagine that one can change them like arbitrary axioms, remembering that in order to give them the necessary mobility one must have a distant view, but also look at what is nearby and all around oneself. To be very mindful that every­ thing one perceives is evident only against a familiar and little-­known horizon, that every certainty is sure only through the support of a ground that is always unexplored.”44 In the interest of such discomfort and inspired by Foucault’s lectures on psychiatric power, I have also chosen to reproduce some psychiatric scenes, which I have smuggled in between chapters.45 With them I consciously aim to destabilize my narrative, to move away from any position of absolute authority, and to foreground other voices—­both mad and not mad—­that bear on the subject of this study.

15

SCENE In my last visit to Juquery hospital in the company of Osório César, upon enter­ ing the large reception area, I found leaning against a column, a tall boy, very friendly, of melancholy look, who attentively observed the people entering. Because I remained alone, he shyly approached me: “The Sir is sick? You are going to be interned?” No, I responded. “My apologies; here you cannot distinguish between the mad and the sane man. And, among the doctors, there are more mad than among the mad.” He spoke slowly. And, at times, his clear and quiet eyes took on an expression of revolt. He had premature dementia. He worked, obedient and orderly, in the hospital’s interior service.

Cândido Motta Filho, “Prefacio,” December 12, 1927, in Osório César, A expressão artística nos alienados: Contribuição para o estudo dos símbolos na arte (São Paulo: Oficinas Gráficas do Hospital do Juquery, 1929), xvii.

2. Claudina D’Onofrio, drawing archived in patient’s medical file, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery, São Paulo, 1940. Núcleo de Acervo, Memória e Cultura, Museu Osório César, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery.

1 CLINICAL-­ARTISTIC TABLEAUX Picture yourself sitting at a desk in the museum of a psychiatric hospital and reviewing medical file 19168. The patient’s name is Claudina D’Onofrio. She is registered as thirty-­one years old, white, Brazilian, and single. She was interned on April 4, 1940, and examined by Dr. Mário Yahn six days later. The next page shows ten fingerprints as well as frontal and profile ID photographs that were taken on the chair that is outfitted with identification numbers and sited to your left in the same room. Page 3, rather than continue with the clinical conventions, is a drawn portrait. If you turn back to the previous page, you notice that the portrait and photograph share some features: the shoulder-­length, wavy hair is parted on the left, the eyebrows gently slope, the nose is slightly asymmetrical. This self-­portrait differs from the photograph not only in its medium and use but also by the extent to which the portrait individualizes the subject: she wears a necklace, and floral details adorn the shirt’s collar (fig. 2). But rather than look out to a potential viewer, the sitter lifts her gaze somewhat askance. In the course of the following pages you read that D’Onofrio had “delirious ideas of a persecutory character” and was consequently diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. The physician’s report also records her physiological state: it provides information on the patient’s circulatory, respiratory, and digestive systems as well as reflexes. You can see that Yahn initially prescribed psychoanalysis as treatment, although on another page he proposes lobotomy (leucotomia cerebral), pending the family’s authorization. Some pages later, Dr. Eugenio M. O. Netto prescribes electroshock therapy. The file documents a series of such treatments in April and May 1942, providing a chart with the dates, resistance, time, voltage, and results: nada, ótimo, nada, ótimo (nothing, great, nothing, great). You consult another file, number 3461. The patient’s name is Pedro dos Reis. He is twenty-­eight, white, Brazilian, and single. He was interned on September 7, 1946. The next page shows fingerprints and a single frontal ID shot. After a brief family history, you read that Dr. Nilo T. da Silva diagnosed him as schizophrenic and prescribed convulsive therapy as treatment. A questionnaire offers details about his family history and present illness.

Chapter one

3. Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery, São Paulo, c. 1900. Núcleo de Acervo, Memória e Cultura, Museu Osório César, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery.

Questions with regard to the latter include: Has been agitated? Has been depressed? Had visions? Heard voices that did not exist? Nestled between the questionnaire’s pages are two drawings: one a landscape with two houses and another a ship at sea. Both are drawn on paper from the Diretoria de Assistência a Psicopatas (Board of Directors of Assistance to Psychopaths). Where D’Onofrio’s drawing seemed to aim toward a naturalistic likeness so as to correspond with her image in (real) life, Reis’s agitated line doubles and redoubles the contours of the various objects he depicts, and the circulating lines of the land and sea seem rendered as if to capture their force rather than their form. These files are part of the extensive medical archive at the Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery (formerly the Hospital e Colônia de Juquery; here­ after, Juquery or the Juquery hospital) in the São Paulo suburb of Franco da Rocha, about one hour by regional train from the city center (fig. 3). I r­ eviewed the files in the Museu Osório César, presently located in one of the hospital’s former female pavilions, under the name Núcleo de Acervo, Memória e Cultura.1 The questionnaires, charts, and typed and hand­written doctor reports 20

C l i n i c a l-A r t i s t i c Ta b l e a u x

these files contain record the medical practices used to treat mental illness, from lobotomy and electroshock to less physically invasive treatments such as psychoanalysis.2 The files testify not only to the over­lapping of distinct therapies and paradigms (from the talking cure to in­vasive psychosurgery); the patients’ drawings found therein bear witness to the outbreak of an interest in patients’ art at Juquery in the 1920s and spread through to the 1950s. D’Onofrio’s and Reis’s work also forms part of the collection at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), and their works were on view as part of the exhibition Historias da loucura: Desenhos do Juquery (Histories of madness: Drawings from Juquery) in 2015. The traces of these creative practices as they persist in the patients’ medical files are not unlike other patient strategies to recuperate their singularity in the face of disciplinary subjugation: from decorating their uniforms with plants and flowers to drawing on the hospital’s walls. But how this art was first put to work in relation to modern art in Brazil is what I chart in this chapter: from the works’ association with futurism to its exhibition in one of São Paulo’s first venues dedicated to modern art. To do so, I must introduce the pioneering work of Dr. Osório César, in whose museum this chapter’s research began.

· · · In addition to being a trained physician, César was also a musician, a violinist, a writer who published both art and music criticism, a communist political activist, and a professor.3 He began work at the Juquery hospital in 1923 (as an intern in the laboratory for bromatology and chemical analysis) and officially began work as an anatomical pathologist in 1925.4 According to his own testimony, when he arrived at the hospital, many patients routinely painted and drew. Although no space was exclusively dedicated to these activities, the hospital did begin to collect the patients’ production so as to assemble it in a museum.5 In the Brazilian context, César was the first to systematically study and publish analyses on the creative work of mental health patients. Even so, he also continued to write articles on anatomical pathology that served as key references at the time. About one female patient diagnosed with premature dementia (simply named “O” in the clinical file so as to protect the patient’s identity), he writes, “She spends her days in the pavilion courtyard to paint still lives and landscapes of the surrounding area. And watercolor was principally her preferred type of painting.”6 Other patients would similarly work in the courtyard and the hospital’s other spaces, and César at times provided paper, graphite, and colored pencils to those who “spontaneously” drew or etched on the hospital walls. Other patients created small clay figures. Consequently, he began a collection to study the psychic factors motivating their artistic production, publishing his first article on the subject in 1924. 21

Chapter one

In “A arte primitiva nos alienados” (Primitive art in the alienated) César discusses the symbolic character of patients’ work as well as its style, which he compares to a futurist aesthetic (estética futurista), a designation frequently used as a synonym for modernist in the Brazilian context. The study is the first evaluation of psychiatric patients’ work to be published within the São Paulo medical milieu.7 Even though a few patients drew, their artistic production was not yet seen as potentially therapeutic, nor did they have the sort of studio space often found with art therapy practices today. Rather, the dominant therapeutic approach at Juquery was ergotherapy: a prescribed routine of physical work and relaxation (sometimes referred to as labor therapy and today developed into occupational therapy). In the early 1900s, such a conception of physical work as therapy drove the hospital’s organization as well as the construction of its first Colônia Agrícola Masculina, an agricultural asylum-­colony (with eighty patients) sited on Juquery’s extensive and bucolic grounds, which measured nearly four hundred acres (see fig. 3).8 Within this regime patients were put to work and distributed according to labor type: some lived on a farm near the cultivated area, and some milked cows; others held maintenance jobs, working as gardeners, painters, or masons; some made shoes (fig. 4). Dr. Franco da Rocha, the hospital’s founder and first director, explains how, “for them [the patients], the appearance of liberty, associated with moderate and profitable work . . . is the blessing of civilization.”9 Yet he acknowledges how such liberty was relative, and by 1908 the hospital had implemented a more progressive family assistance program.10 In his 1912 report on the hospital and its history, Rocha also lists the fruits of the patients’ labor: twenty thousand liters of corn, seven thousand liters of beans, a large quantity of fruits (e.g., oranges, grapes, apples, bananas, pineapple), and vegetables. But rather than focus exclusively on the quantitative yield that supports the hospital’s functioning, which he affirms costs nothing to the state, he frames the payoff in moral terms: “The insane who works and sees the result of his sweat, feels more dignified; leaves the lowly condition of useless creature and is elevated before his own eyes; he adapts to a modus vivendi that greatly softens the disgrace. The consciousness of personal self worth revives in the individual, who, in another way, would be a heavy and useless charge for the healthy part of society.”11 In this way, the dominant therapeutic approach at Juquery was an extension of the moral treatment first codified by Philippe Pinel, the founder of French psychiatry and the one whose removal of the inmates’ chains is immortalized in the paintings Pinel fait enlever les fers aux aliénés de Bicêtre (Pinel orders the chains removed from the mad at Bicêtre, 1849) by Charles Müller and Pinel à la Salpêtrière (1876–­1878) by Tony Robert-­Fleury. Pinel recommended that the physician “console the patient by adopting a benevolent tone, . . . prescribe a balanced diet, long walks, and above all sustained work in the field

22

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4. Sapateria (shoemaking workshop), Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery, São Paulo, c. 1930–­ 1940. Núcleo de Acervo, Memória e Cultura, Museu Osório César, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery.

every day.”12 Within this paradigm, physical labor helped to distract the ­patient from exclusive focus on his or her delusion and also allowed the physician to classify illness through observation and transcription. Patients at Juquery were, however, obliged to submit to regulation, obey orders, and conform to the regularity of certain actions and habits. This system of order is, as Michel Foucault maintains, “reality in the form of discipline.” Pinel’s act of “liberation” inaugurated a new articulation of psychiatric power.13 In the 1920s, when César arrived at Juquery, the hospital had expanded significantly to include new pavilions, including one for abnormal children, and the first histochemical laboratory for studying cerebral pathology, thus ushering in an anatomical-­pathological phase in Juquery’s directorship and its medical practices.14 By 1928, it accommodated approximately two thousand patients within its various facilities, from the main hospital to the colonies. Faced with such an increase in number of patients (in 1907 there were 900; in 1912 there were 1,250), the core clinical team of seven doctors—­four psychiatrists, two medical interns, and a surgeon for general medicine—­

23

Chapter one

was insufficient. With such a reduced team, and given the institution’s geographic expanse, the guards and nurses constituted the hospital’s real “motor.”15 As Maria Clementina Pereira Cunha shows, Juquery’s regime of order and discipline depended on the hospital workers’ surveillance network, which served symbolically and, at times, literally as the doctor’s eyes. Her excellent and harrowing study also demonstrates how the reality of Juquery was at odds with the idyllic image the psychiatrists promoted.16 The patients’ artistic production was a minor practice within the hospital. Early aesthetic studies, like that of Marcel Réja, emphasized how the work was produced out of “necessity,” thereby informing modernist theories that would also uphold a psychological creative necessity as central to patient and nonpatient artists alike.17 As suggested in the introduction, this discourse is at odds with the development of notions of medium specificity.18 But such creative work also forms part of a genealogy in which patients have dressed up, subverted their uniforms, and asserted their singularity against the standardization imposed on them. In Foucauldian terms, I understand it as instances of counterpower, and thus as responses to the microphysics of power related to the history of the psychiatric institution. These creative practices opened a space—­one close to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix G ­ uattari theorize as a line of flight, evoking the act of fleeing and eluding, and the infinitesimal possibility of escape—­that exceeded the hospital’s disciplinary order.19 Yet as soon as patients’ art emerged as an object of study, the patients’ creative production passed a threshold and was inscribed within a new epistemic order: the various psychological studies that claimed to account for the meaning of this art and its relation to aesthetic modernism. At times this relation was positively framed. At other times it was forged in the service of conservative critique. Remember how in the Brazilian context Monteiro Lobato polemicized against Anita Malfatti’s work and compared modern art with the “abnormal.”20

· · · In 1929, when Juquery counted more than two thousand patients, César published his seminal A expressão artística nos alienados: Contribuição para o estudo dos símbolos na arte (The artistic expression of the alienated: Contribution to the study of symbols in art, 1929; fig. 5), which includes eighty-­four illustrations and a preface by Cândido Motta Filho.21 As in his earlier 1924 article, he offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of the drawings, paintings, sculpture, and poetry of patients at Juquery. At the time, scant literature was available in Brazil concerning the relation between art and madness—­only Ulysses Pernambucano had studied the subject in the Brazilian context.22 In the introduction to his volume, César recognizes this challenge: “At first we encountered a huge number of difficulties: scarce literature among us, the lack of an artistic museum in the hospital, and mainly a lack of solid 24

C l i n i c a l-A r t i s t i c Ta b l e a u x

5. Osório César, A expressão artística nos alienados: Contribuição para o estudo dos símbolos na arte (São Paulo: Oficinas Gráficas do Hospital do Juquery, 1929), book cover.

knowledge of the subject that we were going to study.”23 Yet César’s A expressão artística nos alienados reveals his familiarity with the historical work of Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Morselli and with the contemporary work of Walter Morgenthaler and Hans Prinzhorn, as well as Jean Vinchon. His volume even includes two reproductions of work from Prinzhorn’s collection (figures 32 and 60 in César’s book). He was thus aware of an emerging field in which the creative work of psychiatric patients had become the object of scientific and aesthetic scrutiny: Morgenthaler had published Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (Madness and Art: The Life and Works of Adolf Wölfli) on the work of Adolf Wölfli in 1921; Prinzhorn’s Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill) had appeared in 1922; and Vinchon’s L’art et la folie (Art and madness) was available in 1924. César’s own book-­length study, published not long after these three works, marks him as a pioneer in the field, both in the Brazilian psychiatric context and internationally. Rocha, Juquery’s founder, had this to say about César’s publication: His study comes to mark, for us, the beginning of a new direction in the examination and interpretation of delusions that are observed in the insane. . . . Until now, everyone saw in the insane only complete mental disorder, incomprehensible absurdities, nonsense and no cohesive motivation for the behavior of the patient. . . . The unconscious, which contains a world of tendencies, aspirations, ideas and complexes unknown to the patient himself, is 25

Chapter one

what will provide the explanation of many things that until now were simply incomprehensible nonsense. The poetry, sculpture, painting, and art in general, in the manifestations of madness, bring an important contingent to the psychiatry of generations that now begin to study this subject.24

At the time of César’s book’s publication Sigmund Freud’s theories were already circulating in the medical and cultural contexts of São Paulo. In 1920 Rocha had published O pansexualismo e a doutrina de Freud (Pansexualism and Freud’s doctrine; later republished as A doutrina de Freud in 1930). São Paulo was also the site of the first psychoanalytic society in Latin America. The Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise was founded on November 24, 1927, under the direction of Rocha and Dr. Durval Marcondes. Rocha served as its first president. The society’s membership included doctors and intellectuals, among them César, A. de Almeida Júnior, and Motta Filho.25 Given Freud’s robust reception in the local medical milieu, César decided to send some of his research to the Viennese doctor, who responded with a letter: My esteemed colleague, I am very grateful for the delivery of your work in “Memories of Juquery Hospital,” which at least in the French translation was accessible to me. If you want to send us a German translation of your new work, I can already guarantee its inclusion in our “Imago” magazine, where it will readily find reception. I am very pleased to have this proof of the interest that our psychoanalysis has aroused in Brazil. Yours, Freud [signed]26

Freud’s studies were also integral to the ideas and libraries of various cultural figures, from poet Oswald de Andrade and his “Manifesto antropófago” (Cannibalist manifesto, 1928) to visual artists Tarsila do Amaral, Cícero Dias, Ismael Nery, and Flávio de Carvalho, each of whom in the 1929–­1933 period produced work informed by Freud’s theories. By the early 1930s, César was also in a romantic, albeit short-­lived, relationship with Amaral, a leading avant-­garde painter, after her separation from Andrade.27 Published in the first issue of Revista da antropofagia (1928), Andrade’s manifesto includes a kaleidoscopic array of ideas and references, among them Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913). He rejects the psychoanalyst’s description of a civilized culture, one of taboos, that has internalized paternal rule, to endorse a totemic cannibalistic culture. He ends the manifesto with the following line: “Down with the dressed and oppressive social reality registered by Freud—­reality without complexes, without madness, without 26

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prostitutions and without penitentiaries, in the matriarchy of Pindorama.”28 The manifesto was at once a reaction against modern Western disciplinary culture and its institutions (e.g., the asylum, the prison) and the expression of a desire to build Brazilian culture and artistic production on another, hybrid ground. If Europeans projected Brazil as a land of savages, the call to anthropophagy was a radicalization of European modernists’ assumptions, exacerbating their primitivist projections by invoking the indigenous ritual of eating the enemy’s flesh as a metaphor for Brazil’s forceful appropriation of Euro-­American culture. Accordingly, the manifesto inveighs in English, “Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question,” providing a homophonic rewriting of Hamlet’s soliloquy to engage one of Brazil’s indigenous populations, the Tupi.29 While the manifesto is aggressive in tone, this generation’s visual production is largely assimilationist, combining the formal aspects of cubist and postcubist painting into a figurative national-­cultural project, as in ­Amaral’s painting Abaporu (1928), which is often credited in the critical literature as having ignited the short-­lived anthropophagist movement. The reception of Freudian theories was also critical for introducing into aesthetic modernism in Brazil the questions that drive this study: What is the historical relation between modern art and the art of psychiatric patients? How is the work of psychiatric patients framed and discussed? What are the norms by which creativity among the sane and insane is understood? How do we understand the exhibition of patients’ art in modern art venues? What constitutes art, for whom is it intended, and how should the process of its making be understood? What constitutes an art object, and who adjudicates such a condition? Consequently, if Andrade’s “Manifesto antropófago” is key for aesthetic modernism, articulating a countercolonial strategy of ingestion, in the course of the 1930s the reception of psychiatric patients’ work articulates the conditions of possibility for an understanding of how patients’ creative production was foundational to the discourse of aesthetic modernism and its institutional practices. By 1933, the patients’ work had left the disciplinary space of the hospital and for the first time in Brazil had come into contact with modern art and its institutions.

· · · In the first part of A expressão artística nos alienados, César classifies the patients’ creative production according to four styles or groups—­aligned with art by the “primitive,” primitive art (e.g., medieval and Japanese art), classical art, and avant-­garde art—­and then turns to various theoretical texts to ground his comparative method.30 Fittingly, A expressão artística nos alienados is characteristic not only of contemporary psychological studies but also of modernist aesthetic thinking at the time; that is, it includes comparative material that situates the art of mental health patients in relation to that of children and the “primitive.” While César’s work was an important advance 27

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in the field of psychiatric studies, he was also no stranger to avant-­garde art, as his fourth category evinces. In the course of his study he associates the patients’ work with modernist movements, including cubism and futurism, but in so doing, he affirms that his objective is not to discredit modern art: “The futurist aesthetic presents various points of contact with those of the asylum. We do not desire with this to censor that new manifestation of art; far from it. We find it even very interesting, so too with the aesthetic of the alienated. Both are manifestations of art and therefore are felt by different temperaments and reproduced with sincerity.”31 In the book’s second half (beginning with chapter 3), César notes correspondences between mental illnesses and their artistic characteristics and styles. When dealing with the creative production of a specific Juquery patient, he first reproduces selections from his or her clinical file and then analyzes the work. Hence, with a female patient diagnosed with premature dementia (the one he identified as “O”), he writes that she is “Brazilian, white, 30 years old; not married, not single, not a widow: for years she is legally separated from her husband, who gave justification to do so by his habitual drunkenness and brutality against his wife.”32 With regard to her mental condition, we learn that her behavior clashed with the social class to which she belonged, that she fought terribly with her siblings, dressed with improper exaggeration, and was in love with a doctor with whom she wanted to move to Europe. However, only when her father, a distinguished man, is brought up in conversation—­as a way of putting in evidence the impropriety of her conduct—­is her verbal response to her family reported in the file: “You are all pests, deceptive; you do not think in this manner; you only have in view to contradict, to disgust for pure evil, for the malicious intention of persecuting me.”33 The report continues by describing her delirium of persecution, as well as her violent acts upon arrival at the hospital, behavior that led to her brief solitary confinement. César uses this documentation, which dates to 1914, the year of her internment, as a point of departure for discussing the pictorial practice she developed in the hospital, a talent that seems to have preexisted her arrival. He describes how O’s drawings became “increasingly primitive until the point of [a work] whose similarity with the children’s drawings of the second-­ year school group is shocking.”34 He then draws attention to the colors in two landscapes, evoking their color symbolism and attributing to them a ­sexual symbolism: “the tree (manly member) and red blood color—­(female ­sexual organ, intercourse, of virginity).”35 This case formed part of his final category—­avant-­garde art—­for which Freud’s theories were essential on ­account of the “obscure and almost undecipherable symbolism.”36 For César, Freud’s analyses assist with the interpretation of unconsciously drawn symbols. He states: “The symbols that the sick use for their artistic productions belong to the symbolism that Freud observes in the in-

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terpretation of dreams. Thus, the masculine sexual organs are, for example, represented by canes, weapons, snakes, daggers, revolvers. . . . The feminine organs have their representation in vessels, boxes, safes, doors, fruits.”37 Unlike his later declarations of the 1950s (see chapter 2), César’s symbolically oriented reading of Freud stabilizes his interpretation of the patients’ art by focusing on the symbols’ fixed signification. He also describes how the patients’ works evince an atavistic regression to prehistory (thus, he remains in line with Freud’s thinking on regression), reiterating how their representations “correspond exactly to Freudian [sexual] symbols.”38 In so doing, however, he nonetheless holds such atavistic tendencies apart from a discourse of degeneracy (he also critiques aspects of Lombroso’s work). In contrast with the fascist tendency found in parts of the Movimento de Higiene Mental (Mental Hygiene Movement) of the 1920s and 1930s, César affirms, “Whoever enters an asylum and seeks to talk attentively with the sick, to listen with interest to their complaints, their curious stories, will note, with certainty, that among a large number of them, reason is logical, the language is correct, and the imagination is, at times, exuberant.”39 While César draws attention to the madman’s reason, the cumulative effect of his various interpretations and associations in A expressão artística nos alienados is to invent a system of relations that establishes a discursive equivalence among the clinical file, a patient’s art, and a symbolic understanding of Freud’s theories. The patients’ creative production is put to work as visible evidence of an inner unconscious “truth.” César displays a confidence in artistic form to produce the evidence that grounds the truth of his theoretical application of Freud. That is, the turn to Freudian symbolism allowed for the possibility of a pictorial representation that maintained the integrity of the clinical case. At no moment does César use the art reproduced in the pages of his volume to disqualify or challenge the clinical diagnosis. Such a retrofitting of the visible facts to ground a clinical “truth” is not new in the history of medicine. In his seminal Invention of Hysteria, Georges Didi-­Huberman brilliantly and artfully shows how Dr. Jean-­Martin Charcot, chief professor of pathological anatomy at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, isolated hysteria and used photography to locate the patients’ symptoms in an “art of surface territories,” a bodily surface that he staged in symptomatic poses to link seeing and knowing, seeing and suffering.40 In the course of the study Didi-­Huberman avows that the ensuing “outbreak of photographic images” constituted a “chapter in the history of art.” Such a claim is based not only on Charcot’s iconographic impulse—­namely, how the clinical case became a bodily tableau—­but also on Charcot’s own turn to the history of art in his Les démoniaques dans l’art (The demonic in art, 1887).41 This text, which was illustrated with engravings by Paul Richer (chief artist of the laboratory), examined a selection of medieval and Renaissance art depicting demonic possession. Even though he admits that the settings and costumes

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were the result of artistic preferences, Charcot nevertheless confirms that the paintings’ signs of hysteria are “so precise that the imagination could not invent them.”42 Les démoniaques thus “proved” that bodily hysterical symptoms existed centuries before the photographs he published in the Iconographies.43 But Charcot’s method also presents us with an anachronism: he compares historical representations in art with a contemporary collection of bodies, his “Living Pathological Museum,” at the hospital. Hence Charcot’s turn to art history to ground nosological classification differs from the subsequent emergence of patients’ art as an object of psychiatric inquiry in the 1920s and 1930s, when patients’ art, and not just their bodies, would become a subject for art history and criticism. César could be considered the “Hans Prinzhorn of Brazil.” Both psychiatrists were pioneers in taking psychiatric patients’ art as a serious object of study. But some key differences obtain between these two theorists of the art of the mad, especially with regard to Freudian psychoanalysis. In his Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, Prinzhorn upholds a “constructive” or “configurative” power or instinct shared by all, one that survives in the mentally ill despite the disintegrated personality. He also argues against psychoanalytic interpretations that focus on the symbolism produced by an individual under analysis, interpretations that, for him, did not offer insight into the process of artistic configuration (a critique Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa would echo in the late 1940s).44 Prinzhorn also cautions against any simplistic equation of the pictures with art and uses Bildernei (artistry, or image making) in his volume’s title, proposing six urges, or drives, for pictorial configuration (the primary urge remains that of expression, of which picture making is one outcome).45 Prinzhorn incorporated into the realm of psychiatry the lessons he learned from the psychology of expression (he turned to Karl Jaspers and Ludwig Klages), whereas César applied Freudian theories to the symbolic study of patients’ art. By tethering his interpretations to Freud’s theories, César, when it came to his comparative studies with modern art, ultimately mapped conscious artistic transgression onto psychic regression. If Prinzhorn focused on the configurative process and César on symbolic content, both manifest and latent, the two did share some overlap in orientation. Both claimed visual affinities between patients’ art and modern art (expressionism in the case of Prinzhorn, cubism and futurism for César).46 Both used the patients’ works as evidence of the theories they proposed, although Prinzhorn would more forcefully claim the value of the art independent of the clinical biography.47 Accordingly, they often presupposed a direct relation between image and psyche, whether present through drives or materialized as symbols. Each also insisted on the “spontaneity” of the patients’ production, even when they encouraged some patients in their creative expression.48 Yet their projection of artistic spontaneity can

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be historically accounted for: the patients’ production was not the result of occupational therapy or the subsequent development of art therapy.49 The final artistic product, not the creative process as therapy, remained at the center of both Prinzhorn’s and César’s studies in these years. Nevertheless, psychiatrists such as César took note of such activities’ calming effects. He remarked that “patients who indulge in such thoughts [e.g., hallucinations of grandeur] remain calm, work with pleasure, stylize their artistic manifestations with complete satisfaction of spirit. It could be said that their thoughts are lost in a huge world of beauties.”50 In practice, however, such observations were attuned less to the creative process’s therapeutic effects than to how these patients, when engaged in activity, did not disturb the hospital’s disciplinary order. Prinzhorn was a trained art historian and abreast of contemporary currents in modern art, notably expressionism, while César began in the 1930s to write art criticism for the art of his time, thereby moving beyond the comparison of his patients’ work with modern art to engage the work of contemporary painters and sculptors, from Livio Abramo and Cândido Portinari to Anita Malfatti and Maria Martins.51 Not only did César write art criticism; his activities and collaboration with modern art and politics moved beyond the purview of the hospital and the newspapers’ art columns. Upon his return from a trip to the Soviet Union with then companion and fellow communist Amaral, the couple loaned a large number of posters they had collected on the trip for an exhibition at the Clube dos Artistas Modernos (CAM) in July 1933.52 A few months later, he collaborated with Flávio de Carvalho, who served as CAM’s secretary, in the organization of an exhibition of patients’ work. The exhibition, an important chapter for modern art in São Paulo, brought together science, art, and pedagogy.

· · · The 1930s was when the modern artist Carvalho began to visit Juquery and study the patients’ work. Like César, he would compare their drawings and sculptures to those of the hospital’s Grupo Escolar (School Group), children between the ages of seven and ten years old. From his study he drew certain conclusions, foremost among them that the mad returned to a state of childhood, thereby sharing the theory of regression that subtends César’s study and was common to their Freudian intellectual milieu.53 At CAM he also pursued what his biographer J. Toledo describes as “thorough research” related to Prinzhorn’s study and conducted under César’s direction.54 And like André Breton and other European surrealists such as Paul Éluard, Carvalho collected the patients’ work, especially their ceramics, which could be identified among the many objects that decorated his later home, the Fazenda Capuava.

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Beyond his research and collecting activity, Carvalho was at the helm of the intense but short-­lived CAM, an art organization that, in the years following the 1930 revolution and Getúlio Vargas’s assumption of power, became an indispensible venue for a modern art program married to a Marxist politics.55 CAM was committed to education and initiated a series of public programs that were altogether new to the São Paulo cultural milieu. The organization was also founded in opposition to what was perceived as the much more elitist Sociedade Pró-­Arte Moderna (SPAM), with Lasar Segall at its helm. The contemporary press often noted CAM’s “valuable services to the artistic milieu of S. Paulo,” and the writer for the Rio-­based Base: Revista de arte, técnica e pensamento wrote of the organization as a “large reservoir of energy.”56 Journalists who reported on CAM’s activities regularly foregrounded its status as an experiential laboratory.57 Among the most notable of CAM’s cultural programs were Amaral’s lecture on the art of the proletariat and Pedrosa’s lecture on Käthe Kollwitz, which were scheduled on account of an exhibition of the German artist’s graphic work in the space.58 CAM explicitly positioned itself against the rise of fascism, and its members supported the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution in São Paulo.59 In that year, both Amaral and Pedrosa were arrested because of their political activism. As the cultural historian Daryle Williams explains in his excellent study of the Vargas era, the revolution, though quelled by Vargas’s military forces, was a “civil war replete with armored tanks, trenches, and dead war heroes.”60 The year 1932 also marks the foundation of Brazil’s first fascist movement, Integralismo. Aside from the Kollwitz exhibition and its explicitly Marxist orientation, what came to be known as the Mês das crianças e dos loucos (The month of children and the mad; hereafter Mês) remains among the most frequently cited of CAM’s programs. The Mês was organized by Carvalho and César, and inaugurated on August 28, 1933. The exhibition included drawings, paintings, and sculptures by patients at Juquery (selected by César from his collection) and works by children from various São Paulo public schools. CAM augmented the exhibition with a robust lecture series: speakers and topics ranged from Marcondes’s psychoanalytic analysis of drawings by psycho­paths to Dr. Pedro de Alcântara’s discussion of the pedagogical value of children’s drawings.61 César launched the series with his comparative study of avant-­garde art and asylum art, published as A arte nos loucos e vanguardistas. In it he evokes stylistic similarities between patients’ art and modern movements such as cubism and futurism. In this context, his comparative look at the art of the mad and the avant-­garde artist developed on the earlier work by moving beyond his Freudian interpretations of unconscious symbolic content to engage Freud’s reflections on actual artists. He evokes Freud’s study Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910) and cites Freud’s discussion of how the artist flees reality for fantasy

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but ultimately returns to reality, “thanks to his special talent, with which he will mold his fantasy as new classes of values, which are admitted by all as valuable semblances of reality.”62 For César, following Freud, the move from the unconscious to a visible, painted truth is the same in patient and nonpatient artists alike. However, although he names various artists, such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Georges Braque, and Marcel Duchamp, César refrains from providing any formal analysis of modern art. Instead, his interpretations focus on clinical cases. In one instance, he confirms how a patient’s sculptures reveal the characteristics of cubism, thereby providing the visual conditions for a comparative study.63 At no point, however, does César acknowledge that Freud never turned to the visual art of his time, or to psychiatric patients’ artistic production. Barring his patient Sergei Pankejeff (Wolf Man), Freud searched for signs of psychological disturbance in the great masters of art history: Leonardo and Michelangelo. Visual documentation of the Mês and what was actually on view in the exhibition is scant. A few published press photographs show installation details that focus on the three-­dimensional work but do not show how or where the two-­dimensional works were shown. We can speculate that the drawings were hung on the walls so as to leave the central space open for the public’s seating during lectures, as seen in the lecture photographs published by the press. The works from Juquery would have been shown alongside the large-­format panels painted by CAM’s founders—­Carvalho, Emiliano Di ­Cavalcan­ti, Antonio Gomide, and Carlos Prado—­and another two painted by Anita Malfatti and John Graz. The patients’ works were thus displayed both literally and symbolically at the center of this modernist venue. One press photograph stands out. The image published in Diário da Noite on August 31 provides a broader installation view that shows three-­ dimensional works in ceramic, wood, and cloth displayed on two wooden tables (fig. 6). Perhaps unsurprising given CAM’s impromptu and ad hoc organization, as well as contemporary psychiatric collecting practices, neither this nor any of the other published newspaper images offer information about the works’ authors, years of production, or even dimensions. Nor was this information provided at the level of display (so far as I can tell). Instead, works are identified in newspaper headlines and captions across various publications as “Trabalhos pelos alienados do Hospital do Juquery” (Works by the alienated from Juquery hospital) and “Algumas produções artísticas dos alienados” (Some artistic production by the alienated).64 Some of the work on display would have been further contextualized for audiences through the lectures, attendant slide presentations, and publications.65 In the Diário da Noite image, one also observes a self-­conscious reporting of news-­within-­the-­news: seated next to the sculptural production from Juquery, the figure posed at the image’s far right (clothes and stature suggest it might be Carvalho himself) reads an issue of Rumo, which had previously

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6. Installation view of the exhibition featuring psychiatric patients’ three-­dimensional work from Juquery hospital. Mês das crianças e dos loucos, Club dos Artistas Modernos, 1933. Exhibition view published in Diário da Noite, August 31, 1933.

reported on CAM with a headline that reads: “Club dos Artistas Modernos: Um laboratório de experiências para a arte moderna” (Club dos Artistas Modernos: An experience laboratory for modern art).66 What emerges in the course of reading the reviews is the emphasis most writers placed on the education of the public, which was otherwise deprived of the necessary resources for instruction, both aesthetic and otherwise. For example, in the pages of Base, one reads: This c.a.m. program reveals the artist associates’ great conditions of spirit in relation to the public, with whom it wants to be in constant contact, facilitat­ ing for them the right to immediate critique, keeping alive the listeners’ attention, which is the best way to teach them through facilitating for them the cultivation of dialectics. [I]f that public is not composed exclusively of blasé dilettantes, without a doubt c.a.m. will have achieved an important pedagogical success in the sphere of its preferences, raising the cultural level of the people, who always lacked all the resources of education.67

For another writer at Folha da Noite, which had already covered some of CAM’s activities, the event was important “because it helps the public to understand the existing connections between the art of the insane, the art of the avant-­garde, and the art of children.”68 Similarly, the Correio de São 34

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Paulo explains how “the lectures have been very lively, always with those attending taking part in heated discussions.”69 In the context of the early 1930s, and in the wake of the call to anthropophagy so important to this generation of artists and intellectuals, the exhibition became a way to further move beyond academic conventions in art. Here Carvalho’s declarations are key. Interviewed for the Correio de São Paulo, Carvalho insists on the inventiveness of the patients’ work, proposing how they evince an originality that is beyond the reach of a so-­called great artist who is “already stupid due to the pedagogy of civilization” (já está embrutecido pela pedagogia da civilização).70 Carvalho uses the exhibition as a platform for a critique of academic artistic education (i.e., the escolas de belas artes) whose function, he claims, is to smother all bursts of creativity.71 One might recall modernist architect Lucio Costa’s brief stint as director of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (ENBA) in Rio de Janeiro in 1930–­1931. Antimodernist backlash among ENBA faculty and their allies ultimately forced his resignation.72 Beyond his critique of pervasive academicism in arts education, Carvalho also suggests that “the exhibition of drawings by children and the mad at Clube dos Artistas Modernos is more important than it seems at first glance because it brings to the eyes of the public a series of issues that it is not used to facing.”73 With regard to the work of psychiatric patients and the question of what constitutes normality, Carvalho (who remains unnamed but is identified as an “intelligent man”) further specifies in the pages of Rumo: There is an interesting art, very curious, an art capable of producing deep impressions for those who admire it; a frantic art, but for that reason attractive, an art that surprises us at each moment. That art you gentlemen do not know at all. It is the art of the insane. It is necessary that you get acquainted with it, if only to do nothing more than give up the mistaken belief that madness is a great night without stars. Come and see how much beauty is released from Juquery’s patients and spreads over the white paper. Come abandon that unshaken presumption of normal men and seek to convince yourselves that common normality—­because absolutely normality does not exist—­is what is called, in good Latin, “aurea mediocritas” [the golden mean].74

With this statement Carvalho moves beyond the journalistic reports that focused on the “existing links” among modern art, the art of the mad, and the art of children, challenging the conception of a normative subjectivity, a stance not necessarily taken up in the contemporary press. Essential to Carvalho’s refusal of the existence of an absolute normality is his reception of Freud. That Carvalho had moved beyond the individual psychology of the subject to interrogate group psychology is perhaps ­nowhere more evident than in his Experiência no. 2 (1931), a performative 35

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­action that resulted in his eponymous published narrative account. Carvalho explains: “I looked for a while at this strange movement of colored faith [a Corpus Christi procession] when it occurred to me to do an experiment to unravel the soul of believers . . . [to] study the reaction on the faces, gestures, gait, look, to feel ultimately the pulse of the environment, to psychically palpate the tempestuous emotion of the collective soul, register the flow of that emotion, provoking a rebellion to see something of the unconscious.”75 His experiment: donning his hat, he walked in opposition to the procession. He continues: “My attitude attracted and partly monopolized attention. They were beginning to discuss and think about my gesture, priests and friars. ­Already they looked at me in a weird way.”76 He ran into an acquaintance, who told him, “Flávio you need to take off your hat.” Shortly thereafter someone yelled, “Take off your hat!” He describes how the mass of people became agitated, how more people began to say, “Take off your hat!”; how someone then yanked off his hat; how a boy ultimately returned it to him. He then describes his perceptual experience of seeing the tumult of arms, the red faces filled with anger, a mob at the extreme of hate, unsure what to do in response to his action. He describes the escalating sensation of violence, how someone shouted, “Lincha!” (lynch!), and how the cries of “Lincha mata!” (lynch, kill!), initially timid, increased in vigor. He attempts to escape the crowd and in retrospect reflects, “visualizing my adventure, I seem to visualize the part of a world that is strange to me, I feel half like an archaeologist and half as a cynical skeptic.”77 Carvalho willfully walked in the opposite direction of a Corpus Christi procession, integrating analysis of the crowd with his own subjective response.78 Thus psychoanalysis was crucial not only to Carvalho’s thinking about the patients’ art but also to his artistic practice—­he turned to Freud’s Totem and Taboo and especially Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) as a way of analyzing the response to his artistic actions in the world.79 His research on and reception of the patients’ work, as well as his performative rather than exclusively painterly reception of Freud, place him at a critical remove from the pictorial surrealism identified in the work of his peers Amaral, Ismael Nery, and Cícero Dias.80 His research on the inside of Juquery propelled him to test the conventions of that other “reality,” the asylum’s outside, and in a series of counterperformative actions he showed that irrationality is not the purview of the mentally ill alone—­and he did so at a moment when management of the national mind and body became part of the Brazilian state’s official policies under Vargas’s plan to sanear e a educar o Brasil (sanitize and to educate Brazil).81 In the opening paragraph of his analysis of Experiência no. 2, Carvalho affirms that “a procession in movement is similar to a nationalist parade. Both have an invisible chief, Christ or the Fatherland.”82

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The Mês was not the first time patients’ work was exhibited outside of the asylum context. In Germany in the early 1920s, Prinzhorn organized exhibitions of the Heidelberg collection and often accompanied them with a lecture. The collection traveled to both artistic and scientific venues, including the Zinglers Kabinett in Frankfurt (1921), the Naturforscher-­Kongress in Leipzig (1923), and the Kunsthalle in neighboring Mannheim that same year. In the years 1930–­1933, when Prinzhorn was no longer director, Heidelberg professors Wilhelm Mayer-­Gross and Hans Gruhle organized Die Kunst der Geisteskranken (The art of the mentally ill), which toured nine German cities. As Bettina Brand-­Claussen explains, Gruhle was invested in the exhibition as a way to “demolish the prejudice that places such individuals outside any system of social values and . . . debars them from achieving recognition for anything they do.”83 As at CAM, these exhibitions generally received positive responses in the press. Two exhibitions also took place in France at Parisian art galleries in the late 1920s, a few years after Prinzhorn’s book had been introduced to the surrealist circle.84 The first Paris exhibition of patients’ art was Les imageries des fous (The imagery of the mad, December 1927–­January 1928), at the Galerie Vavin, a modernist venue whose program included Paul Klee and André Masson. Les imageries des fous displayed the creative production of psychiatric patients that had been collected by Dr. Auguste Marie, founder of the Musée de la folie at the Villejuif Asylum in the suburbs of Paris and who by this time worked at the Hôpital Sainte-­Anne.85 The success of the first exhibition led Marie to organize another the following year, Exposition des artistes malades (Exhibition of ill artists, May 31–­June 16, 1929) at Max Bine’s gallery.86 Unlike his first exhibition, which was culled exclusively from his collection, the second included works from other psychiatric collections, including those of Vinchon and Dr. Bagenoff; works from London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital; as well as thirty-­six works from the Prinzhorn Collection. This was the first time original works from the Prinzhorn Collection were seen in Paris. Ingrid von Beyme’s detailed research notes how Exposition des artistes malades began with a “psychiatric historical section,” and quasi-­medical-­diagnostic criteria were decisive for the remaining objects’ display.87 As with the exhibition at CAM and the German venues, the works on view were produced by “cases,” not artists, just as the owner of the work was the psychiatrist or hospital from whence it derived. It was from this exhibition that Breton purchased works by a psychiatric patient for his own collection: the two wooden boxes each identified today as Objet d’aliéné (Object by the alienated, c. 1878).88 The Galerie Vavin and Max Bine exhibitions are the only exhibitions known to have been exclusively dedicated to patients’ art in an artistic context in this decade in Paris. But patients’ objects eventually made their way into surrealist exhibitions, notably in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936.89 Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism enjoyed a popular 37

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reception—­some fifty thousand visitors went to see it.90 Although focusing on the twentieth century, it also included art from the fifteenth century through to the French Revolution, as part of the historical sweep of its seven hundred objects. Fantastic Art was the second in a series of MoMA exhibitions that aimed to introduce important movements in modern art to an American public. The first, presented earlier that year, was Cubism and Abstract Art, for which Alfred Barr presented the infamous flowchart tracing the development of modern art. But while this chart has often been assimilated to a narrative of modern art’s progress toward abstraction and MoMA’s commitment to this particular history of artistic development, Fantastic Art suggested a more assorted and complex history by including “psychotic” works that formed part of a broader sample of comparative material in the exhibition, which included the art of children, folk art, “miscellaneous objects and pictures with a Surrealist character,” as well as scientific objects. Barr included loans from Breton’s and Éluard’s collections of patients’ work as well as from the collection of Hungarian art dealer Ladislas Szecsi.91 In his written guide to the exhibition, Barr ponders: Why should the art of children and the insane be exhibited together with works by mature and normal artists? Actually, nothing could be more appropriate as comparative material in an exhibition of fantastic art, for many children and psychopaths exist, at least part of the time, in a world of their own unattainable to the rest of us save in art or in dreams in which the imagination lives an unfettered life. Surrealist artists try to achieve a comparable freedom of the creative imagination, but they are different in one fundamental way from children and the insane: they are perfectly conscious of the difference between the world of fantasy and the world of reality, whereas children and the insane are often unable to make this distinction.92

While such “fantastic” art is framed as comparative material in the catalog, the press reception demonstrates the confusion that can occur when such art is put on display. Emily Genauer’s review for the New York World Telegram was titled “Real Value of Dada and Surrealist Show Rests on Few Good Pictures: Drawings by Lunatic Asylum Inmates as Good as Most of the 700 Items in Museum’s Fantastic Exhibit.” While she initially flags in her title the relation with asylum art, in the course of her review Genauer ultimately declares that the show’s value “rests on the good pictures in it. And there are probably only a few dozen such out of the seven hundred items in the whole exhibition.”93 The issue of aesthetic quality also begs the question of a potential bewilderment about the status of the artistic subject: Is he or she an artist or an asylum inmate? How does one tell the difference if, as she claims, the work produced by the latter is “as good as most” of the rest? Katherine Dreier, collector and president of the Société anonyme, concerned about what it meant for modern art’s reception in the United States, 38

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vehemently opposed the exhibition of patients’ work (and also that of children), calling its inclusion the result of “mental confusion.”94 For her, “the clock was set back many years!”95 She wrote to Barr: “The fact that you claim from the Surrealist point of view a person’s sanity only adds greater interest—­shows how confused they are as to what is art. I took up this question with Dr. Prinzhorn whose book on the paintings of the insane you must know and we went over hundreds of pictures by the insane together. This was back in 1920. . . . Personally I considered it very dangerous for our American public who are not art-­conscious to present such fare.”96 For Dreier MoMA had played into the hands of art conservatives who claimed modern art to be mad or degenerate, and as a result she withdrew her loans from the exhibition’s iterations, also publicly airing her reservations on the radio talk show Let’s Talk It Over and in the New York Times.97 To the best of my knowledge, Fantastic Art is the only time MoMA included the work of interned psychiatric patients in its exhibition galleries. Subsequently, in the course of the 1940s and 1950s, MoMA refined its exhibition program to align it with the medium-specific definition of art, even as it continued to exhibit modern artists who struggled with mental illness, notably, Vincent van Gogh, Antonin Artaud, and Armando Reverón. Other patient-­artists—­ that is, those who produce work at a physical and psychic remove from the institution of art—­would be left behind by the inheritors of Barr’s torpedo diagram for modernist art, while subsequent artistic turns to therapy as art would become exhibition afterthoughts when compared to the formal display of an artist’s painterly and sculptural work, as in the case of Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, which was presented at MoMA in 2014. By 1961, patient-­artist production would become the domain of MoMA’s former neighbor, the American Folk Art Museum, whose mission is to showcase self-­taught artists, some of whom, though by no means all, are diagnosed with mental illness, while MoMA’s education department has upheld the institution’s commitment to subjects and publics with disabilities.98

· · · If Barr used patients’ art as comparative material in the 1930s, the surrealists incorporated such work in their exhibitions in a decade when the definition of the surrealist object was at stake, especially for Breton.99 The turn to the exhibition of psychiatric patients’ art objects represents a departure from the 1920s, when “madness” inspired diverse surrealist literary and visual productions—­from Breton’s Nadja (1928) to Max Ernst’s copy and collage techniques, which were often inspired by specific Prinzhorn works, to their explicit critiques of psychiatry in the pages of La révolution surrealiste.100 While Prinzhorn’s book has been referred to as the surrealists’ “Picture ­Bible,” what I am concerned with here is how they put to use psychiatric patients’ actual work. 39

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7. Mannequin by Man Ray at the fourth Exposition internationale du surréalisme, Galerie des Beaux-­Arts, Paris, 1938, photograph published in the limited-edition Man Ray, Résurrection des mannequins, 1966. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University. Photo: Man Ray.

The fourth Exposition internationale du surréalisme opened the Galerie des Beaux-­Arts in Paris in 1938.101 For the exhibition’s main display, Duchamp created an environment in which paintings were hung on revolving wooden doors and coal sacks hung from the ceiling. In the entrance space, the so-­called Surrealist Street, visitors were greeted with sixteen mannequins, each outfitted and decorated by a different artist (fig. 7), while “hysterical” laughter was played. Posters and advertisements for past exhibitions, as well as street signs, hung on the neighboring walls. Different objects from Dr. Gaston Ferdière’s collection were on view—­the psychiatrist recalls the presence, “in a corner, [of] the little dolls by my patients.”102 The exhibition blurred the conventional boundaries between media, whereby visitors were to give themselves over to a “loss of self before the spectacle on display.”103 Exposition internationale du surréalisme was to estrange viewers, objects, and space alike. In this exhibition, the patients’ artistic production was folded into the surrealists’ curatorial challenge to the character, composition, and function of display. Unlike Fantastic Art’s comparative framing of such work, with the Exposition internationale du surréalisme the objets des aliénées literally became objets surréalistes.104 In the 1930s both the surrealists and CAM challenged aesthetic norms as well as the dominant social order, yet this double critique played out in divergent fashions with regard to each group’s turn to the work of psychiatric patients. On the one hand, the surrealists championed the purported free40

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dom from rationality represented by the mentally ill and used their objects in a curatorial strategy to defamiliarize bourgeois conventions of viewing and the contemplation it subtends. Breton appropriated the patients’ creations in the service of the marvelous, and consequently these objects lost their identity to an aesthetic calculated to “disrupt sensibility by [re]routing all rational habits.”105 By contrast, at CAM the patients’ work was exhibited as an object of aesthetic and scientific study, and thereby inscribed within the organization’s broader pedagogical program, a public research orientation that also challenged academic resistance to modern art. While both surrealism’s and CAM’s approach to the patients’ art evince appropriative strategies coupled with the aim of artistic transgression directed toward critical ends, a key difference remains. In surrealism, Breton used patients’ objects to illustrate his theories and ideas of the marvelous, as one visual reference among many, including outmoded, natural, and tribal objects. At CAM, the patients’ creative production kept its identity and provenance, and was exhibited and discussed as a valuable contribution to CAM’s modernist aesthetic program. By taking as a given the fact that each example of patients’ work is an instance of a patient’s pathology—­and thus not normal, conventional, or rational—­the surrealists and CAM unwittingly maintained the integrity of the clinical case. Accordingly, each was also out of step with Prinzhorn’s study, which largely understood this art not as an instance of pathology but as evidence of a configurative impulse common to all. Furthermore, as critic Peter Bürger charges in relation to surrealism, “they speak from the shores of a reason that is quite sure of itself,” an echo of Barr’s earlier 1936 assertion that the surrealists are aware of “the difference between the world of fantasy and the world of reality.”106 Similar claims could be extended to CAM and Carvalho, who in his public statements likewise conflated his criticism of academic convention with the “liberation” from convention that he projected onto the experience of the mentally ill. With their varying claims to artistic freedom, both Breton and Carvalho distanced the patients’ actual suffering, a position reinforced in Carvalho’s 1939 interview with Breton.107 But if Breton—­be it in the pages of Nadja or in his curatorial strategy—­spoke from “a reason that is quite sure of itself ” in order to introduce the unconscious and marvelous within everyday reality, Carvalho, with similar intellectual confidence, turned to everyday reality to expose the irrationality within it, also implicating his own subjectivity opposite the “normal” devotees participating in a Corpus Christi ritual.

· · · The 1930s—­the decade when the pioneering exhibitions of Mês das crianças e dos loucos; Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism; and Exposition internationale du surréalisme took place—­witnessed the rise of fascism both in 41

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Europe and in Brazil. Artists in each geographic context were faced with increasing calls to a national unitary identity, classical and academic aesthetic norms, and social order in the service of a healthy nation. In Brazil, Vargas increasingly centralized the government and tightened control over the media first during his tenure as civilian chief of the Provisional Government (1930–­1934), then as president (1934–­1937), and finally as president-­ dictator (1937–­1945). As an artistic and leftist-­political organization, CAM closed its doors at the end of 1933. That year police shut down Carvalho’s Teatro da Experiência (Theater of Experience), which was located on CAM’s ground floor, on account of the performance of his controversial theater play O bailado do Deus morto (The ballet of the dead God). In these years, César and psychiatrist Nise da Silveira were both arrested because of their Marxist affiliations. The wearing away of constitutional rule, the rise of political extremism, and anticommunist paranoia in the wake of the Intentona Comunista in 1935 culminated in the November 1937 coup that ushered in Vargas’s Estado Novo, which aimed to control the future of brasilidade. But in contrast to the propaganda ministries of totalitarian states in Europe, official cultural policy during the Estado Novo remained paradoxical: it often drew on modernist expressions and the advice of modern artists and architects (at times even communist ones) alongside its support of academicism and traditionalism.108 Against this political context one might frame Carvalho’s shift in discourse vis-­à-­vis his early performative gestures and statements. Rather than put the patients’ art to work as a way to test academic convention and challenge normative conceptions of subjectivity, in a dialectical reversal in 1936 he claimed that the only art is abnormal art. In the article “A única arte que presta é a arte anormal” (The one good art is abnormal art), he affirms that “the only art that contains deep artistic value: Abnormal art, or even subnormal art, the only ones that are worth it because they contain what man possesses of the demonic, morbid and sublime, contain what is rare, burlesque, funny and philosophical in thought, something of the essence of life.”109 As with the surrealists before him, the appeal to the irrational became a way to critique not only conservative aesthetics but also the “healthy” nationalist agenda by naming threats to unified conceptions of the self and nation. One year after the first installment of Fantastic Art in New York, Dreier’s fears seem to have materialized across the Atlantic with the Nazi-­mounted exhibition of modern art titled Entartete Kunst in 1937. Inaugurated in Munich, it targeted modern art through didactic slogans such as “Madness becomes method” and “Nature as seen by sick minds,” thus claiming the purportedly diseased origins and threat of cultural decline evinced by the art on display.110 Head of the Chamber of Art Adolf Ziegler (himself an artist) organized the exhibition and declared in his inaugural speech how “this show produces in all of us feelings of shock and disgust.”111 The follow­ ing year, about six weeks after the Exposition internationale du surréalisme, 42

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8. Entartete Kunst exhibition guide, 1938. Cover and page that juxtaposes patient Georg Birnbacher’s portrait to two portraits by Oskar Kokoschka.

Entartete Kunst expanded its content to include comparative material from the Prinzhorn Collection in its iterations in Berlin (February 26–­May 8) and Leipzig (May 13–­June 6).112 Four pages of the Berlin exhibition guide reproduced works by patient-­artists next to modern artists: Karl Genzel’s sculptural head is paired with Eugen Hoffmann’s Mädchen mit blauem Haar (Girl with blue hair), and the patient’s carved face of a cat is printed next to Richard Haizmann’s Fabeltier (Fabulous beast); Oskar Herzberg’s image of a mother and child is printed diagonal to Klee’s Die Heilige vom innern Licht (The saint of the inner light, 1921); and Georg Birnbacher’s portrait is juxtaposed to two portraits by Oskar Kokoschka (fig. 8). As Hal Foster notes, the most reviled works were not necessarily the most abstract but ones that disfigured the body and, by extension, I wager, the human face.113 The Nazis connected such heterogeneous physiognomic figurations of identity—­ from concave eyes and geometric faces to agitated lines that efface “proper” contours and disproportionate facial features—­with the “degenerate” and applied this term to everything they considered other to, and thus threaten­ ing of, their conception of German racial purity: for example, the Jew, the communist, and the homosexual, but also the child, the “primitive,” and 43

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the insane. In this context, the clinical cases that became artistic tableaux in Prinzhorn’s and César’s work became under National Socialist doctrine indissolubly linked to a modern art deemed the expression of pathological subjects.

· · · In the aftermath of World War II, modern artists and institutions, both aesthetic and scientific, would again take on the thought-­provoking task of probing the relation between art and madness in ways that explicitly went against the grain of the Nazis’ racialized belief in the threat of cultural degeneration. With the revival of interest in psychiatric patients’ art in the immediate postwar years, these institutions also returned to the various models of scientific and artistic reception discussed in this chapter: from common configuration to symbolic content, from pedagogical program to marvelous surreality. With the inauguration of the Brazilian Second Republic, the stakes of CAM’s exhibition and César’s work were critically elaborated for the postwar moment. The turn to psychiatric patients’ work as a way of justifying a rupture with academic conventions in art became tied to a critique of psychiatry that emerged alongside the first organized art studios for patients in the asylum context in the mid-­1940s. Here the critique of one modern institution (the asylum) by means of the patients’ production coincided with the inauguration and eventual consolidation of another institution: the first museum of modern art in South America.

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SCENE Doctor: What is your name? Patient: Antônio. Doctor: How old are you? Patient: Twenty-­six years old. Doctor: Do you know where you are? Patient: Yes, in a hospital. Doctor: But where? Patient: The neighborhood of Engenho de Dentro. Doctor: Do you know the name of the hospital? Patient: Hospital Psiquiátrico Pedro II. Doctor: Do you know the name of the street? Patient: No. [silence] Patient: Doctor, I need to tell you something . . . Doctor: Do you know what day it is today? Patient: Doctor, I need to tell you something . . . Doctor: What day is today? Patient: Wednesday. [silence] Patient: Doctor, I need to tell you something . . . Doctor: Do you know the day of the month? Patient: I don’t know if it is 22 or 23. . . . I don’t know [silence] Patient: Doctor, I need to tell you something . . . doctor . . . At that moment the doctor lifted her eyes to look at his face and said: What? And he responded: I feel so alone. In silence she took her prescription pad from the drawer and prescribed 10 electroshocks. Nothing more was said.

Reported by Gina Ferreira, in Cinema na praça: Intervenção na cultura/ Transformando o imaginário social da loucura: Relatos de experiências em saúde mental, ed. Gina Ferreira and Ana Maria Jacó-­Vilela (São Paulo: All Print Editora, 2012), 55.

2 COMMON CREATIVITIES In the fall of 1949, French artist Jean Dubuffet penned his text “L’art brut préféré aux arts culturels” (Art brut preferred to the cultural arts) to accompany an exhibition at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris. The exhibition was not a conventional avant-­garde exhibition but one of what Dubuffet called art brut, a term he had coined in 1945 to designate “drawings, paintings, all works of art emanating from obscure personalities, maniacs; arising from spontaneous impulses, animated by fantasy, even delirium; and strangers to the beaten track of catalogued art.”1 Crucial for Dubuffet was that art brut not form part of any tradition, be it primitive art, folk art, naïf art, or children’s art, just as any artist with formal training would also be excluded from his conception of an art untainted by official culture and its institutions. Art brut, as he explains in the course of the catalog text, has precious little to do with the production of “career intellectuals.” Rather, it is an art “unscathed by artistic culture” and derived from the artists’ “own depths” instead of from convention.2 By way of conclusion, Dubuffet offers a few words about the so-­called art of the insane. He confesses, “Many of the objects in this exhibition (about half) are the works of patients confined to psychiatric hospitals.”3 He then displaces the opposition between normal and abnormal subjects to ask whether the artistic act could “ever be deemed normal.” But rather than merely resuscitate the Romantic association between madness and genius, what was at issue for Dubuffet at this moment was to uphold an understanding of pure creativity common to both the sane and the insane, whereby he affirms that “the artistic function is identical in all cases, and there is no more an art of the insane than there is an art of dyspeptics or of those with knee problems.”4 Such an assessment echoes the seminal work of art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, a vital reference for Dubuffet as well as for the surrealists. In his seminal study on the creative work of psychiatric patients,

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Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill, 1922), Prinzhorn writes of a specific work by his patient Franz Pohl: “What is schizophrenic about this picture? We cannot be certain. . . . Instead we have to make up our minds once and for all to count on a separate creative component and to look for the value of a work only within the work itself.”5 Dubuffet thus shares with Prinzhorn an insistence on a creative faculty common to artists and mental health patients alike. The critical literature has established that the origins of art brut can in part be traced to Dubuffet’s knowledge of various studies and collections of the art of psychiatric patients in Europe, including the Prinzhorn Collection. In regard to the latter, Dubuffet explained: “The pictures in Prinzhorn’s book struck me very strongly when I was young. They showed me the way and were a liberating experience. I realized that everything was permitted, every­thing was possible. Millions of possibilities of expression existed outside of the accepted cultural avenues.”6 In 1945, he went on a three-­week tour of psychiatric hospitals in Switzerland, an experience that propelled him to begin his collection of art brut. In November 1947, he opened the Foyer de l’art brut, which was located in the basement of the Galerie René Drouin, and the following year he formed the Compagnie de l’art brut together with André Breton, Jean Paulhan, Charles Ratton, Henri-­Pierre Roché, and Michel Tapié. The Compagnie had as its principal objective the collection and promotion of such art, and its headquarters were located in a pavilion in the garden of the Éditions Gallimard building.7 As evinced in the few remaining photographs of the Foyer de l’art brut, some of the works stemmed from the collection of Swiss psychiatrist Charles Ladam and were produced by psychiatric patients, although Dubuffet went to great lengths to distinguish art brut from Breton’s contemporary theorization of “les art des fous,” or the art of the insane.8 Among the works reproduced in the pages of the René Drouin catalog is one by a so-­called art brut artist who is also listed among the sixty-­three creators whose works were included in that exhibition. Toward the end of the slim volume, an entry indicates five objects by an “inconnu de são paulo” (unknown from São Paulo) with one illustration of his or her work (fig. 9). Dubuffet printed this black-­and-­white reproduction on the spread across from a work by Adolf Wölfli. The illustration shows a woman who holds what looks like an open urn or vase. She stands over a man, who is lying down with his arms spread to his sides. Both figures’ heads are titled, and they share similar facial features—­large eyes, thick eyebrows, a broad nose—­while a lack of facial hair, pubic hair, and exaggerated breasts (seen in almost cubist perspective) identify the standing figure as female. Together they inhabit a kind of a podium, which, together with the urn, suggests a ritual.

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9. List of work and reproduction (right page) by “Inconnu de São Paulo” (Albino Braz) in the catalog L’art brut préféré aux arts culturels, published on occasion of an art brut exhibition at the Galerie René Drouin, Paris, 1949. Archives de la Collection de l’art brut, Lausanne.

Other than the drawing and the five entries that list title, medium, and dimensions, Dubuffet gives no further information about the Brazilian ­author of this particular work (fig. 10). What is more, in the case of authors clinically diagnosed with some form of mental illness, the catalog preserves partial anonymity by using abbreviations for the patients’ names and refrains from providing medical diagnoses. In the specific case of the “unknown from São Paulo,” no clue, not even an abbreviation, offers insight into whether he or she is sane or insane, institutionalized or not. Nor are we told how this work traveled across the Atlantic to arrive in Dubuffet’s hands and thus to be featured in an art brut exhibition. We can infer only that the work must have been produced, as per Dubuffet’s definition of art brut, by a person “unscathed by artistic culture.”9

· · ·

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10. Albino Braz, Untitled, between 1934 and 1949. Graphite and colored pencil on paper, 32 x 23 cm. Collection de l’art brut, Lausanne.

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In these years, the Centre psychiatrique Sainte-­Anne in Paris was another venue where one found exhibitions of art produced by those who were at a physical and psychic remove from the world of French official artistic culture. In 1946, the hospital hosted the Exposition d’œuvres de malades mentaux (Exhibition of works by the mentally ill), which was conceived of as a response to the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art) exhibition mounted by the Nazis in 1937 to target modern art and also the work produced by psychiatric patients, claiming the pathological origins of each. At Sainte-­Anne the ­exhibition’s principal organizers were the hospital director Benjamin Graulle and head ­ erdière and the painter physician Dr. R. Bessière, together with Dr. Gaston F Abraham Schwarz-­Abryls, who had been a patient at Sainte-­Anne. Ferdière, who was then working in Rodez and was well known both for his relation to the surrealists and, perhaps more infamously, as the psychiatrist of Antonin Artaud, delivered an inaugural address.10 (Around this time, Artaud also entered the debate on the relation between madness and art with the publication in 1947 of his volume Van Gogh le suicidé de la société [Van Gogh suicided by society], a vitriolic critique of psychiatric practice that at once offers some of the most precise formal and materialist readings of Vincent van Gogh’s work.) In the contemporary press for the exhibition, writers emphasized the public’s discovery of such work as well as its aesthetic quality. The critic for Libération writes: “The exhibited paintings have nothing pathological. That is to say nothing particularly pathological. Their range goes from infantile and naïf color to the super-­modern work accessible only to ‘aesthetes.’ ”11 Another critic in La Presse describes how some visitors were thinking about “Picasso-­isms or of other surrealisms,”12 while a writer for Le Figaro maintains that there are “several paintings of considerable artistic interest, which could be signed by the masters of modern painting.”13 The critics emphasized the styles of the work and the fact that they could have been created by many a contemporary artist. Finally, in line with the organizers’ ambitions, another writer notes how the exhibition “shows that madness seems to have little effect on the plastic sense [sens plastique] and the creative gifts of the patient.”14 If in 1949 Dubuffet knew precious little about the “unknown from São Paulo,” the following year, similar work would appear in the context of the Exposition internationale d’art psychopathologique (International psychopathological art exhibition), which was organized alongside the Premier congrès mondial de psychiatrie, at the Centre psychiatrique Sainte-­Anne. But this second exhibition, which ran from September 21 to October 14, 1950, was much broader and international in scope. It included approximately two thousand works created by more than 350 psychiatric patients, and forty-­five psychiatric collections from seventeen countries were represented.15 To exhibit the works, Graulle transformed one of the facility’s buildings into an exhibition venue with six galleries. The upper gallery was 51

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11. Exposition internationale d’art psychopathologique, Centre psychiatrique Sainte-­Anne, Paris, 1950. Exhibition view. Instituto Municipal Juliano Moreira Collection.

dedicated to patients’ work that had been culled from French and Brazilian psychiatric collections (fig. 11). The works on view were documented with approximately nine hundred black-­and-­white photographs and two hundred in color, many of which can be seen in the contemporary 1950 film Images de la folie by E. Duvivier.16 In his volume L’art psychopathologique from 1956, Dr. Robert Volmat brings together extensive documentation related to the exhibition. Volmat, who had worked as an assistant to psychiatrist Jean Delay in preparation for the Premier congrès mondial de psychiatrie and was himself an expert on psychopathological expression, explains how the exhibition’s objective was twofold: first, it was to bring together works of significant scientific interest; second, it was to give the public an opportunity to perceive the aesthetic and human value of the patients’ expression (he uses the term aliénés), thereby echoing some of the first exhibition’s press reception. Similar to the exhibition in structure, Volmat’s book includes a brief gloss on each country and collection. Within this framework, Volmat also provides individual entries for each of the “cases,” including name, date of birth or age, date of 52

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internment, profession, brief family history, diagnoses (e.g., schizophrenia, chronic alcoholism, hysteria), artistic formation (if applicable), and descriptive commentary on the work, which is tied to a specific diagnosis. Hence, with regard to case 318 and figure 91, he writes, “The exhibited oil painting represents a landscape, and is typically schizophrenic with the rigidity of forms and their geometry.”17 Consequently, in the course of this work, Volmat affirms how such paintings are direct expressions of the mentally ill personality, stating, “If the mentally ill expresses himself totally in his work, the work totally expresses his illness.”18 Thus, contrary to Prinzhorn and the afterlife of his thought in Dubuffet, each of whom theorized the existence of a creative impulse independent of mental illness, by 1950 the scientific context’s diagnostic drive insisted on the visibility of pathology in the painted sign in the works on view at Sainte-­Anne. If art brut was framed as an example of a purely personal expression, within the context of psychopathological studies, the art was put to work within a scientific episteme as the object of a clinical gaze. The Brazilian section included fifty-­eight works by ten of Dr. Osório César’s patients. Other Brazilian collections included those of Dr. Mário Yahn, Heitor Péres, and Nise da Silveira.19 The first case listed under César’s collection is that of a patient named Albino Braz. The case entry begins: “Schizophrenia, sub-­excitation, ideational association through concordance and resemblance. Ideas of grandeur, excited moods and actions; good spatio­temporal orientation (17 drawings of neo-­primitive style with harmonious composition of themes and colors, rich symbolism).”20 Volmat further reports César’s observations about how, when read through a Freudian lens, the work can be classified according to four periods. What interests me here, however, is the entry’s final two lines. Citing the Galerie René Drouin catalog, Volmat explains that Braz’s work had previously been exhibited by the Compagnie de l’art brut, which had attributed it to “the unknown from São Paulo.” In the book’s plates section figure 6 is a work by Albino Braz (fig. 12), with notable stylistic and figurative similarity to the work shown at the Galerie René Drouin.21 But here, rather than two figures, is a woman with similar features holding two small birds; a flower hangs from her mouth. She seems to float in an undifferentiated space, filled only with the patient’s short diagonal marks, with a cat on the lower right providing indication of a literal ground (in Volmat’s book the orientation of the work is flipped along the vertical axis). In the French context Braz’s work is thus at once exemplary of the psychopathology of art and art brut. Within the psychopathology of art, a patient’s work is upheld primarily for its diagnostic value and how it might expand the scientific understanding of mental illness. For the work to function as art brut, it may derive from a psychiatric patient like Braz, but the work’s provenance remains secondary to its actual aesthetic. Archival documentation reveals César’s direct contact with Dubuffet, who had written 53

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12. Drawing by Albino Braz, reproduced in Robert Volmat, L’art psychopathologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956).

to him requesting work samples for his collection. In a letter to Dubuffet, César describes his patients’ work as “original and varied,” and the French artist echoes this assessment by further declaring it “free from all outside influence.”22 Accordingly, Dubuffet understands the work within his avant-­ garde gambit in search of pure creativity and, crucially, as subverting official artistic culture. Such an understanding of art brut’s subversiveness as well as its nonofficial cultural status is repeatedly echoed in Dubuffet’s writings as well as in the work of his acolytes, such as Michel Thévoz, who directed the Collection de l’art brut in Lausanne from its founding in 1976 until 2001. In his 1976 volume on art brut, Thévoz distills three “essential features” of the art brut artist: he or she is a social or mental outsider, the work is produced (and circulates) outside of the institution of art, and the works derive from “personal invention” rather than tradition.23 For Dubuffet, his art brut collection and exhibitions in Paris at the end of the 1940s remained almost clandestine events, consciously off the radar of institutional cultural programs. In contrast, approximately ten thousand visitors saw the works on display in the Exposition internationale d’art psycho­ 54

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pathologique. Yet what art brut shares with the psychopathology of art is a break with the conventions and spaces of official artistic culture, foremost among them the art museum. That the work remained on the outside of the official cultural institutions of the time is also evinced by the fact that in the European context Braz’s work ended up in two very different collections: the Collection de l’art brut and the Collection Sainte-­Anne. But what if such work, and more specifically the work of psychiatric patients, was presented not as “outside” to official artistic culture but as part of cultural production itself? To further understand how such work was differently understood and framed in mid-­twentieth-­century Brazil, we must turn to César and the occupational therapy of the Rio-­based Silveira, as well as to how their patients’ creative production was discussed and the spaces in which it was exhibited and ultimately legitimated as art.

· · · Given his developing desire for the patients’ work to be understood as art, César organized the Primeira exposição de arte do Hospital do Juquery at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). Supported by the Departamento de Cultura da Associação Paulista de Medicina, the exhibition was on view at the museum’s original location in an existing building on Rua Sete de Abril from October 19 to December 19, 1948. MASP’s archive contains correspondence between the museum and the association about the course Ciência Medicas e Arte (Medical Sciences and Art), which was programmed alongside the exhibition, as well as a few press clippings from the Diário de São Paulo that cover the various course lectures, whose topics ranged from the relation between psychology and art to architecture and medicine.24 In light of the contemporaneous exhibition of patients’ work in Paris as a clandestine avant-­garde event or a spectacular pathological art exhibition, it is striking that these works were shown in a newly inaugurated museum of art (and not as comparative material, as in MoMA’s Fantastic Art, or propagandistically, as in Entartete Kunst). What is more, the exhibition of psychiatric patients’ creations in an artistic context has a historical precedent in Brazil (see chapter 1).25 With its exhibition and extensive lecture program, the exhibition recalls the earlier Mês das crianças e dos loucos, which had been organized by César and Flávio de Carvalho at the Clube dos Artistas Modernos (CAM) in 1933.26 The difference in 1948 was that the works were presented in an art museum and were likely installed in MASP’s temporary exhibition space with the lectures programmed in the adjacent small auditorium (both spaces were designed by Lina Bo Bardi).27 To the best of my knowledge, no installation views have survived of the patients’ exhibition at MASP. Further documentation may have existed, but a fire in 2005 destroyed a large part of César’s library and archive. Therefore, given the more extensive documentation, I turn to related developments in Rio de Janeiro and what ­psychiatric 55

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patients’ creative production meant specifically for the development of modern art and its institutions in Brazil. César’s Rio-­based colleague Silveira shared his progressive stance. A signed copy of César’s A expressão artística nos alienados: Contribuição para o estudo dos símbolos na arte (The artistic expression of the alienated: Contribution to the study of symbols in art, 1929) in Silveira’s personal library confirms that they met as early as 1932, thus exposing Silveira early on to the creative production of psychiatric patients as well as the writing about them. In 1944 Silveira began work as a psychiatrist at the Centro Psiquiátrico Nacional Pedro II in the Rio neighborhood of Engenho de Dentro.28 But rather than turn to Freud, she first turned to Antonin Artaud for inspiration and subsequently settled on the theories of Carl Jung.29 In the course of her career, she was repeatedly referred to as a “rebellious psychiatrist” who vehemently criticized the psychiatric institution and its aggressive practices such as lobotomy and electroshock.30 She developed alternative therapeutic models for her patients and continually advocated for better conditions in the hospitals.31 In 1946, in collaboration with painter Almir Mavignier, she opened a painting studio for her patients at the hospital, a studio that continues its activities to this day.32 In his capacity as studio monitor from 1946 to 1951, Mavignier helped to organize exhibitions of the patients’ work and encouraged art-­world figures such as the Belgian critic Léon Degand and Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa, as well as painters Ivan Serpa and Abraham Palatnik, to visit. The first exhibition of her patients’ art took place at the hospital, just three months after the painting studio opened. A similar exhibition was again on view in early 1947 at the Ministério da Educação e Saúde, from which a selection was then featured at the Associação Brasileira de Imprensa, where Pedrosa first encountered the work and also delivered his lecture “Arte, necessidade vital” (Art, vital necessity) the day of the exhibition’s closing ­(Pedrosa’s reception of the patients’ work is the subject of chapter 3). A year and a half after these initial exhibitions in Rio, her patients’ creative production was featured in the exhibition 9 artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro (9 artists from Rio de Janeiro’s Engenho de Dentro; fig. 13), which opened on October 12, 1949, at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-­SP), then also located at the Sete de Abril building and thus MASP’s literal neighbor. As its title suggests, the exhibition represented the work of nine patients—­Adelina Gomes, Carlos Pertuis, Emygdio de Barros, José Goulart, Kleber Leal Pessoa, Lúcio Noeman, Raphael Domingues, Vicente, Wilson Nascimento—­and included 179 works across various mediums. (Works by four of these patient-­artists, Raphael, Carlos, Lúcio, and Adelina, would be shown the following year in Paris at the Exposition internationale d’art psychopathologique.) While Degand initiated the idea of an exhibition with Mavignier, its actual organization took place under the tenure of the museum’s second director, Lourival Gomes Machado. In a letter to Mavignier dated September 9, 1949, Gomes Machado stresses the criteria 56

13. 9 artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1949. Exhibition views. Courtesy Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente.

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for selecting the work for exhibition: “We are interested in works of art and, therefore, all works predetermined by clinical interests (for example, simply ‘cathartic’ paintings) or educational (the long repetitions of the same series of drawings) should be excluded [relegados]. From there, I think, you could exercise a merciless cut, so that the works fit into our small museum.”33 Such criteria, he also suggests, were agreed upon in conversation with Silveira. In his letter, Gomes Machado also proposes the conditions for the works’ display, for which he planned to allocate the larger gallery, whose walls could be extended through the use of portable panels. In this way, he explains, the smaller gallery could be used as a room for comparison with other artists. Mavignier responded, somewhat warily, to the director’s proposal for a second comparative gallery: “For this first exhibition a more direct comparison between our artists and those outside of Engenho de Dentro had not been thought, [a suggestion] I am led to understand from your letter; . . . [it] is a new angle that requires study in order not to suggest precipitated, even malevolent, comparisons.”34 While his hope for a comparative gallery was abandoned, Gomes Machado’s anticlinical and purely aesthetic appreciation of the work was not. The exhibition catalog’s introduction affirms that, “interested exclusively in the artistic value of the works coming from Engenho de Dentro, the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors to them.”35 At the level of museum politics, the statement makes patently clear the work’s assimilation to a particular conception of aesthetic modernism based on autonomy and aesthetic quality. What is on display inside the museum is the aesthetics of an autonomous modern art; what remains outside is the psychic condition and institutional context from which the works arise. The museum welcomed psychic ­difference but at once framed its expression as exclusively aesthetic in order to position the museum’s identity and the institution of modern art against such expressions of nonnormative subjectivity.36 In the work of modern European artists from the surrealists to D ­ ubuffet, the “art of the insane” was posited as radically other and marked by externality, while at times used to refresh and expand the formal vocabulary of modernist art. As a result, these forms of psychic expression were largely mined as a formal device and as a way to disrupt the official spaces of culture—­ hence Dubuffet’s sustained postwar opposition between the arts culturels and what he called art brut.37 In the case of MAM-­SP’s discursive policing of the inside and outside, the catalog’s opening statement suppressed the clinical reading of the work in order to proclaim it as a triumph for modern and abstract art and its institutions. Thus differing from art brut and the psychopathological studies with which it coincides, in Brazil the ­patients’ creative production was crucial not only to the discourse of modernist abstraction and its institutionalization in South America’s first museum of modern art (MAM-­SP); in these years it was also regularly exhibited in the very space of the modernist museum. 58

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· · · Two years after the success of 9 artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro, MAM-­SP, perhaps not surprisingly, followed it with the Exposição de artistas alienados (Exhibition of alienated artists, 1951), exhibiting patients’ work from the Seção de Artes Plásticas (Fine Arts Section) at Juquery hospital. When César began his work at Juquery, no space was dedicated to the patients’ art activities (see chapter 1). Nevertheless, the hospital did have an extensive labor therapy program, which, in line with hospital practices at the time, provided patients with work in various workshops that also served the hospital. Thus, as a poster for Juquery Labor Therapy Services shows, by 1946 labor was organized according to agriculture and cattle raising, in addition to industrial workshops and domestic work that included kitchen and laundry duties (fig. 14). A section on the poster also lists diverse activities (ocupações), including the jazz band and sports. Alongside the various trades one also sees painters listed, although “painters” here likely refers to the work of painting the institution’s walls and not what would come to be known as art therapy in the course of the 1950s. In response to the organization of local and international exhibitions such as the exhibition at MASP and the Exposition internationale d’art psychopathologique, the Juquery hospital administration finally supported the formalization of an art section for the patients in early 1949: the Seção de Artes Plásticas, which was first headed by César’s colleague Mário Yahn. The newly established section also decided to employ a professional artist, a decision no doubt informed by similar developments in Rio de Janeiro and the success of Mavignier’s work as monitor. In his review of 9 artistas de Engenho de Dentro, César had commented on this development as follows: “There is also in the Service in Engenho de Dentro a fine arts section that is oriented technically by the painter Almir Mavignier. With the present exhibition we see how it [this practice] has admirably succeeded, not only from the point of view of technique but also from expression and color, to orient a group of patients, respecting their ideas, and their creative impulses.”38 With regard to the employment of a professional artist in the Seção de Artes Plásticas at Juquery, Yahn, in his account of the space’s creation, maintains: “Speaking little, creating more favorable working conditions, suggesting ideas so that there could be, in the same section, a permanent exhibition of works such that newer works would substitute older ones, putting herself in direct contact with the alienated [who are] not always in a good mood, without showing any fear or scruple, [the section monitor] created around her the ideal atmosphere for the success of the new section.”39 For Yahn, such an ideal atmosphere was not about teaching art but encouraging the patients in their spontaneous production within a favorable and organized work environment. A year later in the pages of Habitat, the arts and culture magazine under the editorial direction of Pietro Maria Bardi and Lina Bo 59

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14. Labor Therapy Services poster, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery, São Paulo, 1946. Núcleo de Acervo, Memória e Cultura, Museu Osório César, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery.

Bardi, he says in relation to patient José Thephilio, “His work is spontaneous and made of pure imagination.”40 Here Yahn upholds the myth of the spontaneous manifestation of artistic creativity, when in fact what is revealed in his statements is a discursive shift away from spontaneity toward “orientation” within a newly conceived section with its own proper space: a former hydrotherapy room with baths outfitted with tables where the patients could work.41 This new space allocated to the patients’ production introduced a modification in the hospital’s approach to patients’ work: from physical ­labor to creative labor. Accordingly, Yahn’s report also bespeaks a shift from 60

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the psychiatric collection to the patients’ studio, which serves at once as a site of a permanent exhibition and reception of their work by the patients and hospital staff: the “public” inside Juquery. Maria Leontina Franco da Costa, the section monitor referred to in Yahn’s account, was the first professional artist employed to help orient the patients’ creative activities (she was followed by Clélia Rocha in 1953–­1955 and by Moacyr de Vicentis Rocha in 1955–­1957). Yahn explicitly references her formative role in a letter to Volmat, who had written to him with a series of questions in the wake of the Paris exhibition.42 Maria Leontina would go to the hospital every one to two weeks over the course of two years. She was, moreover, a well-­known painter at the time. She had her first solo exhibition in 1950 at the Galeria Domus, which produced a small exhibition brochure with an introduction to her work penned by critic Sérgio Milliet.43 The exhibition received a positive response in the press, including a review by César.44 That same year she was part of the Brazilian delegation to the Venice Biennale. About her work at Juquery, she recalls, “[I was] recommended by art critic Osório César; this experience was very important as a professor.”45 In these years, she participated in the first Bienal de São Paulo, winning the Moinho Santista Prize, and exhibited in the country’s museums of modern art. For the Exposição de artistas alienados at MAM-­SP, Maria Leontina likely chose the work on display (fig. 15). Her own work at the intersection of abstraction and figuration—­and hence her aesthetic criteria—­no doubt informed her choices. The modest leaflet published on occasion of the exhibition explains: The Museum of Modern Art aims to highlight, with this exhibition, only the artistic expression of the alienated, their aesthetic sensibility. It reveals itself as always extremely curious and easy to be perceived in the simple confrontation between different conceptions and symbolisms, the varieties of style and technique, the search for color and form, the equilibrium, the harmony, and the subtleties of artistic treatment [tratamento plástico]. The works here displayed are the ones that stand out among the huge production by the interned who frequent the painting section of Juquery hospital. They constitute the realization of authentic artists and not simple examples of the artistic expression of the mentally ill. Their art is only, due to circumstance, more transient than that of the normal; however, it is rigidly within the laws of aesthetics.46

As with the catalog introduction to 9 artistas de Engenho de Dentro, the museum discourse again emphasizes the institution’s exclusively aesthetic appreciation of the patients’ works. But, here, it goes even further to affirm the patient-­artists’ status as authentic artists and to thereby disavow a psycho­ 61

15. Exposição de artistas alienados, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1951. Exhibition views. Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

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pathological understanding, a stance undoubtedly informed by César’s increasingly vehement arguments against such a designation in the wake of the congress and exhibition at Sainte-­Anne. In his lecture at the Société médico-­psychologique in Paris the following year, “L’art chez les aliénés dans l’hôpital de Juquery” (The art of the insane at Juquery hospital, 1952), César characterized the newly established art section as a “laboratoire de recherches plastiques” (laboratory of artistic research) and similarly detailed how a professional painter oriented the section and distributed materials but did not exercise any influence over the patients, who have “total liberty to realize what they want.”47 He identifies the majority of patients as schizophrenic and comments on the “rich symbolism” found in their work. He then poses the question, “What result did we obtain?” In his response he maintains, “In the face of this richness, we believe that psychiatrists, psychologists, art critics, should hesitate to employ in their vocabulary the humiliating denomination of pathological art to designate this artistic expression among the alienated. There is, in fact, nothing pathological; it is merely an expression of feeling of an interior world different than our own. It is in the same way with African art, primitive Arab art and Gothic art, which are the consequence of diverse cultures and are entirely distant from our contemporary artistic culture, still influenced by the culture of the Italian Renaissance.”48 What is of interest here is that, unlike the French psychiatric context at this time, with its emphasis on psychopathology, César shifts theoretical orientation: he analyzes the work produced by patients for its symbolism (and thus to understand the unconscious mind), yet abandons the evolutionary discourse and discussion of atavistic regression that characterized his 1929 A expressão artística nos alienados to make a claim for a sense of self that is different but not necessarily “regressive” even when it remains “other” to our own. Upon his return from Paris, he would take up the section’s direction.

· · · Beyond MAM-­SP’s affirmation that the works were an expression of authentic artists and the concerted shift away from the discourse of psychopathology so present in Paris at the time, I wish to draw attention to how the museum advertised the “varieties of style and technique” of the patients’ work on display. MAM-­SP’s early archival records contain approximately twenty photographs by Alice Brill (all dated June 1951) that document the exhibition display and individual works. Four photographs present views of the exhibition, and the remaining sixteen document individual works by the following patient-­artists: Yosky, Farid, Ana, Haydée, Alcina, Baraquiel, Aurora, and Sebastião Faria. In the same file are also Brill’s photographs of works by Braz and Rubens. Even the most cursory review of this documentation

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reveals that, with the exception of Baraquiel’s “surreal” interior (one notes the ­distorted perspective, the woman’s disproportionate arm that reaches to grab the stem of a flower, and the personified flowerpot with a face and tears on the right) all other works included in the exhibition share what one might call a more naïf and abstract style. Thus, for example, the flattened perspective and planar use of color in Alcina’s Toureiro (Bullfighter, c. 1950); the schematic division between foreground and background in Farid’s landscape, as well as its varied brushstrokes; and, finally, the figurative expressionism of Aurora’s paintings, one of which was chosen as the exhibition leaflet’s cover image.49 In an exhibition view one notes Haydée’s signature painted lions with broad brushstrokes and minimal attention to realistic details (see fig. 15). The archival documentation related to the exhibition demonstrates not variety but a limited set of aesthetic criteria employed when choosing the works. In this way, the particular aesthetic of the patients’ work on view responded to the decade’s support of abstract tendencies in art and of the École de Paris, as seen in the works by European artists from Fernand Léger to Pierre Soulages on display in MAM-­SP’s inaugural exhibition Do figurativismo ao abstracionismo (From figuration to abstraction, 1949), curated by Degand. The goal to expose the Brazilian public to abstract art, over and above the figuration that represented prior generations of Brazilian painters such as Cândido Portinari, continued under Gomes Machado’s direction and characterizes both MAM-­SP directors’ early support of patients’ art.50 It follows that the choice of work reinforced MAM-­SP’s legitimization of the work’s aesthetic and abstract qualities and not necessarily the museum’s reckoning with its site of production (the asylum) or the particular demographic of the hospital’s population: the urban poor, immigrants, and blacks, as well as women who threatened “feminine” norms.51 It is thus hardly surprising that Rubens’s highly detailed drawings in china ink on paper were omitted from the actual exhibition. The five Rubens drawings documented in the archive include two portraits as well as drawings of the hospital’s bakery, the art section, and the courtyard (see figs. 16–­17). On the back of each photograph documenting the individual works is written in pencil “não exposto” (not exhibited). The exhibition brochure indicates, however, that he was represented by one work, his Senhoras ao remendo (Ladies mending), which shows a group of women seated and repairing clothes. These women likely represent the hospital’s sewing workshop, but, without the other images, the psychiatric context is not identifiable as such. Rubens’s other drawings were excluded on two accounts: from an aesthetic perspective they are realist in their attention to the representation of everyday life, but the “life” he represents is one that takes place inside Juquery. Of Rubens’s nonexhibited works, what strikes me is his representation of the hospital’s Seção de Artes Plásticas, as well as the courtyard. In the first drawing, Rubens depicts the section’s crowded space with multiple ­patients at work at tables and a few others at easels. Yahn is pictured in the 64

16. Rubens, Seção de artes plásticas (Fine arts section), c. 1950. Drawing. Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

17. Rubens, Pátio do hospital (Hospital courtyard), c. 1950. Drawing. Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

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18. Patient-­artist Rubens at work in the Seção de Artes Plásticas, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery, São Paulo, 1950. Alice Brill / Instituto Moreira Salles Collection. Photo: Alice Brill.

far-­right background surveying a patient paint, while Leontina, the space’s artistic monitor, is seen on the lower left extending a cup of food to another. At the lower right corner, Rubens has drawn a likeness of Aurora, who in the course of the 1950s became one of the section’s best-­known painters outside of Juquery. Another series of photographs by Brill speaks to the veracity and almost documentary quality of Rubens’s drawing. These photographs also constitute the remaining scant visual documentation of the space as it existed in those early years. One photograph shows Rubens at work on his drawing of the bakery; a second pictures two patients seated next to the large tub repurposed from its hydrotherapeutic function to serve their work in ceramics (figs. 18–­19). In a third photograph the shower fixture and pipes are odd presences among the two- and three-­dimensional work on display (fig. 20).52 One sees here, too, as in Rubens’s drawing of the section, how Leontina filled the space from floor to ceiling with the patients’ work. The

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19. Seção de Artes Plásticas, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery, São Paulo, 1950. Alice Brill / Instituto Moreira Salles Collection. Photo: Alice Brill.

space, as Yahn’s testimony, Brill’s photographs, and Rubens’s drawing bear witness, was also an exhibition venue, functioning simultaneously as a space of production, exhibition, and reception. For Rubens, this space was also the subject matter of his art. Furthermore, Brill’s photographs within and outside of Juquery reveal how the exhibition display shifts between the sites she captures through her lens: from the salon hang at the hospital, which incorporates the largest number of works (note the presence of Rubens’s drawings in fig. 20), to the presentation of individual and paired works, framed and hung on MAM-­SP’s elegant partition walls. Finally, MAM-­SP’s archival record suggests that Braz, too, was not included in the exhibition. The very qualities that confirmed his art brut status—­innovative personal expression and curious figurative compositions—­did not find the same modernist reception in midcentury Brazil. If Rubens’s drawing of the Seção de Artes Plásticas shows the emerging

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20. Patient work on display in the Seção de Artes Plásticas, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery, São Paulo, 1950. Alice Brill / Instituto Moreira Salles Collection. Photo: Alice Brill.

regime of what eventually came to be identified as art therapy, and the type of work produced within it, his drawing of the hospital courtyard probably documents the space just outside of one of the male pavilions at Juquery (see fig. 17). In this image as in the space it depicts, benches provide seating for some patients, while others stand in line. Unlike his portraits, which reveal the individuality and activity of single patients, here Rubens shows us uniformity of dress and overcrowded conditions through the distribution and number of bodies represented in the space. In the course of the 1950s, such evident overcrowding was a cause for concern. In the years 1953–­1955, approximately sixty patients took part in the Seção de Artes Plásticas, but around fifteen thousand individuals (men, women, and children) were interned in the hospital.53 Therefore, the section accommodated a whopping 0.4 percent of the hospital’s patients—­a minor history indeed.

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· · · In the context of such newly founded Brazilian museums of art as MASP and MAM-­SP, the patients’ work was exhibited as art (although at times categorized as alienado) and championed as part of the history of aesthetic modernism at MAM-­SP. But in both France and Brazil, the patients’ work, whether viewed as art brut or as modern art, was largely supported on account of its aesthetic (rather than diagnostic) quality. A crucial discontinuity arises, however, both in the style of the work that was chosen for exhibition (figurative versus abstract) and, more important, in the spaces in which the work was exhibited in the postwar years. In the French context the shift from the asylum and art brut gallery to the art museum took some twenty years, from 1946 and the first exhibition at Sainte-­Anne until 1967, when Dubuffet finally allowed his collection to be shown in a museum, albeit the Musée des arts décoratifs, not a modernist museum.54 Similar European hospital collections of patients’ work, such as the notable Prinzhorn Collection, would also not be shown again in art museums in Europe until the mid-­1960s. In further contrast to these European developments, as early as 1954, César used art museum exhibitions as a platform for fund-­raising to support patients’ creative activities through the sale of work, which, in the face of increasing economic difficulties in the course of the decade, became the near-­ exclusive means by which to secure financial resources. When the Seção de Artes Plásticas became officially known as the Escola Livre de Artes Plásticas (ELAP, or Free School of Fine Arts) in 1956, César’s own orientation had also moved beyond the exclusive study of Freudian symbolism in ­patients’ art to an understanding of art therapy and social reintegration as two distinct but interrelated ends for his patients.55 Under the auspices of the Instituição de Assistência Social ao Psicopata (IASP), an independent organization without government funding, the Seção de Artes Plásticas relied on donations and the sale of patients’ work, among other activities, to function. With regard to a 1957 exhibition, he entreats: “I would like to make an appeal to have the exhibited works acquired. In this way, you would be giving great assistance, because we are having difficulties due to the increase of all the [various] materials we use.”56 (César’s strategy contrasts with Silveira, who insisted on preserving her patients’ work for further scientific study as part of the collection of the Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, which she founded in 1952.) Yet the acceptance of patients’ creative production as art and its exhibition in the country’s leading institutions was not without its detractors in the late 1940s and 1950s. Controversy surrounding the work of Silveira’s patients began with the first exhibitions in Rio de Janeiro in 1947, with critics both supporting and criticizing an understanding of such creative expressions as art. But the debate between Quirino Campofiorito, art critic, painter,

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and professor at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes, and Pedrosa intensified on account of the exhibition 9 artistas de Engenho de Dentro at MAM-­SP—­ that is, because of the works’ presentation in a museum of modern art.57 ­Between the exhibition’s opening in São Paulo in October and its closing at its second venue, the Câmara Distrital do Rio de Janeiro, approximately twenty articles appeared in the press. Pedrosa, whose support of the work was by this time well established, takes up themes he had addressed two years earlier in his lecture “Arte, necessidade vital.” In the pages of Correio da Manhã, he describes how the works are “characterized by a strong expressive force” but also takes issue with a “reactionary prejudice” that imposes normality.58 Accordingly, Pedrosa defends the patients’ work within a universal (his term is global) conception of criação pura (pure creation) and aesthetic reception. In contrast, Campofiorito repeatedly focuses on the works’ scientific dimension as well as the rationality he claims differentiates artistic subjectivity. After all, he explains, the artist has an obligation to be a “dignified professional” engaged with his métier.59 He also suggests that as an exhibition 9 artistas constituted a mere pretext for endorsing abstract art. Hence, as sociologist Glaucia Villas Bôas also affirms, Campofiorito positions the works’ reception within the larger battle between figuration and abstraction that structured art criticism and production at the time.60 With his article “Esquizofrenia e arte,” published in O Jornal on December 14, 1949, Campofiorito finally broaches the issue of the works’ aesthetic quality. Writing about how such work was being harnessed to justify modern abstract art, he maintains, “If some healthy artists produce things that look like those [patients’] works, it is necessary to consider that in this fact resides their weakness [debilidade].”61 Campofiorito shifts the terms of his position away from a consideration of the works’ clinical origins and thus from the discursive conditions and differences between the ends of psychiatry and the ends of art, and in a perverse dialectical twist he also relegates modernist abstraction to the realm of debilidade. Here debilidade suggests not only weakness but also intellectual disability (or what was formerly known as “mental retardation”). For Campofiorito it was a question not only of whether the patients’ work was art. At issue was also whether modernist abstraction, from Wassily Kandinsky to Paul Klee, was the product of “mediocre” artistic demonstrations of what he designated as a “schizophrenic covering” (revestimento esquizofrênico).62 Even though Campofiorito would always praise the therapeutic work of psychiatrists such as Silveira, a troubling reversibility haunts his discourse: if the patients’ art is seen as modernist in appearance, then the art of modernists could be considered as pathological in origin.63 Such a view taps into the early conservative criticisms of modern art, like the one waged by Monteiro Lobato against Anita Malfatti’s painting; so too, however, does it recall more recent German fascist assessments, as made public twelve years 70

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earlier in 1937 in the Nazi exhibition Entartete Kunst, which featured work by Lasar Segall.64 Perhaps in response to the specter of fascism evoked by Campofiorito’s remarks in the context of Brazil’s democratic Second Republic, Flávio de Aquino raises a challenging question four days later: “In whose name could we summarily negate the value of the work by artists from Engenho de Dentro?” He acknowledges that such work does not discredit modern art but is instead proof of its “legitimacy.”65 Similarly, MAM-­SP’s subsequent affirmation of the Juquery patients as authentic artists did not hold some critics at bay. Architect João Vilanova Artigas ridiculed the work’s framing as art: “The attempt to establish the art of the insane as a separate artistic manifestation, with value in itself, as if it were a new school of creation, has an already lengthy history, well trodden by theorists, psychiatrists and art critics, who, hand in hand, wallow in human miseries that the bourgeoisie, unable to extinguish, maintains, and of which, in the end, it takes advantage to erect the building of their decadent theses.”66 For Artigas, a Marxist, the attempt to frame the patients’ art as an authentic artistic expression ultimately failed to understand madness as the product of capitalist social relations. Where conservative academics largely focused on the irrational in the aesthetic, Artigas, in dialectical counterpart, points to the irrationality of a bourgeoisie that was unable to redress (“extinguish”) such human suffering.67 Nevertheless, psychiatric patients’ work found a predominantly positive reception in Brazil and has enjoyed a robust legacy there in the postwar years. Pedrosa developed his concept of arte virgem in the late 1940s on account of such work; Emygdio de Barros was presented in the second Bienal de São Paulo in 1953; Walter Zanini included an Arte Incomum (Uncommon art) section in the Bienal de São Paulo in 1981; Heloisa Ferraz organized a joint exhibition venture of MAC-­USP and the Museo Osório César in 1987; and larger-­scale exhibitions have taken place, such as the five-­hundred-­year Rediscovery exhibition, which included the section Imagens do Inconsciente in 2000 and whose organizing committee counted Luiz Carlos Mello, Lula Wanderley, and Lygia Pape among its members. These are but some of the many exhibitions, panel discussions, and events that have taken place. Furthermore, these works made their way into the collections of prominent museums in Brazil. In 1974, César donated 102 works by his patients to MASP. Nine of the artists represented by this donation were featured in the Exposition internationale d’art psychopathologique: Braz (case 12 in Volmat’s book), H. Novais (case 13), A. Donato de Souza (case 14), Pedro Cornas (case 15), Armando Natale (case 16), Geraldo Simão (case 18), Sebastião Faria (case 19), J. Q. (case 20), and Pedro dos Reis (case 21). One of Braz’s works also maintains the original 1950 work label, which, following the hospital’s exhibition practices at that time, includes his medical diagnosis in French: psychose maniaque-­dépressive (manic-­depressive psychosis). Similar labels are found in the archive at Sainte-­Anne.68 In response to César’s donation, 71

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MASP director Pietro Maria Bardi wrote the following to his friend: “Your donation to the museum is precious from the point of view of art as well as the experience developed in relation to the treatment of mental illness, a field in which you were a pioneer.”69 The fact that he donated the work to MASP further reflects César’s support of the works as art, thereby at once rejecting an understanding of them as psychopathological and an exhibition or collection practice that would confine them to the hospital. The donation reaffirmed the claim he had made during his lecture in Paris in 1952 that they were “works that could be included in any museum in the world.”70 On March 17, 1988, more than a decade after César’s donation, Michel Thévoz, director of the Collection de l’art brut, wrote to MASP’s director about the possibility of acquiring additional works by Braz for their collection. He wrote, “Our mutual friend Dr. Pierre Landolt-­Sandoz informed me of your projects, and also of your collection from a psychiatric hospital. I saw photographs of drawings by Albino Braz that you possess and that I find extremely interesting. I myself dedicated a short article to Albino Braz in a publication of our museum that I am sending you under separate cover.”71 Thévoz here refers to the tenth issue of the Art brut fascicles, which comprises monographic studies on art brut creators and was launched by Dubuffet in 1964. L’art brut 10 includes reproductions of Braz’s work as well as the short essay on his work penned by Thévoz.72 Unlike Dubuffet’s 1949 publication on the occasion of the exhibition at the Galerie René Drouin, in which the reader and exhibition visitor are offered precious few details about the “inconnu de São Paulo,” in these pages Thévoz discloses many details about Braz’s biography and work, repeating much of the information already reproduced in Volmat’s 1956 volume. In his correspondence with Bardi, Thévoz also explains the rationale behind the Collection de l’art brut: “This is a museum open to creations of high tension [à haute tension], and relatively alien to the established culture, such as those of Albino Braz precisely.”73 He proceeds to offer a sum of 8,000 Swiss francs (approximately $11,680) to acquire Bardi’s collection, explaining that this sum represents less a commercial transaction than the fact that “what we offer above all, is a home in the most appropriate museum for the work of Albino Braz; it is also affection, the interest that we bring to these drawings.”74 On April 7, 1988, Bardi, in his response to what must have seemed like an odd request, explains that, yes, their friend Landolt-­Sandoz had indeed photographed various works to show Thévoz. But, he continues, “the idea of selling never crossed our minds. Our museum, by statute, cannot sell any piece in its collection.”75 When seen from the present-­day perspective, the 102 works donated by César reflect a complex moment in the history of the reception of psychiatric patients’ creative production, in which their work was at once categorized as art brut and psychopathological, framed within the art museum as art and as evidence of the resilient nature of human creativity. But the strate72

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gic insertion of the work as art and its exhibition in art museums is specific to the history of this art in Brazil, just as the country’s psychiatrists were pioneers in the emergence of art therapy and in using museum exhibitions as a platform for furthering knowledge and helping their cause. Such exhibitions naturally called upon viewers and art institutions to question the self-­evidence with which modern society accepted definitions of what is sane and insane, thus challenging normative definitions of subjectivity and avowing a common capacity for creative production. The effect of César’s and Silveira’s work was to show how artistic creations could emerge in clinical and cultural contexts, even when the two sites of production (i.e., the hospital and the artist’s studio) represent two distinct, if at times interrelated, sets of practices. Given such relations, other donations followed; for example, art historian Aracy Amaral donated nine works from Juquery to MASP in November 2000.76

· · · The exhibition 9 artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro and other exhibitions of patients’ art in Brazil might well prompt us to ask whether the exhibited works are examples of art brut or modern art. Is it both? Or neither? If we heed Dubuffet, and the later art brut spokesman Thévoz, the works created by both César’s and Silveira’s patients should be excluded from the conception of art brut. On the one hand, the Brazilian patients’ work circulated within the modern art museum and was legitimated and recognized as art within the official spaces of Brazilian artistic culture; on the other hand, some of the work was produced in art workshops that often served therapeutic purposes. The archival record reveals that, with an eye to clarifying precisely the issue of whether the works were produced in the context of a group art therapy studio, Dubuffet wrote to Silveira on March 24, 1949, asking for photo­ graphs of her patients’ art in order to include the documentation in his archive at the Foyer de l’art brut. He explains how P. E. (Paulo Emilio) Sales Gomes, a Brazilian leftist intellectual and film critic then residing in Paris, recommended that he write to her for assistance in his research. He specifies, “I deal personally with investigations of this kind for some years now; they have led me on my trips and put me in contact with many psychiatrists in France and in many foreign countries.” Dubuffet describes how, in 1948, he created the association Compagnie de l’art brut as well as the Foyer de l’art brut, which houses the small institution, organizes exhibitions, and is the location for their archives, documents, and collections. He describes his photographic collection of such work as well as his publication program and concludes, “We would be very obliged if you could provide us with either the originals or photographs of material that you may have gathered in this field, which is that of our investigations.”77 Silveira sent him seventy-­one black-­ 73

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and-­white photographs of fourteen patients’ work. In her response from June 1949, she confesses, “I anxiously await your opinion of their value” and explains that all the patients had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and produced work “free of convention,” having recourse only to “interior models.” She insists, “They work with complete freedom.” She concludes that soon she will be able to send him “some originals” for his organization.78 The following month, Dubuffet extends his gratitude for the photographic documentation and notes that her patients’ art seems to have all been “executed under the leadership of a common initiator” and that this person must be someone of “high taste” (haut goût) and “aware of the currents of modernist painting.” For Dubuffet, the works are “advanced” (évoluées) as compared to those found in French psychiatric hospitals. He concludes that the Brazilian works “are not delusional” (ne sont pas délirantes). Hence, when addressing the work of Silveira’s patient Raphael, Dubuffet maintains the opposition between “advanced” and “art brut” and asks whether Raphael had seen art reproductions, given his drawings’ resemblance to those of Henri Matisse, or whether the resemblance was “simply chance” (see fig. 21). In short, Dubuffet calls the ensemble of works “charming” but concludes, “I must say, not very deeply original, not very feverish, not very ‘brut.’ ” To clarify his position and what he means visually by brut, he included “some photographs of different works made by patients and belonging to the collection of ‘L’Art Brut.’ ”79 Dubuffet’s sentiments regarding the quality of Silveira’s patients’ creative production were also publicly aired in these years in Antonio Bento’s column “As artes” in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Diário Carioca. Bento reports on his visit to the Foyer de l’art brut with Sales Gomes as well as Pedrosa, and he describes how Dubuffet inveighed against art in museums in favor of “free creation and invention.” It is possible that Pedrosa first learned about art brut from French surrealist Benjamin Péret, who was then living in Paris and had been married to Pedrosa’s sister-­in-­law.80 According to Bento, Pedrosa showed Dubuffet a collection of drawings by Raphael, and in this context the French artist again identified Matisse as a possible influence on the work: “ ‘No’—­protests Mário Pedrosa—­‘Raphael never saw a ­Matisse reproduction, he has been ill for many years.’ ” But Dubuffet insisted: “ ‘I ­believe in good faith the information you give me. But something tells me that Raphael knows the work of Matisse.’ ”81 While the report demonstrates Dubuffet’s insistence on the visually original nature of his research, his correspondence with Silveira attests to how his photographic collection played a determining role in communicating the precise nature of his investigations. An examination of what Baptiste Brun tellingly labels Dubuffet’s “photographic atlas” (and of the actual works in the collection) reveals repeated representations of the distortion of an ideal or natural body:82 physical boundaries become creases; borders become openings; bodily contours are excessive and absent; figures and faces evince disjunctions in proportion and scale. That is, 74

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21. Raphael Domingues, Untitled (Vase of plants with bananas), 1949. Ink on paper, 47.5 x 31.3 cm. Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente.

just as Dubuffet positions art brut against official artistic culture, vis-­à-­vis his colleagues in Brazil he unwittingly turns the brut into an artistic-­cultural and visual criterion for late-­modernist art as well as psychiatric patients’ production. Of course Dubuffet’s conception of art brut was not limited to work produced by those clinically diagnosed as mentally ill, and in his writing he also embraced a conception of “common” and “savage” values.83 In the course of his international research he also searched for more information about self-­ taught painters. To this end, Dubuffet wrote to Gomes Machado, MAM-­SP’s director, on September 1, 1950. In his letter he explains that Maria Martins had recently been in Paris and given him a copy of Romance da minha vida (Novel of my life), the autobiography of the self-­taught Brazilian painter José Antonio da Silva, which was published under the auspices of the museum in 1949. In the course of his letter, Dubuffet explains that, although he had “great difficulties” reading Silva’s autobiography since he did not know Portuguese, the “language of images is, fortunately, international.”84 He identifies the drawing on page 117 of Romance da minha vida as among his favorite and mentions that the previous year Martins had also given him a “beautiful Silva painting, representing a surgical operation on the eye.”85 He further 75

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notes how this gift was currently in the Compagnie de l’art brut collection. (Today this work, subsequently titled Opération chirurgicale de l’œil, can be found in the Collection de l’art brut in Lausanne.) Here again one notes the emphasis on the transgression of the body’s boundaries in Dubuffet’s choices, and thus a model of transgression tied to a specific understanding of modernist art for which the visuality of self-­taught and psychiatric patients’ art could serve as model. Dubuffet’s own work turns to the psychic disturbances that are related to the bodily deformations in the art of the mentally ill. Such a transgression of the body’s boundaries responds to the specificity of the body politic in France at this historical moment, just as his conception of art brut as an absolute other to official artistic culture remains at odds with the official art institutional embrace of psychiatric patients’ art and self-­ taught artists in Brazil. Rather than peripheral to official art institutions as legislated by Dubuffet’s definition of art brut, in the Brazilian context Silva’s work was framed and legitimated as a cultural art, most notably in the Exposição de pintura paulista (Exhibition of Paulista painting), which was organized by Galeria Domus (where Silva had his first solo exhibition in 1948) for the Ministério da Educação e Saúde in Rio de Janeiro in 1949. Here Silva’s sixty-­ three works were seen alongside those of Emiliano Di Cavalcanti and Flávio de Carvalho, among others.86 He also exhibited in the first Bienal de São Paulo in 1951, alongside Brazil’s other self-­taught modern artist, Alfredo Volpi, and again with Volpi and also Emygdio de Barros in the second Bienal de São Paulo in 1953. With regard to what is now known as art therapy, Dubuffet went to great lengths to distinguish its products from art brut. In 1967, he writes: “They [psychiatric patients] used to figure out for themselves how to get out of their mess, using their delirium. . . . In certain cases it undoubtedly resulted in the sick person becoming a marvelous creator.” He continues: “In ‘art therapy’ studios, the stated goal is elsewhere: to lead the sick back to the generally accepted conventions. This approach runs counter to the creation of ‘Art Brut,’ which implies a rejection of accepted conventions.”87 In his 1976 volume Art Brut, Thévoz also speaks to what he calls the “diminishing inventiveness of the ‘mentally ill’ ” and affirms that, because of shifts in psychiatric practice, “the work of psychiatric inmates has now taken a different turn . . . it is no longer genuine.”88 Dubuffet upholds madness as a myth, a madness expressed in an art that purportedly arises from pure spontaneous expression, thereby guaranteeing that its maker is both outside convention and immune to external influence.89 That art brut was so rigorously defined and redefined and defended against official culture might lead us to ask whether the very elaboration and codification of what constitutes an authentic art brut does not in the end repeat the initial incarceration of the subjects to which the concept in part initially referred, thereby repathologizing the subject while insisting that, at 76

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least in the case of psychiatric patients, genuine or authentic creativity is born of disciplinary subjugation. For me, rather than the efficacy of art therapy or the quality of the works produced in a therapeutic context, what is at issue here is the specter of modernist myths; namely, the myths of quality, authenticity, and originality, which Dubuffet firmly held in place. In short, the art brut artist is outside but subject to the insider cultural values of the French modernist artist.90

· · · In the years 1949–­1950, the work of Braz, the unknown from São Paulo, traveled across the Atlantic and was subject to multiple readings.91 His creative work was put to discursive use in the interest of art brut and in the interest of psychopathological studies. Albino Braz: representative of psychopathological art as well as art brut. Albino Braz: a clinical case who became an artistic tableau, part of the chapter in the history of art that Prinzhorn, César, and other psychiatrists with an eye to artistic production had begun. But let us remember that while Braz’s work was put to work as art outside the asylum for viewers of art and those who did not view it as art alike, he remained on the inside of the psychiatric institution from 1934 until his death in 1950. In 1935, the year after his internment, his medical file included the diagnosis “manic-­depressive psychoses with the manic form predominate” (the same diagnosis included on his works’ exhibition labels). The recommended treatment: a so-­called soothing potion. Fourteen years later, the same year he was garnering international attention for his work as an “unknown” art brut artist and as a patient with a psychiatric case history, a different treatment for his condition was prescribed. On September 14, 1949, Yahn, the same doctor initially at the helm of Seção de Artes Plásticas at Juquery, wrote in Braz’s medical file that he had been in the hospital since 1934 and that his condition had remained the same. He notes that Braz is a “curious draftsman, in the stereotype and symbolism of the employed forms, [and] was studied by Drs. Whitaker and Osório César.” Yahn thus draws attention to the patient’s creative production, but upon reexamination he suggests cerebral leukotomy (a prefrontal lobotomy) for the case, stating his belief that, “given the conservation of the psychic level, . . . remission is possible.”92 Also in 1949, the Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology for the discovery of leukotomy’s therapeutic value for certain psychoses. As a surgical intervention on the brain, the general effect of the procedure, which Moniz had first performed in 1935, was to reduce the individual’s personality, spontaneity, and responsiveness. The procedure was always controversial. The Juquery hospital records do not indicate whether the surgery was actually performed on Braz. Such medical files (and I reviewed the majority of files related to patient-­artists in MASP’s collection) testify to how 77

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the d ­ ominant therapies at midcentury were largely biological—­insulin shock therapy, Cardiazol-­induced convulsions, lobotomy—­and co­existed alongside labor therapy. Each treatment contributed to the consolidation of psychiatry as a medical practice based on anatomical-­pathological criteria, which did not necessarily displace an interest in psychoanalysis. In fact, Yahn became a member of the Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise de São Paulo in 1954. In the end, however, the patients’ art or art as therapy remained secondary to the scientific drive to find a “cure” for mental illness through psychosurgery. As to the effects of such a procedure on a patient’s art, Silveira spoke out vehemently against such violent practices as well as their negative effects on patients’ creative production. At the Premier congrès mondial de psychiatrie, in the context of the congress’s Exposition internationale d’art psychopathologique in Paris, she featured ninety-­eight works by her patients (in actuality shown under the auspices of Dr. Mauricio de Medeiros). Among the works she selected were sculptures by Lúcio, a patient-­artist who had participated in 9 artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro at MAM-­SP the previous year. For Lúcio, his small figurative sculptures represented warriors that would protect him in the cosmic fight against evil. But in the course of 9 artistas, at the very moment when his work was legitimated as art, Lúcio was lobotomized. Silveira’s appeal to the patient’s status as an artist went unheard by the hospital administration. Thus, for the international showcase of psychopathological art in Paris she chose to send sculptures Lúcio had made before and after the lobotomy, a comparison that also made it to the plate section of Volmat’s volume (fig. 22).93 Where the earlier work shows the careful articulation of the bodily posture and faces of his warriors, the subsequent work shows how such details became less defined, as when eyes are represented by mere concave impressions on the gesso sculpture’s surface. For Silveira, what was at stake for her as a psychiatrist was not necessarily whether such work constituted art or whether her patients might qualify as authentic artists. In the catalog to the MAM-­SP exhibition she explains, “There might be artists and non-­artists among the mentally ill.” She con­ tinues: Individuals affected in this way become unfit for our kind of social life and for this are segregated. Before seeking to understand them, it is concluded that they have blunted affectivity and their intelligence is in ruins. They would thus very well inhabit the building-­prisons called hospitals, given shelter and food. In the best of these institutions one sees beds lined with very white mattresses and hallways of the shiniest floors. But what if you discover how the long hours of the days pass for the inhabitants, for months and years on end? Come and see them wandering in the walled-­in courtyard,

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22. Sculptures by Lúcio before and after his lobotomy, reproduced in Robert Volmat, L’art psychopathologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956).

such ghosts. . . . This situation is due to having arbitrarily admitted that our mentally ill have extinguished all human needs other than sleeping, eating, and at most working in rudimentary jobs. However, only the powers of inertia favor a conformist acceptance of this state of things.94

She then concludes, “The current exhibition could be a message of appeal in this regard, addressed to everyone who came here and intimately participated in the enchantment of forms and colors created by human beings enclosed in the sad places that are the hospitals for the mentally ill.”95 ­Silveira’s text was a plea to the public, offering a critique both of psychiatric practice and of the material conditions present in psychiatric institutions. Hers was a challenge to “civilized” society, one that also informed Pedrosa’s writing on art, uniting her ethical stance to a specific mode of aesthetic reception.

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SCENE I lived at the hospital and my morning coffee was brought to me by a schizophrenic named Luiza. . . . All the time she spoke a jumble of words. I struggled to understand the meaning and could not; it was completely without syntax. Although I could not understand what she said, we had a very good relationship. In 1936, in that period of the Estado Novo, a hospital nurse, seeing that I had books on Marxism, denounced me. I was arrested and spent a year and a half in prison. I lost my job and was away from public service for eight years, really the core of a person’s career. This patient heard comments and knew that something had happened to me because of that nurse. She took this nurse and gave her a beating so violent that she ended up lying on the ground. I only learned about it years later. So this is what you can call an affective reaction. The schizophrenic is not indifferent.

Nise da Silveira, cited in Encontros: Nise da Silveira, ed. Luiz Carlos Mello (Rio de Janeiro: Beco do Azougue, 2009), 47–­48.

3 PHYSIOGNOMIC GESTALT How can we decide what comes from the inside and what comes from the outside?

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-­Image, 1985

“Denn was innen, das ist außen.” The phrase—­what is inside, is outside—­is from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s short poem “Epirrhema” (c. 1820), a Romantic reflection on nature that posits a dynamic relation between inner and outer worlds, the laws of nature and the mind. This very line is taken up in the late 1920s by experimental and Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in the context of his study Gestalt Psychology, originally published in English, presumably to appeal to an American audience.1 But rather than serve as a poetic rumination on nature, the line is mobilized to describe sensory organization and how the (inner) nervous system orders the (outer) perceptual field. For my purposes, I find it telling that the Brazilian art critic Mário ­Pedrosa also invokes Goethe’s line in his first two studies on Gestalt structure and perception.2 In his first study, his 1949 thesis “Da natureza afetiva da forma na obra de arte” (On the affective nature of form in the work of art), Pedrosa refers to Köhler’s citation of Goethe in his own description of the sensory organization of the external perceptual field.3 Two years later, he again refers to how the inside is the outside in his 1951 “Forma e personalidade” (Form and personality). Yet this time the discursive context of the statement’s enunciation has shifted, with the phrase now serving to describe a perceptual reversibility specific to the mentally ill. Pedrosa writes: “[The mentally ill] do not need to be induced to a prior emotional attitude to perceive the ‘face’ of things. They see everything simultaneously from inside and from outside.”4 As a young Marxist, Pedrosa had studied philosophy at the University of Berlin in the late 1920s, when Köhler was director of the university’s Psychological Institute. Subsequently, Pedrosa played an important role in bringing modern artists from Europe and the United States to Brazil, also penning key essays on European, North American, and Latin American avant-­garde artists.5 Pedrosa’s influence on the Brazilian and international art scenes was as deep as his knowledge was broad. In addition to working as an art critic, he was central to the foundation of Brazil’s institutions of modern art

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and collaborated closely with the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-­RJ) from its inception in the mid-­1940s through the 1960s, as well as the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-­SP), of which he served as director from 1961 to 1963. He also participated in the organizing committees for the second and third Bienal de São Paulo and as general director for its sixth iteration, in 1961. Pedrosa was also an active member of the International Association of Art Critics (Association internationale des critiques d’art, or AICA) and in 1959 organized an AICA conference titled “A cidade nova—­síntese das Artes” (The new city—­synthesis of the arts) in Brasília, using the city as a case study. In accounting for the new capital’s new architecture, Pedrosa declared that Brazil was “condemned to be modern.”6 Pedrosa was also deeply committed to leftist politics and was involved in founding the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party) in 1981. In the 1950s during his role as the main art critic in Rio de Janeiro, Pedrosa, in his lectures and early writings on Gestalt, insisted on the autonomy of form and on a modern global perception that, for him, was universal in scope (global should be understood in this context as comprehensive—­that is, perceiving a whole rather than fragments—­and not as the “global” that often frames discussions of contemporary art today). I would thus like to ask this: What did looking to the art produced by the psychiatric patients (in this case, primarily the work of schizophrenics) bring to Pedrosa’s understanding of midcentury modernism in Brazil (and in Rio de Janeiro more specifically), a time generally aligned with a highly rational cultural outlook and accelerated modernization, both associated with the development of a geometric or concrete aesthetic in art? In Pedrosa’s early gestaltist writings the inside is claimed as the outside, yet it is also necessary to recall one of Gestalt perception’s rationalist counterparts: the mathematical and topological figure of the Möbius strip, which holds a privileged place in Brazilian art historiography of the 1950s. Max Bill’s work Tripartite Unity (1948; fig. 23) won first prize for international sculpture at the inaugural 1951 Bienal de São Paulo. Tripartite Unity includes a Möbius form whose sinuous curves confound Euclidean notions of front and back, inside and outside. With Bill’s work, the mathematical concept on the inside (in one’s mind) is projected onto a material support on the outside, which here takes sculptural form. Following the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg, Bill described what he called “concrete” as the “pure expression of harmonious measure and law.”7 The narrative of Bill’s reception, as well as the Bauhaus “influence” via the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Ulm (of which Bill served as director) on the visual arts of Brazil, has been rehashed multiple times, so I will not linger on it here.8 In short, within this still dominant narrative Bill is credited with having introduced geometric abstraction to Brazil. That Bill’s status remains central to this history was most recently upheld at the 2013 Venice Biennale. In the Brazilian pavilion Bill’s work counted as an origin for the abstract work on display.9 84

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23. Max Bill, Tripartite Unity, 1948/49. Stainless steel, 113.5 x 83 x 100 cm. Coleção Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo. 24. Artur Amora, Untitled, c. 1940. Oil on canvas, 63 x 47 cm. Museu de Imagens do In­ consciente.

But what if, in the interest of polemics, I identify the first truly modern geometric abstraction in Brazil as the small black-­and-­white oil paintings produced by Arthur Amora around 1940 (see fig. 24), almost ten years prior to Bill’s appearance on the Brazilian art scene?10 How would our understanding of this art shift if we were to take into account the fact that Amora produced his work while a patient at the Centro Psiquiátrico Nacional ­Pedro II? I introduce Amora’s work not to claim that the so-­called art of the insane served as a formal reference or an aesthetic model for avant-­garde artists in Rio de Janeiro (as it did in the work of some European artists) but rather to explore the highly mediated ways in which the reception of psychiatric patients’ work came to inflect the practice of art and art theory, informing a shift at the heart of Pedrosa’s critical project. On account of his reception of this art, Pedrosa began to articulate the contours of a discursive field in which geometry would be understood as expressive rather than rational or purely visual, thereby also outlining the contours of an affective aesthetic response. The difference with regard to geometric abstraction in avant-­garde artistic practice at this time is perhaps nowhere better summed 85

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up than in the São Paulo–­based Grupo Ruptura’s rejection of the Rio-­based Grupo Frente because the latter promoted “expression” and “experience” rather than “theory” and “objectivity.”11 Função diagonal (Diagonal function, 1952; fig. 25) is a work by Geraldo de Barros, an artist based in São Paulo. Its composition is based on operations of symmetry, including rotation, reflection, and inversion. He constructed the largest white square by connecting the center points on each side of the frame, the black form from the halfway points on the white, and so on. The visual effect is one of rotation and recession, in which we progressively recognize the work’s formal characteristics. Moreover, Barros used a limited color range of shiny lacquer on board, creating sharp and near uniform areas of colored forms. The work of Rio-­based Ivan Serpa similarly exhibits a geometric aesthetic but uses oil on canvas and a broader palette of color. The composition of his Formas (Forms, 1951; fig. 26) consists of a predominantly pale blue background on which the brushstrokes remain evident. The painting includes two circular forms, a larger one in red and a black one that seems to recede both because of its placement and size but also because

25. Geraldo de Barros, Função diagonal (Diagonal function), 1952. Lacquer on board. 62.9 x 62.9 x 1.3 cm. Courtesy Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.

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26. Ivan Serpa, Formas (Forms), 1951. Oil on canvas. 97 x 130.2 cm. Coleção Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo.

of its color. Moreover, the gray shape in the foreground with its curved and angled edges introduces a concerted asymmetry, reading neither as a polygon nor as an entirely curvaceous form. Serpa’s Formas is not technically considered a work of concrete art, but its form and composition unequivocally set in relief some of the differences between the two contexts in which geometric abstraction thrived in Brazil.12 (Serpa’s work, like Bill’s, was also awarded a prize at the first Bienal de São Paulo.) In the late 1940s and 1950s, Serpa and other artists would often gather at Pedrosa’s home. A photograph from the early 1950s shows such a gathering as well as an unlikely reunion of artists committed to rationalist abstraction and others who advocated a more intuitive approach to art. From left to right are Barros (standing), Abraham Palatnik, Pedrosa, Lidia “Lidy” Prati, Tomás Maldonado, Almir Mavignier, and Serpa (fig. 27). Prati and Maldonado were both founding members of the art movement Asociación arte concreto-­invención in Buenos Aires in 1944. The photograph likely dates from 1953, when both Prati and Maldonado were exhibited at Grupo de artistas modernos argentinos at MAM-­RJ. With the exception of Palatnik, who turned to the production of chromo-­kinetic work, all the painters present in this image became deeply invested in the tenets of constructivism and 87

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27. Artists gathered at the home of Mário Pedrosa, c. 1953. From left to right: Geraldo de Barros, Abraham Palatnik, Pedrosa, Lidia Prati, Tomás Maldonado, Almir Mavignier, and Ivan Serpa. In background: Emygdio de Barros’s painting, Tarde de temporal (Stormy afternoon), c. 1950. Coleção Mário Pedrosa. Acervo da Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, Brasil.

concrete art as a way of affirming the reality of painting, at times marrying it to a political agenda, as in the case of Maldonado’s Marxism. Within a year, Maldonado and Mavignier would meet again at the HfG in Ulm, where the former served as director (1954–­1967) and the latter was a student (1953–­ 1958). What I am drawn to in this photograph is the painting in the background. Hanging on the wall of Pedrosa’s home was a work painted by Emygdio de Barros, who, like Amora, was a patient at the Centro Psiquiátrico Nacional Pedro II.13 Pedrosa’s home was a place where artists discussed contemporary painting and such seemingly incompatible fields as Gestalt psychology and the art of psychiatric patients.14 Consequently, Pedrosa was also one of the primary interlocutors for the artists of Grupo Frente, who counted Serpa among its members in addition to Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, and, later, Elisa Martins da Silveira (a naïf painter) and Hélio Oiticica. But to understand the 88

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historical and cultural specificity of Rio-­based artists’ engagement with an expressive geometry, we must turn to Pedrosa’s close friend and collaborator, the psychiatrist Nise da Silveira. What stands at the center of this competing account of midcentury modernism in Brazil is, in large measure, what Pedrosa learns from Silveira’s work and the work of her patients, including Barros.15

· · · In the 1930s, during the fascist-­oriented regime of Getúlio Vargas, Silveira was arrested and accused of being a communist, and spent over a year in prison. She was also fired and prohibited from public service. With the democratization of the country at the end of World War II, Silveira in 1944 returned to work as a psychiatrist at the Centro Psiquiátrico Nacional Pedro II in the Rio neighborhood of Engenho de Dentro. During her years away from service, invasive psychosurgery and other biological treatments had been developed. She began to learn about such practices, but after witnessing a patient’s convulsions after the application of electroshock, she refused to continue the treatment when asked to push the machine’s button. Thus began her quest for alternative means to ameliorate psychic suffering. In an interview she recalled, “In medical theory, occupational therapy was already discussed, but because it was not part of the curriculum, I knew very little.”16 The hospital’s director at the time, Paulo Elejade, gave her funds (thirty contos de réis) to develop precisely such activities. She explained: “I began, little by little, to open sections and workshops, to initiate activities. . . . In total I ended up opening seventeen activity sections, which gave a peculiar life to the hospital, even though they reached a small number of patients.”17 The Seção de Terapêutica Ocupacional e Reabilitação (STOR, or Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation Section) was officially created in May 1946. In September of that same year, as discussed in chapter 2, Silveira also opened a painting and drawing studio for her patients in collaboration with Mavignier.18 In his role as studio monitor from 1946 to 1951, Mavignier helped to organize exhibitions of the patients’ work and persuaded art-­ world figures such as the Belgian critic Léon Degand and Pedrosa, as well as painters Serpa and Palatnik, to visit (see fig. 28). These cultural figures visited the patients’ studio not just out of psychiatric curiosity. Each was profoundly affected by the work he saw. Pedrosa developed a deep and lasting commitment to the work of Barros. Serpa, an important art teacher in Rio, extended his teaching activities to include some of the patients. In part because of his exposure to their work, his own pedagogical practice was driven by experimentation rather than prescriptive dictates.19 Palatnik, on account of the quality of the patients’ work, gave up traditional painting altogether in order to begin his aesthetic experiments with a type of chromo-­kineticism. He recalls, “What fantastic artwork, the density, the colors!” He continues: 89

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28. Almir Mavignier, Madame Léon Degand, Emygdio de Barros, and Dr. Nise da Silveira, c. 1949. Courtesy Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente.

“All of a sudden, I had this feeling that I had to abandon painting, I couldn’t paint anymore, it wasn’t real, it was all an illusion.”20 Finally, even the early photographic work of São Paulo–­based Geraldo de Barros can be traced to this vital context.21 Another photograph from the late 1940s shows Mavignier, together with Madame Léon Degand, Emygdio de Barros, and Silveira. Perhaps taken by Léon Degand, the photograph testifies to the early contact between modern art and psychiatric professionals—­the institution of modern art and the psychiatric clinic—­at this historical moment in Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, at this time Degand was serving as the first director of the MAM-­SP, which was inaugurated in 1949 with his exhibition Do figurativismo ao abstracionismo (From figuration to abstraction), which further exposed the Brazilian public to European abstract art. At Mavignier’s invitation, Degand had gone to see the work of the patients in the painting workshop at the hospital in Engenho de Dentro. Thanks to the visit and Mavignier’s efforts, Degand initiated the organization of an exhibition of the patients’ work in São Paulo, with an eye to bringing the work to the attention of a broader public. The exhibition 9 ­artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro (9 artists from Rio de Janeiro’s Engenho de Dentro) opened at MAM-­SP on October 12, 1949 (see also the discussion in chapter 2). From 1949 to 1951, in addition to his study of the psychology of form, Pedrosa engaged extensively with and repeatedly reviewed the art of psychiatric patients, including the exhibition at MAM-­SP, which subsequently 90

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traveled to Rio. In response to the patients’ creative production, he developed his concept of arte virgem, meaning art free of academic convention and naturalistic representation. This theorization was contemporary with—­ but altogether different from—­Jean Dubuffet’s conception of art brut in the late 1940s.22 Crucial in this context is how at this time Pedrosa was faced with a seemingly contradictory imperative: how to understand the patients’ creative expression and incorporate it into his larger theoretical project to account for the objectivity of artistic form in relation to affective aesthetic response. Psychoanalysis, and by extension psychiatry, afforded Pedrosa precious little theoretical assistance. For Pedrosa, both disciplines tended to understand art as an illustration of the unconscious or as psychological symptom. “The psychiatrist,” he stresses, “is not broaching the problem of creation nor treading the aesthetic field. He is not offering any qualitative judgment on the art. He is simply in the admirable exercise of his clinic.”23 His critique, however, did not distance him from Silveira, who approached her patients’ art as a means to access the unconscious and supported its scientific exhibition and study.24 Such a critique likely extended to Osório César’s writing on patients’ work from Juquery. While César’s books do not count among those found in Pedrosa’s library, Pedrosa would have been familiar with the São Paulo–­based psychiatrist’s work. In the 1930s both men were associated with the Clube dos Artistas Modernos (CAM) and had their work covered by the local press; both shared a Marxist politics (César was a communist, and Pedrosa became a Trotskyist); and both were imprisoned for a short time during the Vargas regime on account of their political activities and views. What is more, Pedrosa was likely aware of the 1947 exhibition of Juquery patients’ art at MASP, which continued the scientific framing of such art through its attendant lecture series and press coverage. But whether Pedrosa knew César is less pertinent than the fact that Pedrosa asks how to approach a work of art, its “authentic value,” and how to separate it from an appreciation of dreams and symbols when the work is produced by the clinically insane.25

· · · Pedrosa’s thesis “Da natureza afetiva da forma na obra de arte” begins “The problem of apprehension of the object by the senses is the number one problem of human knowledge.”26 For Pedrosa to approach this problem was to approach the work of art. How is a work of art perceived, and, crucially, what are its specific properties? How can one account for the work of art’s dynamic relay between form and expression, objectivity and subjectivity? To tackle these issues, he turns to the psychology of form, to Gestalt psychology and its analysis of sensory organization. First introduced to Gestalt theories while studying philosophy in Berlin in the late 1920s, Pedrosa would return to the subject twenty years later after reading an interview with the 91

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29. “Natureza afetiva da forma nas artes plásticas.” Press clipping, January 13, 1951. Coleção Mário Pedrosa. Acervo da Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, Brasil.

young nonfigurative painter known as Atlan, in which the artist describes the affective-­physiognomic character of his paintings.27 Subsequently, Pedrosa wrote the thesis as part of a competitive process for a chairmanship in art history and aesthetics at the Faculdade Nacional de Arquitetura (National School of Architecture) in Rio de Janeiro. Given his prominence as an art critic, Pedrosa’s defense was covered by the local press, which published images of Pedrosa, the examiners, and the members of the public who were in attendance (fig. 29). One writer described the work as a “bold thesis, and, to some extent, unknown to most listeners.”28 In the thesis Pedrosa describes various Gestalt principles, including figure-­ground articulation, the closure principle, the subordination of parts to the whole, as well as Max Wertheimer’s discussion of “good form,” in which the privileged forms of the perceptual field are identified as regular, simple, and symmetrical. For Pedrosa, in a work of art “as in psychology, the exigencies of good form are present,” and the pages of his thesis are peppered with the visual graphs so characteristic of these studies.29 For Gestalt psychology the process of perceptual organization must be considered spontaneous, and other components of the perceptual field, including color and 92

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luminosity, form and space, are treated as independent from but also subsumed within the psychologist’s focus on emerging organizational patterns that are considered prior to knowledge formation and pragmatic meanings. Gestalt psychology aimed to displace the psychological studies of prior decades that analyzed behavior (behaviorism) and a subject’s projection of their own mental state onto others and the environment (empathy theory). For Pedrosa, Gestalt theory, beyond its emphasis on “good form,” also guarantees the relational aspect of perception. To demonstrate that aesthetic response cannot be reduced to previous behaviorist theories that focus on stimulus and response, Pedrosa introduces his first specifically Brazilian example. “A samba,” he explains, “would produce, who knows, an emotion of love. But within [behaviorist] theory nothing exists in the properties of the stimulus that explains the specific emotional effects.”30 At this juncture Kurt Koffka is particularly important to Pedrosa’s thinking because, by 1949, the year Pedrosa completed his thesis, Koffka was among the few scholars who had broached the issue of the psychology of perception’s purchase for the psychology of art.31 Koffka approaches the work of art’s specificity and presents a challenge to studies that remained within the purview of the artist’s psychology, on the one hand, or that of the spectator on the other, consequently leaving out the work of art.32 In his 1938 lecture “Problems in the Psychology of Art,” he affirms how “the emotional reaction is an intelligible, not a purely contingent, result of the properties of the object.”33 Pedrosa closely echoes Koffka’s formulation when he writes that “the emotional response is not just any contingent or automatic response; it is an intelligent result of the properties of the object.”34 To better account for aesthetic response, Koffka turns briefly to the work of art’s “tertiary qualities and physiognomic characters,” invoking by extension an instance of physiognomic perception. What is physiognomic perception? Most simply, to perceive physiognomically is to perceive the face of things. Within Gestalt psychology, physiognomic perception describes those instances, for example, when one perceives a dark cloud as threatening or a mountain as majestic or forbidding. Such tertiary properties of object perception—­that an object of perception may be perceived in its dynamism as imbued with feeling, rather than through primary and secondary properties such as form and color—­are central to Koffka’s analysis. In his lecture, Koffka also offers the following example: “Two persons standing on a hill and looking at a mountain slope covered with an old forest not yet disturbed by human hands; one is overwhelmed by this spectacle . . . [and] the other has no such feelings, instead he makes a cold survey of the kind of trees.” What is important in this example is how the physiognomically expressive characteristics of a landscape, and by extension a work of art, are phenomenologically objective while independent of individual response. Koffka confirms that “the tertiary and physiognomic characters of a work of art cannot owe their existence to responses of our selves.” He continues, 93

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“Inasmuch as the appeal of the work of art issues from its structure, it is this structure, and not the emotion which this structure arouses, that is of primary importance for our understanding of the psychology of art.”35 In the course of his study Koffka characterizes the work of art as “a strongly coherent whole, a powerful Gestalt” and describes how “the forces within the Gestalt are well balanced”; how color and shape, figure and ground, form part of a greater “organized pattern.” For Koffka the work of art is “epitomized” by what he calls its “purity.” While Koffka suggests how the response to a work of art exceeds scientific determination, he ultimately accommodates artistic perception to a gestaltist view: “Perception tends toward balance and symmetry.”36 Hence, the cumulative effect of Koffka’s lecture is to endorse an understanding and experience of art that is framed exclusively through the laws of the good Gestalt, whereby he concludes, “If the vision of the artist lacks perfection, then the stresses existing between the various parts of his total work will not be perfectly balanced.”37 Koffka’s psychology of form exhibits a tension in its application to art: he seeks to account for aesthetic response based on physiognomic properties of the object and thus exceeds form and color while at once instituting Gestalt’s normative function: good Gestalt perception corrects that which deviates from what is “perfectly balanced.” Maurice Merleau-­Ponty would later critique such aspects of gestaltist thinking, writing that “Gestalt psychology . . . forgets its most valid descriptions when it tries to provide itself with a theoretical framework. It is unexceptionable only in the middle regions of reflection. When it tries to reflect on its own analysis, it treats consciousness, despite its principles, as a collection of ‘forms.’ ”38 Merleau-­Ponty’s critical evaluation helps us understand how Koffka’s study, rather than maintain attention on the tertiary qualities or physiognomic character of aesthetic production, ultimately brings him back to form and what is perfectly balanced. Given his imperative to perceive good form, Koffka rather predictably does not address modern art or works of art produced by nonnormative subjects, whose mode of perception might deviate from the gestaltist norm. Pedrosa turns to these subjects and a different account of physiognomic expression in his second study on the psychology of form.

· · · While the section on “Forma e expressão” in Pedrosa’s thesis hews closely to Koffka’s study, in the wake of the various exhibitions of patients’ work, as well as his strident defense of it in the local press, Pedrosa’s approach to the work of art, its formal qualities, and the nature of aesthetic response necessarily shifted. By the time of “Forma e personalidade,” Pedrosa had moved away from the principal Gestalt psychologists and toward the work of developmental psychologist Heinz Werner as well as of the art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn.39 As a result, the principles of Gestalt partially 94

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recede behind Pedrosa’s engagement with the nuances of what Werner first formulated as physiognomic perception in the 1920s. Pedrosa asserts, “The artistic phenomenon consists, basically, in seeing everything physiognomically, as if it were a set of planes and lines animated with expression, that is, a face, a whole.”40 Like the Gestalt psychologists, Werner was interested in the active and organizing role of the subject in perception and identified the concept of physiognomic perception in 1925 as a way of approaching a modality of perception attuned to an object’s expressive qualities.41 Werner’s study Comparative Psychology of Mental Development (1926) is, similar to the interests of Gestalt psychologists, directed at the study of perception, aiming to displace both behaviorist and empathy theory. Yet unlike the Gestalt psychologists who often assumed a neutral subject of perception, Werner turns his attention to differences in perception through his accounts of children, the so-­called primitive, and the mentally ill.42 With regard to physiognomic perception, Werner also turns to nature as a common real-­life example: “All of us, at some time or other, have had this experience. A landscape, for instance, may be seen suddenly in immediacy as expressing a certain mood—­it may be gay or melancholy or pensive. This mode of perception differs radically from the more everyday perception in which things are known according to their ‘geometrical-­technical,’ matter-­of-­fact qualities.”43 To further clarify why he designates this type of perception as physiognomic, Werner continues: “In our own sphere there is one field where objects are commonly perceived as directly expressing an inner life. This is in our perception of the faces and bodily movements of human beings. . . . Because the human physiognomy can be adequately perceived only in terms of its immediate expression, I have proposed the term physiognomic perception for this mode of cognition.”44 Physiognomy, or the discernment of the inner qualities of a person’s character from his or her outer appearance, has a long history that extends to ancient Greek philosophy and returns intermittently across the centuries, reappearing again with increased popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries largely on account of the Swiss poet and physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater, who was briefly a friend of Goethe. In the realm of art, we find a notable example of eighteenth-­century physiognomic studies in the group of sixty-­nine sculptural heads produced by the German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. The Vexed Man (1770–­1783), for example, is emblematic of Messerschmidt’s obsession with expression, the face, and the communication of various psychic states. Messerschmidt also allegedly suffered from psychotic illness when making these works. Consequently, as artwork made by mental health patients became increasingly the object of aesthetic scrutiny in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, art historian and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris featured these character heads in one of the first studies to apply psychoanalytic principles to interpret works 95

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of art.45 Messerschmidt’s work displays the Enlightenment obsession with expression and physiognomy and proffers an aesthetic production central to the origins of psychoanalytic interpretations of art. Subsequently, in the nineteenth century within the regime of medical science, photography was used to create physiognomic portraits of the mentally ill. Such photographs problematically suggested that madness could be seen and classified on the basis of faces and bodily gestures.46 In the 1920s and 1930s, when Werner was developing his conception of physiognomic perception, his objective was less a pseudoscientific interpretation of faces than an attempt to account for a type of perception responsive to the expressivity of form. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in a move similar to that of modernist artists in Europe, Werner aligns physiognomic perception with the child, the primitive, the schizophrenic, and the artist and aligns what he calls geometric-­technical perception with the adult, the engineer, and modern civilization. His study features various visual images, including children’s drawings and drawings by institutionalized patients with schizophrenia, as well as the visual graphs characteristic of scientific experimentation and discourse. In his analysis of a drawing by a seven-­year-­ old boy, Werner points out that the child’s line shows the activity of walking not through geometric precision or the exact placement of limbs but through two kinds of lines that represent two kinds of legs: “walking legs” and “running legs.”47 Moreover, in the course of the study he refers to various experimental situations in which, for example, a shape is perceived as cruel or a line is perceived as happy or sad.48 Such tertiary properties of object perception—­that the object of perception itself, rather than its form or color, is perceived as conveying affect—­are central to the analysis of physiognomic perception, which, Werner claims, developmentally precedes a logical-­intellectual grasp of the world. For Werner, children, primitives, and schizophrenics exist in greater dynamic relation with their worlds. When reporting on physiognomic perception under pathological conditions, Werner notes: For example, a paranoiac schizophrenic says, looking fearfully at some doors that swing back and forth: “The door is devouring me!” Affect, it will be seen, has once more become a factor in the configuration of the s­ urrounding world. . . . And this occurs not in the sense that the world of things becomes invested with an especially strong overtone of emotion, but rather in the sense that affect actually forms the world itself. The doors and their movements in the case just cited are experienced directly related to physiognomy. The peculiar blurring, the gradually increasing “queerness” [Verseltsamung] of everything, the sense of abnormal focus and orientation  . . . are partly grounded in the changed appearance of objects as the physiognomic and dynamic stand forth boldly. The properties of things cease to be entirely objective, geometric, and “out there.”49 96

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Werner later maintains that the “schizophrenic world of perception is characterized by a marked participation of subjective factors in the process of [perceptual] configuration.”50 Werner plainly understood that any study of physiognomic perception presents a methodological quandary within a normative gestaltist-­holistic framework. By way of example, Werner speaks again of the human face. He explains how if the eyes are looked at in isolation they lose their specific expressive character, whereby “the ensouled center of the face has . . . ­become a [mere] physical part of the body.”51 It follows that Gestalt principles such as the dissociation of figure and ground and good form are ultimately insufficient to capture the specific dynamism of an object’s physiognomic character, just as the affective range of tertiary qualities (e.g., a shape can be cruel or maybe sweet; a line can be happy or sad, agitated or calm) exceeds the prescriptive dictates of good form and what Koffka in his approach to art calls a well-­balanced and organized pattern. Because Gestalt psychologists such as Koffka did not allow for subjects’ nonrational perceptual experiences in their description of art (such as Werner’s paranoiac-­schizophrenic account detailed earlier), in turning to ­Werner, Pedrosa found a way to incorporate the patients’ creative production into his contribution to the psychology of art. In so doing, he delved deeper into a discussion of the work of art’s physiognomic character and expressive power, thereby negotiating the rift between the formal or structural Gestalt and the physiognomic Gestalt and thus a methodological difference between what it means to focus on the internal coherence of organizing patterns versus expressive forms. Yet what continued to be key to Pedrosa’s grasp of aesthetic response was the notion that physiognomic expression was located in the formal properties of the work of art and not a priori in a subject’s psychology. Another limitation of the studies of the formal or structural Gestalt is that they do not deal with color.52 I had anticipated that color and its capacity to unsettle the perception of Gestalt patterns would play a crucial role in Pedrosa’s critical reviews of the art of psychiatric patients. What I discovered was that with his shift to the physiognomic character of the work of art, Pedrosa calls upon color for its expressivity without naming its effects or potential symbolism. Thus, for example, in a review of Emygdio de Barros’s work, he writes, “It really has to do with a real painter, one of the best that has emerged in Brazil.” He continues, “In the gouache Janela [Window; fig. 30] the chromatic play already appears more a function of the [structural] relation between colors on the canvas than the chance of unconscious symbols.”53 Here Pedrosa addresses the undeniable variety of Barros’s color. But since he is committed to the expressivity of aesthetic form independent of clinical classification, he holds the metaphoricalness of color at bay. Along these lines, he also avoids introducing modernist color theories such as those of Wassily Kandinsky, who wrote in reference to madness and color, 97

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30. Emygdio de Barros, Janela (Window), 1948. Oil on canvas. 65 x 91.5 cm. Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente.

“When compared with the frame of mind of some individual, [yellow] would be capable of the color representation of madness—­not melancholy or hypochondriacal mania but rather an attack of violent, raving lunacy.”54 Rather than ascribe a color or color perception to madness, Pedrosa summons color as part of the dynamic relationality of physiognomic expression. His study of physiognomic perception provided a way to introduce expressivity, rather than rationality, into his gestaltist orientation. In the context of midcentury modernism in Brazil, Gestalt theories have been primarily aligned with the purported rationality of concrete art and works of art exhibiting a constructivist, and at times mathematical, logic. For art historian and critic Ronaldo Brito, concrete art presents “optical and sensorial possibilities . . . already prescribed by Gestalt theory,” as well as serial and optical-­sensory productions that attempt to approximate science and technology.55 Take, for example, Waldemar Cordeiro’s Idéia visível (Visible idea, 1956; fig. 31), which is painted with alkyd on hardboard. In the work, Cordeiro depicts two arrangements of spiraling lines, one white and one black, on a red background. The two sets are identical but for the 180-­degree rotation of the black lines. The work suggests a dynamic symmetry based on a logarithmic spiral, just as it points to the artist’s interest in the pure v­ isuality of mathematical ideas. Cordeiro was a member of Grupo R ­ uptura in São Paulo, which made their commitment to a rationalist abstraction known through their 1952 Ruptura Manifesto, which, in its polemic against natural-

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ism, also criticized “the ‘erroneous’ naturalism of children, of the mad, the ‘primitives’ among the expressionists, of the surrealists, etc.”56 Read against the subject of this book, the manifesto can seem like a dig at Pedrosa and his defense of patients’ work and can also be understood as a critique of the exhibition practices of modern art institutions at that time and the programs dedicated to the patients of Engenho de Dentro and of Juquery. Pedrosa’s grappling with the art of psychiatric patients and what I call the physiognomic turn in his understanding of Gestalt begin to articulate the contours of a discursive field in which abstract geometry could be perceived as expressive rather than as rational or as purely visual. This is not to say that Pedrosa prescribed how geometric abstraction should be produced but that his ideas formed part of a broader conversation with artists and critics in the 1950s in Brazil, especially in Rio. Pedrosa’s understanding of physiognomic perception and expression provided fertile ground for the subsequent local reception of the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, whose work was also informed by Werner’s studies.57 Consider this comment by Merleau-­Ponty: “The Gestalt of a circle is not its mathematical law but its physiognomy.”58 Pedrosa’s engagement with Gestalt and physiognomic perception—­a perception attuned to the expressivity of forms in the world—­places him in an intellectual lineage shared by practitioners such as Béla Balázs in film, as well as psychologist and theorist Rudolf Arnheim. Like Pedrosa, Arnheim extended the Gestalt conception of form to include expression in his work on film in the 1920s and later in his magnum opus, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954), a volume that counts among those found in Pedrosa’s extensive library. Given these intellectual affinities,

31. Waldemar Cordeiro, Idéia visível (Visible idea), 1956. Alkyd on hardboard. 59.9 x 60 cm. Courtesy Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.

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­ edrosa’s approach to the affective response provoked by a work of art must P also be situated at a critical remove from North American Clement Greenberg’s “aesthetic regulation of feeling.”59 Greenberg’s and Pedrosa’s respective approaches to the work of art are further put into relief with a review of their divergent responses to Alexander Calder’s art. Both critics visited the artist’s midcareer retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and critically commented upon it in the pages of publications central to the art criticism of their countries: The Nation and Correio da Manhã. In 1943 MoMA’s galleries were filled with Calder’s hanging and standing abstract sculptures. His mobiles carefully suspend shaped monochrome planes, subject to motion by shifts in the air current; his stabiles elegantly balance arched forms and steel planes. But Greenberg judged Calder’s work to “lack history” and wrote that it was “not sufficiently determined by a driving purpose working itself out,” a critique that foreshadowed what he later identified as modernism’s self-­critical ­tendency tied to the notion of medium specificity.60 Given his investment in affective response, Pedrosa’s theories were never closely tied to the issue of medium specificity. Accordingly, Pedrosa celebrates Calder’s work and observes how it is “at the service of the imagination.”61 For Pedrosa, Calder’s constructions avow an approach to technology that transcends function, thereby escaping identification with the machine. Subsequently, Pedrosa was instrumental in organizing Calder’s 1948 exhibition at the Ministério da Educação e Saúde (Ministry of Education and Health), which was the site of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro by 1952.62 Curiously, the American sculptor and Brazilian critic seem to have shared an interest in art produced for therapeutic ends and thus the artistic activity of nonnormative subjects. Eight months prior to his midcareer retrospective, Calder participated in The Arts in Therapy, a group exhibition on view in MoMA’s auditorium galleries. Organized by the museum’s Armed Services Program, under the directorship of James Thrall Soby, the exhibition aimed to illustrate the relationship between the arts and occupational therapy with an eye to how art programs could be more effectively put to use in rehabilitation efforts for disabled and shell-­shocked soldiers and sailors returning from World War II (fig. 32). In the months leading up to the actual exhibition, MoMA held a competition for “guidance in design,” whereby artists and craftspeople were encouraged to submit “attractive and useful articles which therapists can use as models for their patients.”63 A circular announcing the competition described how occupational therapy “helps injured parts of the body return to normal, and also helps restore self-­ confidence and balance to the patient.”64 The museum also asked artists to consider proposing works “small enough to be made in bed” and with materials both “inexpensive” and “easily obtainable.”65 The competition and ensuing exhibition were explicitly billed as a way for artists to offer their services in the war effort. 100

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32. The Arts in Therapy, February 3, 1943–­March 7, 1943. Installation view (with Alexander Calder’s models displayed on the tables). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gelatin-­silver print, 11.4 x 16.5 cm. Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives.

A museum-­appointed jury selected twenty-­three prizewinners from 237 entries, favoring works that demonstrated “therapeutic and recreational value for disabled and convalescent members of the armed forces.”66 Though not formally part of the competition, Calder and André Masson each provided models. A press release described Calder’s work: Alexander Calder has created two dozen or more gay and fantastic toys made in the simplest fashion of cigar boxes, paper match boxes, scraps of tin, leather, old piano wire, rags, yarn, thread and bits of wood. He has used these wastebasket media in such fantastic and comical ways that a soldier or sailor would have to be very much disabled indeed not to laugh at first sight and then demand that the wastebasket be emptied on his bed to furnish him with similar materials for comic creations of his own. Among the Calder works is Lady Godiva on a Bike, a severe-­looking female of wood and cloth inadequately concealed beneath flowering locks of yarn. Other entries include a complete and very realistic bathroom suite, which would please any Marine, disabled or not.67

The text assumes an immediate affective response on the part of the disabled soldier, one that might translate into the physical act of making, while also speaking to the levity of Calder’s subjects and materials. Soby wrote to thank Calder for his contribution, professing: “I would like to canonize you in print as the St. Alexander of Twentieth Century Therapy. Bless you I say.”68 101

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While practicing artists submitted models for use in occupational therapy, MoMA’s exhibition also included a second “creative therapy section,” which showed “free media” work (painting, sculpture, and drawing) by actual patients who were not necessarily soldiers but whose creative production formed part of psychotherapeutic programs’ means of diagnosis and cure. The existence of two sections in the exhibition reveals the at times competing imperatives in place when art is used as therapy: recreational-­ rehabilitative value versus psychological-­diagnostic value; physical or manual labor versus creative expression; working from a model versus producing works of one’s own invention; and the alignment of these objectives with the discursive determinations of what constitutes craft versus the fine arts.69 While Calder evinces an interest in art produced in therapeutic conditions, key differences remain between the American and Brazilian cultural contexts and the institutional discourses used to support such work and the subjects who produced it.70 Whether during his 1943 sojourn Pedrosa would have seen this exhibition is not at issue. Rather, by the time he returned to Brazil and began his defense of Silveira’s patients’ work, Pedrosa was rigorously and unflaggingly appealing to the latter terms—­creative expression, individual invention, and art—­especially when defending how Silveira’s ­patients did not copy preexisting models, a polemic touched on in the preceding chapter. What is more, in the context of 9 artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro, held in the southern continent’s first museum of modern art, Pedrosa displaced occupational therapy’s recreational-­rehabilitative value as well as psychiatry’s diagnostic drive to support his broader thesis on physiognomic expression and the affective response to the work of art.

· · · Pedrosa’s insistence on physiognomic expression in the work of art also casts his role in the break between concrete art and neo-­concretism in a different light. In 1959, artists such as Amilcar de Castro and Lygia Clark challenged concrete art’s rationalism and the formalism of São Paulo concretists. They formed—­along with Reynaldo Jardim, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Theon Spanudis, and Frank Weissman—­the short-­lived neo-­concrete movement (1959–­1961). To signal this shift, Pedrosa’s disciple, the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar, penned the “Manifesto neoconcreto” (Neo-­concrete manifesto). Gullar explains, “Neo-­concretism . . . denies the validity of scientific and positivist attitudes in the arts, and reconvokes the problem of expression.”71 Informed by his reading of Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenology, to which Pedrosa reportedly introduced him, Gullar and his cohort disavowed the rationalist model of consciousness upheld by São Paulo painters and poets as well as the expressive subject evinced by art informel, which dominated the Bienal de São Paulo that same year. The neo-­concrete artists reoriented the space of geometric abstraction, of concrete art, toward a spati102

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alized phenomenological experience, one in which the viewing subject was accorded a more active role, as in Clark’s Bichos (Critters) and Oiticica’s Núcleos (Nuclei) and Penetráveis (Penetrables), series that were begun in these years and elaborated over the course of the 1960s. In his 1957 text “Paulistas e cariocas,” Pedrosa seems to anticipate such shifts in art in Rio de Janeiro when he describes how the paulistas faithfully follow their theories, while the cariocas are more devoted to “spatial play” in their work (paulistas refers to artists based in São Paulo and cariocas to those based in Rio de Janeiro).72 Pedrosa was in Japan at the time of neo-­concretism’s formulation, which has often led to speculation that the group was formed against him. Yet Gullar and the other neo-­concrete artists did not abandon the elder critic’s investment in the expressiveness of form. Recall Clark’s 1959 article “Lygia Clark e o espaço concreto expressional” (Lygia Clark and the concrete expressional space), in which the artist describes her desire to “express space itself, not compose within it.”73 Gullar’s and Clark’s invocations of expression extended Pedrosa’s thinking, whereby expression is rerouted to take place in the relation between a work and the space it constructs. In the course of the 1950s, various artists jettisoned the inner coherence and formal autonomy of art, while in their work they maintained a subjective investment in the expressivity of geometric forms, as in Clark’s Bichos.74 The language of rupture, introduced in the subtitle of Brito’s seminal Neoconcretismo: Vértice e ruptura do projeto construtivo brasileiro (Neo-concretism: Apex and Rupture of the Brazilian Constructive Project, 1985), is frequently pointed to describe this shift.75 However, the conjunction of concerns between the physiognomic and the phenomenological suggests less a rupture between concrete art based in Rio de Janeiro and the subsequent neo-­concrete movement than a critical elaboration and intensification of the physiognomic Gestalt’s intangible expressivity taken to the realm of the spectator’s actual corporeal participation. The difference in theory responds to differences that can be tracked in practice, differences that in part depend on the divergence between the formal Gestalt and the physiognomic one. The emphasis on creative process that avant-­garde artists observed in the patients’ studio—­whether through their literal visits to the hospital or via Pedrosa’s reckoning with their art—­further helps to account for the opening onto artistic process and participation that came to characterize neo-­concretism and the subsequent development of the artists’ work.

· · · Pedrosa absolutely embraced concrete art as fitting for the Brazilian context and its developing modernity and thereby opposed the continued prominence of prior generations of figurative painters, such Cândido Portinari. At the same time, as was characteristic of the milieu of his intellectual formation, Pedrosa was a universalist. But when evaluated from the perspective of 103

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the present, we might understand his universalism as strategic, and doubly so: with it he inscribed Gestalt perception and modernist abstraction in Brazil within a universal art history (working against foreign misconceptions) and at once incorporated the creative production of psychiatric patients into his universalist account of aesthetic response, which also extended to work produced by children and by indigenous peoples.76 Pedrosa’s universalism, theorized from his position as a cosmopolitan intellectual, responds to the historical specificity of Brazil. But against the developmentalist ethos that aligned geometric abstraction with a rationalist outlook, Pedrosa’s thinking and ambitions for Brazilian concretism remained conceptually and affectively distinct from the rational application of Gestalt theories in art. The displacement of the formal (or structural) Gestalt in favor of the physiognomic Gestalt that Pedrosa’s work engaged on account of Silveira’s patients is not just a difference of degree; it is a difference of kind. Where the formal Gestalt focuses on the organizational patterns of perception, physiognomic perception hinges on an understanding of perception attuned to expression. As Werner writes, “The most primordial objects of awareness . . . are not thinglike but facelike.”77 Pedrosa echoes this assessment: “[Art] is endowed precisely with the physiognomic power that we grasp so well . . . that the child understands in a face.”78 More specifically, he extends his observations to geometric abstraction when he writes: “Not all physiognomic qualities reside in a face. They are also characteristic of the geometric figure, of a painting.”79 My account of physiognomic perception is not meant to displace the way in which Pedrosa, when dealing with the art of psychiatric patients, continually upholds the works’ “pure formal unity,” thereby holding at bay the context of production (i.e., the psychiatric hospital) as well as the patients’ subjectivity.80 After all, when he discusses the patients’ work, he concludes, following Prinzhorn: “Difficult . . . to distinguish sane and insane of spirit when only contemplating the works.”81 What was at stake for Pedrosa was the difference between the developing fields of the psychology of art and psychopathology of art, the specificity of aesthetic response versus that of clinical classification.82 In maintaining this discursive difference, however, Pedrosa went further. Published three years before Michel Foucault’s first work on madness, Maladie mentale et personnalité (Mental Illness and Personality, 1954), Pedrosa’s “Forma e personalidade” offers a prescient account of the historicity of madness in a section titled “Inspiração e loucura no passado” (Inspiration and madness in the past).83 He narrates the ways in which different cultures have treated mental illness: from indigenous societies that considered epilepsy a revelation of “superior being” to the view prevalent during the Middle Ages that such manifestations were a “pact with the devil.”84 Pedrosa writes that “primitive man and, partially, ancient and medieval man did

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not distinguish between normal and abnormal, between standardized and non-­standardized behaviors [in ways] that conform to our present habits.”85 Moreover, by strategically focusing on the paintings exhibited in 9 artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro at MAM-­SP, Pedrosa makes an appeal to rethink contemporary forms of recognition and visibility in order to question the self-­evidence with which modern society accepts established definitions of what is sane and insane: “What reaction does the public have in the face of these same manifestations considered in the past as highly inspired or with dignity?”86 His admonishing response: “The vilest possible [reaction], the most prejudiced and malevolent. . . . [We] isolate them, crush them with a straitjacket and confinement; moral, spiritual and physical destruction; it is the realm of bourgeois rationalist utilitarianism in one of its most base and vulgar expressions.”87 In the context of the largely Gestalt orientation of “Forma e personalidade” and its repeated invocations of the work of art as a “complete whole,” Pedrosa’s excursus on the history of madness constitutes a methodological interruption that compellingly challenges the contemporary conditions in which madness is accorded the status of mental illness and denounces the violence of its treatment. For some contemporary writers, such as O ­ tília ­Beatriz Fiori Arantes, “Mário Pedrosa never ignored the differences between ‘arte virgem’ and cultured art.”88 In contrast, Gustavo Henrique Dionisio suggests that Silveira and Pedrosa “tacitly accept that the patients’ creations are real works of art.”89 For my purposes, however, whether Pedrosa collapsed or upheld the difference between the art of psychiatric patients and modern art is secondary to the fact that his support of the former’s work was intimately tied to his critique of rationality and the methods of the modern psychiatric institution (a critique that can be fully understood only in relation to Silveira’s pioneering work). In accounting for the historicity of madness, Pedrosa also goes beyond the evolutionary logic that subtends Werner’s comparative study with its developmental account of the child, the primitive, and the schizophrenic. Hence the productive tension at the heart of Pedrosa’s critical project: he insists on the autonomy of form through an attention to the work of art’s physiognomic power and simultaneously critiques bourgeois rationality for its exclusion of the mentally ill. Consequently, rather than frame the “insane” as the outside to modern art or as within a model of transgression (as in the contemporary case of Dubuffet), Pedrosa includes the patients’ work as part of the universal model of aesthetic reception he upholds. Within these terms, Pedrosa’s project to promote a modern-­day perception in harmony with the expression of form is at once an aesthetic and ethical position: he engages the subject of ethics as a subject for art criticism.90 His challenge is not only to the conventions of art but also to the norms that define who is and who is not a subject, who is considered sane and insane. Indeed, Pedrosa’s position and the particular

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33. Specters of Artaud with Lygia Clark’s O dentro é o fora (The inside is the outside), 1963, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2013. Exhibition view.

constellation it entails—­art and psychology, an aesthetics but also an ethics of reception—­present a conjunction of concerns that reverberated in artistic practices in Rio de Janeiro in the decades to follow. Recall Pedrosa’s statement on physiognomic perception and the mentally ill: “They see everything simultaneously from inside and from outside.” The phrase also evokes the spatial topography of the Möbius strip. If the latter was celebrated as a rational structure in the work of Bill, then Pedrosa’s statement invokes the expressive interlacing of inside and out that sub­ sequently takes aesthetic form in the work of Clark. One of the final works in Bichos, O dentro é o fora (The inside is the outside, 1963; see fig. 33), for example, is cut from a single sheet of stainless steel. The curvilinear form and malleable metal emphasize a dynamic topology: when manipulating the work, the viewer-­participant experiences the relay and reversibility between inside and outside. Clark writes with regard to the actual experience of the work: “It changes me . . . ‘Inside and outside’: a living being open to all possible transformations. Its internal space is an affective space.”91 Clark increasingly investigated the emancipatory power of sensory experience outside codified language in her Objetos sensoriais (Sensory objects, 1966–­1968) and Máscaras sensoriais (Sensorial masks, 1967), as Suely Rolnik’s and Susan Best’s accounts of her work make clear.92 She developed her artistic practice by moving from the act to the body, from the body to the relation between bodies, and finally by engaging with subjectivity itself with the development of her Estruturação do self (Structuration of the self) sessions and use of what she called Objetos relacionais (Relational objects), which she placed on 106

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the body of her clients, a practice that continues to this day in the therapeutic work of Gina Ferreira and Lula Wanderley. Researching this chapter meant reckoning with the conditions of possibility of Clark’s embrace of therapy, grounding my future writing on her art. Given the history of psychiatric patients’ work in Rio de Janeiro as well as Brazilian modernism’s entwinement with art therapy, Clark’s work presents less an abandonment of art, as the title of the recent MoMA retrospective of her work denotes, than a return to a moment when the link between art and psychiatry, art and therapy, formed part of official artistic and cultural production as well as critical debates.93 Clark’s is thus a return as well as a dialectical reversal. If Pedrosa included work of psychiatric patients as part of the universal aesthetics of reception he upheld, then in the 1960s and 1970s, the moment of effervescence for antipsychiatry movements, Clark revived the link between art and psychiatry while therapeutic practice became the actual material of her art.

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SCENE Visitor: He is able to create, you know. . . . And, it is not just anyone who has the capacity. It is a glory for you, right? Bispo: No, it’s not a glory, no. I do it because I am obliged. If I could, I would not make any of it. Visitor: No, I’m saying I think you have honor in making it. Bispo: No, ma’am, I am obliged. If not, I would not do this, no. Are you understandin’? Visitor: It is very good, I liked a lot of your works. Bispo: I listen to voices, and voices oblige me to do all of this. Visitor: You receive orders to create. Bispo: Well, then, if I could not do anything, I would not do any of it. Visitor: The orders that you receive must be from beyond, right? Bispo: I do not know. Now, I know I receive the orders and I am obliged to do it.

Arthur Bispo do Rosário, interviewed in Hugo Denizart, O prisioneiro da passagem: Arthur Bispo do Rosário (Brazil: Centro Nacional de Produção Independente, 1982), color film, 30 mins.

4 BISPO’S CONTEMPORANEITY I am not an artist. I am guided by the voices to create in this way. Arthur Bispo do Rosário, n.d. (after 1974) Today, with Bispo do Rosário’s oeuvre at one’s disposal, it is the obligation of criticism to analyze it as a significant part of Brazilian contemporary art production.

Frederico Morais, 2013

Arthur Bispo do Rosário is perhaps the best-­known outsider artist from Brazil, a psychiatric patient who represented the country in the 1995 Venice Biennale. Unlike Nise da Silveira’s patients, Bispo produced his various creations—­from banners to assemblages—­in isolation from artistic and literary figures. Yet if one individual can be credited with bringing Bispo’s work to the eyes of the art world, it is curator and critic Frederico Morais, who organized Bispo’s first exhibition, Registros de minha passagem pela Terra (Records of my time on Earth), at the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts in Rio de Janeiro in 1989 (the year of Bispo’s passing) as well as the larger 1993 retrospective Arthur Bispo do Rosário: O inventário do universo (Arthur Bispo do Rosário: The inventory of the universe), at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-­RJ). Morais has described these exhibitions as essential to his “invention” of Bispo the artist.1 Considered in this light, this chapter’s opening epigraphs—­the first attributed to Bispo, the second by Morais—­point to some of the primary concerns that motivated this book.2 That is, how the creative objects made by psychiatric patients are understood, discussed, framed, and exhibited in Brazil and the discontinuities that obtain in practice between Brazil and other parts of the globe. The category “contemporary art” began dominating institutional discourses in the 1990s, coinciding with Bispo’s promotion as a contemporary artist. Consequently, among the questions that drive this chapter are the following: How does such production, made within the clinical context of the psychiatric hospital, inform the narrative of contemporary art and its institutions? How do the debates about whether patients’ work is art or not art, whether it is to be accounted for inside or outside of art history, speak

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to paradoxes and discursive constructions that are specific to the history of art in Brazil? Finally, what is the specific type of contemporaneity that one might ascribe to Bispo’s creative practice? With regard to the latter, what is at stake is the difference between Bispo’s inscription as an artist within the contemporary art system—­from private galleries to biennial exhibitions, from art magazines to art history—­and an understanding of contemporaneity that also takes into account the particular challenge his work posed to the context in which it was born: the asylum.3 Accordingly, this chapter also tells the tale of a confrontation between the history of art and the history of psychiatric art, between the rights of the art critic and the rights of the mad.

· · · The facts: Arthur Bispo do Rosário, commonly known as “Bispo,” was born in Japaratuba, Sergipe, more than likely on March 16, 1911 (discrepant records exist). He was adopted by a family of cocoa farmers (probably the owners of the plantation where his parents worked), and he was taught to read and write. In 1925, he enrolled in the Naval Apprentice Academy. According to naval service records, he subsequently served for nine years but ultimately was discharged on account of his lack of discipline.4 Beginning in 1928, he also worked as a professional boxer, garnering attention in the local press in Rio de Janeiro both for the violence with which he fought and for his capacity to withstand protracted beatings.5 In 1933, while continuing to box, he was employed by Light & Power in Rio. In 1936, he suffered an injury to his foot, which put his boxing career to an end. One year later, he was fired from Light & Power for disobedience and threatening a superior. Bispo sought legal representation and hired the lawyer José Maria Leone to pursue the case in the labor court. The case was settled, and in 1937 the Leone family took him in as a domestic employee, an arrangement that continued until 1960. For the family he did all sorts of odd jobs, from cleaning the house and purchasing food at the market to working as a bodyguard for José Maria, who briefly pursued a political career. While still residing and working in the Leone home, Bispo experienced what could be called his first vision—­or, alternatively, his first psychotic break. According to existing accounts, all of which rely on Bispo’s own, on the evening of December 22, 1938, seven angels greeted him and recognized him as Jesus. Bispo narrates the event on one of his banners, a series of fifteen embroidered cotton fabrics, each measuring around one meter by two meters and picturing, by means both visual and verbal, places and events, such as embassies, warships he sailed on, and the Miss Brazil beauty ­pageant. On this particular banner, posthumously titled Eu preciso destas palavras. Escrita (I need these words. Writing, c. 1967–­1974; fig. 34), Bispo divided the surface into seven columns of differing width. In the center on the lower edge of the banner is the outline of a figure hovering above what looks like a pyramidal 112

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34. Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Eu preciso destas palavras. Escritas (I need these words. Writing), c. 1967–­1974. Wood, fabric sheet, metal, thread, and plastic. 120 x 189 cm. Coleção Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea / Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro.

structure with the descriptive title of the work sited below. The blue thread he used to embroider the banner was obtained from patients’ uniforms, a sign of standardization and disciplinary oppression. Bispo unraveled the fabric’s warp and woof and used hospital bedsheets as support. On the far left side of the banner, words that begin with the letter A are stitched in all capitals: Adeus, Adem, Adaptadas, Adulto, Adicionar, Adula, Advogado. Each word occupies its own rectangle, creating the visual effect of layered bricks of words. In the far right column, Bispo documents his vision (again in all capital letters): “December 22, 1938—­Midnight, accompanied by—­7—­angels on special clouds [in the] form of a stairway—­they left me at the back wall of the house [on] Rua São Clemente—­301—­Botafogo, between the Palmeiras and Matriz streets[.] With lance in-­hand, in these clouds, no evil spirit will enter.” On this surface, Bispo also accounts for how he left the Leone residence in the Botafogo neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro and began a peregrination toward the city center, stopping along the way at the Palácio do Catete, Praça XV, and the Candelária church. Different accounts exist, however, as to his final sacred destination, where he presented himself as Jesus. 113

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Humberto Leone (José Maria’s son) recalls visiting the São José church in search of Bispo. The church priest explained that “some crazy black man,” claiming to be Saint Joseph, attempted to expel him from his church. According to Leone’s account, Bispo was then arrested and taken to the psychiatric hospital at Praia Vermelha.6 In contrast, in an interview with the photographer and psychoanalyst Hugo Denizart in 1982, Bispo described his arrival at the hospital as follows: Bispo: On December 22 I descended over São Clemente [street] in Botafogo. Denizart: Descended, how? Bispo: Down the back of a house, when I was recognized by the family. The next day, after I left, I presented myself at the São Bento monastery. On the 24th, I arrived at Praia Vermelha [the hospital], sent by the friars. Denizart: By the friars? Bispo: Yeah, they recognized me, when I said: “I have come to judge the living and the dead,” they perceived and sent me to go to the hospice.7

Whether from the São José church or the São Bento monastery, what we do know is that on December 24, 1938, Bispo was admitted to the Hospital Nacional dos Alienados (also known as the hospital at Praia Vermelha) in the present-­day neighborhood of Urca (today the building is part of the campus of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro). But the discrepancies and tensions between eyewitness accounts, Bispo’s work, and his own speech continue to motivate the search to fill in the gaps of his biography and life in asylums. When asked about the details of his personal history, Bispo would sometimes explain, “One day I simply appeared.”8 Dr. Durval Nicolaes, who attended to the patient on December 26, recorded the following notes about Bispo’s psychological exam: Calm, lively eyes, airs of importance, answers and asks. Cheerful physiognomy. Variable humor. . . . Appropriate gestures and miming. Associates ideas with relative extravagance. Preserved memory. Presents, at times, auditory and visual hallucinations. Has visual illusions. / Ideation frankly delusional. Delusion of grandeur, mystical, in interpretation, of persecutory and dreamlike character. Diminished affectivity and initiative. Flawed reasoning and judgment. Decreased self-­criticism.9

Medical diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenic. Within a few weeks, in early 1939, Bispo was transferred to the Colônia Juliano Moreira (CJM) in the Jacarepaguá neighborhood of Rio’s western zone (Zone Oeste). He subsequently experienced brief stays at the asylum in Engenho de Dentro, with no record of any contact with Silveira or participation in her occupational therapy workshops, although the artist and ther114

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apist Lula Wanderley explains that Silveira remembered him.10 Bispo also experienced intermittent returns to civilian life, always with the Leone family as his refuge. Studies indicate that he lived freely from 1954 to 1964. In these years, from 1961 to 1964, upon Humberto Leone’s recommendation, Bispo began work at the Assistência Médica Infantil de Urgência. One of the founding pediatricians remembers Bispo, his fasting and “purification” upon the Virgin’s orders, as well as the various miniatures, from battle­ships with embroidery to metal plates with names, that he created and stored in the attic.11 Bispo’s longest internment was at the CJM hospital complex, where he lived for approximately twenty-­five years. The year 1964 represents his definitive confinement.12 With regard to his subsequent creative production in that context, one medical report dated February 8, 1985, states: “Stays in his room doing craftwork. Through this defense mechanism he has developed for himself at the institution, he manages to preserve his personality. He is the only patient to do this, and it sets him apart from the rest.”13 This report has helped bolster the myth constructed around Bispo, a myth that upholds an image of isolation and independent creative initiative in a context deemed bereft of art and art-­therapeutic activity. Bispo may have been the only patient to stay in his room, but he was not the only one engaged in creative work. The CJM included an extensive praxiterapia (praxitherapy, or occupational therapy) program with workshops including weaving and embroidery.14 Bispo had been producing objects since his time at the Leone home and during his brief tenure at the Assistência Médica Infantil de Urgência; it was a practice he continued during his various internments. Perhaps the earliest existing visual documentation of Bispo’s work is a photograph by Jean Manzon published in November 1943 in the illustrated magazine O Cruzeiro in the context of the article “Os loucos serão felizes?” (Are the mad happy?), which psychoanalyst Flavia Corpas diligently tracked down (fig. 35).15 In this report on the Hospital Nacional dos Alienados Bispo is wearing his signature cape, his Manto do Reconhecimento or Manto da Apresentação (Presentation cloak; see also fig. 36), and standing next to what he called his “miniatures,” in this case various constructions—­from a sailboat to a decorative paper triangle banner—­that he worked on in isolation. But Bispo’s purported “mission” to re-­create everything on earth began much later, in 1967, at the CJM, when he received a three-­month term in solitary confinement for having mistreated another patient when trying to maintain order. Bispo, in his role as pavilion xerife (“patrolman” or “referee”), had gone too far when attempting to control another patient, a task doctors often asked of him. In isolation he heard a voice telling him to represent the existence of the earth. To complete this task, Bispo subsequently locked himself away in his cell (likely between 1967 and 1974). In an interview with social worker Conceição Robaina, he explained: “I, when I was locked up there in the 115

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room, I spent seven years locked up there in the room doing service, and those embroidery, which I did. I spent seven years locked in the room, would not come out.” 16 Indeed, Bispo devoted himself to the task of embroidering his banners and rosters of names and materials on fabric, taking inventory of people and places both within and outside the asylum.17 Bispo also continued making objects, but they often took on a materiality different from the embroidery. Bispo wrapped many of the objects he constructed in blue thread, the same thread he unraveled from patient uniforms. On these wrapped objects he stitched the object’s name and often a number. Thus, Cadeira 371 (Chair 371), Escada 142 (Ladder 142), Soquete 204 (Socket 204), Raquete de Tênis 41 (Tennis Racket 41), and so on. Some also refer to weapons (e.g., bow, grenade, knife sheath), and others, such as a sugarcane mill, respond to the specificity of the site: the asylum-­colony was located on a former sugar plantation. In all, Bispo created some five hundred wrapped objects, which today are identified as ORFAs—­objetos recobertos por fios azuis (objects wrapped in blue thread).18 That Bispo was able to develop such (semi)autonomy in the asylum is astounding. Not only was he able to unravel uniforms; slowly but surely he took over the cells neighboring his own until he occupied all eleven in addition to the central salon space on the northern end of Pavilion 10 in the Núcleo Ulisses Viana. In her study of Bispo, communications professor Patrícia Burrowes insists: “Bispo works

35. Arthur Bispo do Rosário pictured in the upper-­right photograph in David Nasser’s article “Os loucos serão felizes?,” O Cruzeiro 16, no. 5 ­(November 27, 1943), illustrated by Jean Manzon.

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36. Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 1943. Photo: Jean Manzon

thus: Against. Against the physical and subjective misery produced by psychiatrization. Against the lack of space. Against poverty. . . . Against abandonment. Against the lack of material. Against.”19

· · · Beyond the medical community and staff at the hospital, Morais was one of the few to see Bispo’s work in the context of its production; namely, in the ward where Bispo amassed raw materials and created his work. He was also one of the few art-­world figures to meet with Bispo when he was still alive. Morais is a celebrated critic and curator, known for his extensive writings (he authored over thirty books), his support of the nova crítica (new, engaged criticism), and curatorial work during the bleakest years of Brazil’s military 117

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dictatorship. In 1964, Brazil’s democratically elected government was overthrown. With the passage of the Ato Institucional No. 5 (AI-­5) in 1968, the regime entered its most repressive phase. In these years Morais associated primarily with artists of the so-­called Geração AI-­5 (AI-­5 Generation), many of whom sought to explicitly engage the relation between art and politics as well as reenvision the artist’s role in society.20 In this vein, Morais organized art exhibitions that addressed contemporary politics, as in the notorious Do corpo à Terra (From body to Earth, 1970) held at the Parque Municipal in Belo Horizonte, as well as other events that engaged the public, among them, the legendary Domingos da Criação (Sundays of creation, 1971), which took place at MAM-­RJ, where he was then director of education (1969–­1973). This series of “happenings” in the museum’s garden attracted thousands of participants in a way that embodied Morais’s commitment to the public and collective meaning of art, as well as his belief in the creative capacities of all individuals.21 Given such a convergence of concerns—­from shared creativity to common, everyday materials (the Domingos da Criação used paper, fabric, thread, and bodies in their propositions)—­it is not surprising that in the decade to follow Morais found resonance between his values as an art critic and Bispo’s work, even as he paradoxically would engage the latter in purely formal terms. Morais’s book-­length study, Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Arte além da loucura (Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Art beyond madness), was published in 2013. The volume is informative and beautifully illustrated, offering compelling insights about Bispo, his life, and his work, as well as an overview of the critical debates surrounding his work’s framing as art. Most striking is the beginning of Morais’s introduction: “Lúcio Costa used to refer to Brasília as ‘the city I invented.’ And he was right. After all, before the ‘new city,’ Brazil’s future capital, was erected on that central highland, all that was there was emptiness and silence. Brasília did not gradually grow, organically, in accordance with its population’s needs. It was born fully formed, beautiful and monumental. Well, to paraphrase our architect and urbanist, I might say, with equal emphasis: ‘Arthur Bispo do Rosário, the artist I invented.’ ”22 The choice of the term invented, which was flagged at the outset of this chapter, is telling. As Bispo’s biographer Luciana Hidalgo makes clear, “The avant-­ garde of the New York and European art circles did not reach Jacarepaguá.”23 In his capacity as a curator, Morais had first included a selection of Bispo’s banners in the exhibition À margem da vida (At the margin of life), which opened on July 25, 1982, at MAM-­RJ. The exhibition featured approximately three hundred works produced by children in juvenile detention facilities, the elderly, psychiatric patients, and prison inmates. The introduction to the small catalog describes the aims of the exhibition: “[MAM-­RJ] wants the public to have contact with sectors of cultural creation entirely apart from the official circuit of art. The exhibition is therefore not about a conventional show but creative modalities opposed to the procedures of 118

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­professional artists. They are spontaneous forms, works apart from tradition and from codified teaching. Windows of the soul, many times charged with a strange poetry.”24 The catalog includes a section dedicated to each type of producer. The section dedicated to the work of psychiatric patients, all five from the CJM, is introduced by Denizart, who affirms, “We can learn that the ill man does not cease to be talented” or “sensitive.”25 À margem da vida was the first time that any of Bispo’s objects, which were shown alongside works by Antônio Bragança, Itaipú Lace, Muniz, and Oswaldo Kar, were exhibited outside the CJM. According to Morais, “It was at this exhibition that Arthur Bispo do Rosário could be seen, for the first time, as an artist.”26 We might qualify that statement by noting that the MAM-­RJ exhibition was the first time Bispo’s work was seen as that of an outsider artist. The exhibition, in which works were presented by subjects at the “margin of life,” relied on a discursive frame that upheld an inside and an outside of art and its institutions, echoing Jean Dubuffet’s early theorization of art brut. Soon after À margem da vida, Morais went to speak with Bispo in the company of Denizart, who that year completed the documentary film O prisioneiro da passagem: Arthur Bispo do Rosário (1982), which, along with harrowing shots of the inhabitants and the hospital’s sparse material conditions, presents an extended interview with Bispo in his working environment as he wears his Manto da Apresentação. At no point in the course of the interview does Bispo identify himself as an artist. A visitor, who remains off frame but is heard in voice-­over, notes how not everyone has the capacity to do what Bispo is doing. She suggests that it must be a “glory”—­that is, an honor—­for him to produce such things. In response, Bispo counters: “No, it’s not a glory, no. I do it because I am obliged. If I could, I would not make any of it.”27 He then queries his interlocutor, “Are you understandin’?” And in the exchange that follows, he repeats himself: “the voices oblige me to do all of this”; “if I could not do anything, I would not do any of it”; “I receive the orders and I am obliged to do it.” “Do you see my aura? What color is it?”28 Bispo asks. Only after successfully answering this question—­a question Bispo posed to all those who desired entry to his space—­did Morais gain access. According to his account, during their meeting Morais offered to organize an exhibition of Bispo’s works at MAM-­RJ. Bispo refused. Not until after his death on July 7, 1989, would his creative production be thoroughly subject to the conventions of art, art history, and museum display. The resiting of the work from the space of the clinic to the realm of artistic culture was no seamless transition, as Morais’s own account in Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Arte além da loucura testifies to. Beyond trying to decide whether some things were finished “works” and others raw material, Bispo had not signed or dated any of the objects he left behind. Just three months after Bispo’s death, Morais opened the exhibition Registros de minha passagem pela Terra at the Parque Lage School of Visual 119

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Arts. The exhibition included five hundred objects and constituted a shift in discursive register from À margem da vida. In the earlier exhibition, Bispo’s work was framed within a broader context of what might be called outsider art. Of Registros, a solo exhibition of Bispo’s work, Morais confesses that it was “the first act of what I called . . . my invention of Bispo do Rosário as an artist.”29 The exhibition traveled to four other cities in Brazil and in each installment was accompanied by a symposium on art and madness, and at times a modest catalog.30 In 1993, three and a half years after this initial act of invention, Morais went further: “I was able to realize my long-­standing dream of holding an exhibition of Bispo do Rosário—­the one he had refused me on our first meeting—­at the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art.”31

· · · The historical emergence of Bispo do Rosário the artist has inspired a debate that remains unresolved, perhaps necessarily so. At the exhibition Eu preciso destas palavras. Escrita (1999) at the Conjunto Cultural da Caixa, Luiz Camillo Osorio raised the question that every exhibition of Bispo’s work begs: “What is this?” His response: “You cannot say it is just art. It is at once more and less than art. Less, because those objects are deprived of any ‘consciousness of art,’ a sense of belonging to a tradition. Bispo’s artistic creations deny the historical dialogue that pervades the production of art.”32 He avows that the works are also “more than art,” an observation he echoes the following year on account of an exhibition of work from the Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente at Paço Imperial.33 Osorio describes Bispo’s objects as the inverted images of Lygia Clark’s relational objects, explaining, “If she abandoned art to deal with the madness of others, he escaped his madness to speak with others through art.”34 Although one might query (as I do) whether Clark in fact abandons art, Osorio isolates an important inversion that extends to the work’s actual reception: Clark’s relational objects live on in psychiatric contexts and uneasily inhabit modern art venues (as with the MoMA exhibition of her work), whereas Bispo’s work entertains a consistent presence in the spaces of contemporary art. Accordingly, Clark’s late work has influenced therapeutic practices, most notably in the work of Gina Ferreira and Lula Wanderley; Bispo’s creative output has informed the work of artists as varied as Jorge Fonseca and Leonilson (José Leonilson Bezerra Dias).35 In fact, the curator Lisette Lagnado describes Bispo’s work as having had “one of the most profound influences on the visuality of Brazilian art in the 90s.”36 Certainly, it has produced a veritable “Bispo effect.” Ferreira Gullar raised similar concerns about the status of Bispo’s work when reviewing the exhibition Arthur Bispo do Rosário: O artista do fio ­(Arthur Bispo do Rosário: The thread artist, 2011) at Caixa Cultural. Gullar writes against Bispo’s association with contemporary art, arguing that it is an “inappropriate association that leaves room for a series of errors.”37 For 120

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Gullar, it is misguided to present Bispo as a “revolutionary artist, conscious of the intention to break with existing forms of art” and thus “as a sort of precursor to the so-­called contemporary art.”38 After all, Bispo had no knowledge of such experiments (e.g., Marcel Duchamp’s readymades), and he never pursued a career in art. Gullar continues, “To associate the work of this artist with so-­called contemporary art is to ignore the origin and the nature of each manifestation.” For Gullar, what is at issue is not whether we should describe Bispo as an artist or even designate his work as art; rather, he maintains that it is “inappropriate to attribute to him avant-­garde intentions.” At no point does Gullar doubt the work’s aesthetic quality, the result of what he calls “exceptional artistic talent and mystical vision.”39 So too did he similarly esteem the paintings by the patients of Engenho de Dentro.40 The responses of cultural figures such as Osorio and Gullar (and also Lagnado) do not deny the status of Bispo’s work as art in a broad sense, but they do take issue with its insertion within a specific understanding of modern and contemporary art and its history. Their defense of the historical and discursive conditions of art is for Morais a retrograde gesture: “All these people see art as one big academic field and, therefore, as a closed market.” He asserts, “I was the first to propose associating Bispo with contemporary art, though on other grounds.” He declares Bispo to be an “artist in the fullest sense of the term” and warns against confusing the work of art with the artist. Morais argues, “The work of art has an intelligence of its own, and I dare say even an unconscious, [given that] it survives its author.” He then asks, “But who says the objects created by Bispo do Rosário do not want to be called art? Ask the work itself, and it will say, yes, I am a work of art.”41 He thus insists on the separation of author and work in a way that initially seems to evoke postmodern critiques of authorship. Here, we might recall Michel Foucault’s seminal “What Is an Author?” which includes a quotation from Samuel Beckett: “What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking?”42 At stake for Foucault is the difference between the author as an individual subject and what he calls the “author function”: the various arrangements, social and institutional, that actualize the author’s work in society. Where Foucault displaces the author to draw attention to multiple forces through which an author is instantiated in discourse, Morais dispenses with the author of the work—­in this case Bispo—­in order to affirm the pure autonomy of his work. In so doing, Bispo’s creative production can be placed in “dialogue with most currents in post-­modern art. . . . Pop Art, New Realism, Conceptual Art, Arte Povera and the archeological strand of French Art.”43 The imputed autonomy of the work also underwrites Morais’s approach as a curator. He maintains, “The relations I draw are between works, not artists, so the fact that Bispo do Rosário was oblivious to the history of art is immaterial.”44 Here curatorial intention trumps artistic intention and history—­but only, I wager, when it comes to the work of psychiatric patients. For example, 121

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in the case of what Bispo is said to have referred to as montages—­his various collections of objects (e.g., spoons, tin cups, boots) placed in gridlike fashion on wooden supports—­Morais explains that instead of montage “the really fitting term is assemblage, with a long modern and contemporary art history already behind it.”45 But if contemporary artists often invent their own vocabulary and name their work, developing it with an eye to art’s histories, and if Morais wants to claim Bispo for contemporary art, why not use Bispo’s montage designation? Perhaps because to seem to remain outside the domain of art’s designations and conventions would be to jeopardize his desire to secure Bispo’s status as a contemporary artist. Bispo’s montages are repeatedly juxtaposed to the work of artists associated with the assemblage aesthetic of the late 1950s and 1960s, by Morais but also by others who introduce additional comparisons between Bispo and the avant-­garde.46 With Bispo’s work Congas e havaianas (Tennis shoes and flip-­flops; fig. 37), in particular, we might easily conjure the nouveaux réalistes (a movement referred to in Morais’s text) and even specify the similarities to the creative output of an artist like Arman. The latter’s collection of women’s high-­heel shoes in Madison Avenue (1962) could easily serve as a comparison for Bispo’s collection of tennis shoes. Both present collections of shoes. In another instance, Morais compares Bispo’s use of language and numbers with the semiotic investigations of conceptual artists such as ­Joseph Kosuth and Roman Opalka.47 Morais argues for the dialogue of Bispo’s work with contemporary art, but to do so he paradoxically proceeds as a modern formalist critic: he puts forth an understanding of artistic forms as unified and autonomous works that exist independent of history. Consequently, the cumulative effect is to offer an understanding of artistic movements and categories as so many transhistorical styles. He also, in order to inscribe Bispo more effectively into the history of contemporary art, writes as if such concepts as authorship and autonomy were never before critiqued. Unfortunately, in the course of his text, such a move reads less as a strategic insertion of Bispo’s work into contemporary art than as a naturalization of the differences that obtain at the level of materials, contingencies of context, and sites of production.48 Thus, Morais not only revives modernist myths; to uphold the designation of assemblage in relation to Bispo’s works, he applies a strident formalism based on pseudomorphology.49 His comparisons between Bispo and nouveau ­réalisme or between Bispo and Duchamp ultimately depend on this pseudomorphological operation. Such pseudomorphism is pervasive when it comes to the exhibition and writing on the work of so-­called outsider artists, because the categories of “art history” or even “poetry” are applied as a way of lifting the work into the realm of high art and inserting it into the contemporary global art system. To be sure, pseudomorphism is not only the purview of the contemporary art

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37. Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Congas e havaianas (Tennis shoes and flip-flops), n.d. Wood, plastic, fabric, paper, and rubber. 180 x 60 x 20 cm. Coleção Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea / Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro.

curator who approaches the “mad artist.” Recent exhibitions of modern and contemporary art too often assume that visually similar forms yield similar meanings. Consider, for example, the specific appearance of geometric abstraction from Latin America in the context of Jens Hoffmann’s Other Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York City in 2014 (for more on this, see the final chapter in this volume).

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· · · Morais invented not only the artist Bispo but also his individual works, dividing and cataloging them, giving them a conceptual order as well as descriptive and art-­historical designations (e.g., ORFAs, assemblages, Duchampian things), with titles that were often culled from the words embroidered on Bispo’s creative production, its literal content, or the process of making, as in the case of the ORFAs. This labor was essential for purposes of the work’s heritage listing with the Instituto Estadual do Patrimônio Artístico e Cultural (INEPAC). But the endeavor was no small task. Morais admits, “How were we to distinguish between raw material and completed works?”; “[he] didn’t title, date or sign anything”; “there was no point in trying to . . . imagine some linear construction to it, as if it followed an inner developmental course through distinct times, phases or stages.”50 It is, moreover, Morais’s initial classification that structures to this day the collection ­inventory of Bispo’s work at the Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea, which is sited in the former administrative building on the CJM grounds. In 1989, with regard to the patient-­artists at Engenho de Dentro and on account of Bispo’s first exhibition, Morais distinguished Bispo from the likes of Emygdio de Barros and Raphael Domingues because of Bispo’s work in three dimensions. Rather than suggest impressionism or cubism, Bispo’s work, for Morais, is more about pop art and new realism and thus “moves with absolute naturalness and competence in the domain of avant-­garde art, of Dada.”51 By aligning the patient-­artists at Engenho de Dentro with modernism (and implicitly with Mário Pedrosa’s support of their work), Morais reserves the status of “postmodern” and contemporary artist for Bispo. Subsequently, in 1995, when Bispo represented Brazil alongside Nuno Ramos at the Venice Biennale, the then president of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Edemar Cid Ferreira, explained that the choice of each artist was in concert with the “utopia of modern art: to promulgate the promise of happiness inherent in all artistic creation.”52 The curator of the Brazilian pavilion, Nelson Aguilar, aiming to separate Bispo’s work from an understanding of art brut, noted that Bispo did not use “traditional supports” and constructed what are known as “installations.”53 He also placed him at a remove from occupational therapy (as does Morais), thereby drawing a line between creative expression in the context of a group workshop and “independent” ­creative expression in the asylum (precisely what Jean Dubuffet understood as art brut). Still, comparisons with artists such as Duchamp are maintained. In short, these various accounts put Bispo’s creative production to work as “contemporary art” and display confidence in form as read through the lens of modern and contemporary artistic practices. Morais, in an effort to shore up the artist’s singularity, also maintains that Bispo never saw an art exhibition.54 Although he allegedly refused to participate in the hospital’s occupational therapy programs, Bispo almost 124

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38. 1a exposição de pintura e arte feminina aplicada, 1950. Exhibition view. Colônia Juliano Moreira, Rio de Janeiro. Instituto Municipal Juliano Moreira Collection.

certainly would have seen exhibitions of patients’ work, perhaps as early as the CJM’s Primeira exposição de pintura e arte feminina aplicada (First exhibition of painting and feminine applied art; fig. 38) in May 1950.55 In this exhibition, five painters from the Colméia de pintores (Hive of painters) were included as well as the products of various “feminine” arts, above all embroidery and weaving. In the catalog to the exhibition, Heitor Péres, CJM director, includes biographical entries on the five painters with descriptive accounts of their diagnoses, as was standard in psychiatric exhibition practices at the time (at least three of the five patients were featured later that year in the Exposition internationale d’art psychopathologique in Paris; see chapter 2 for more on this exhibition).56 Furthermore, the Núcleo Ulisses Viana, where Bispo would reside upon his return to the CJM in the 1960s, was also home to various workshops, from shoemaking to wicker construction. And although photographic documentation of the continuity of the institution’s exhibitions and workshops is scant, I did locate a photograph of an exhibition of patients’ work from 1977 (fig. 39), thereby establishing a partial genealogy that might corroborate my suspicion that Bispo was 125

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39. Patients’ work on display at the Colônia Juliano Moreira, Rio de Janeiro, 1977. Exhibition view. Instituto Municipal Juliano Moreira Collection.

likely exposed to asylum art exhibition practices. Given the extensive occupational workshops at the CJM, as well as the spaces dedicated to patients’ creative work, Bispo would have been introduced to what it means to display art, even if both Bispo’s and other patients’ works were largely circumscribed by the psychiatric setting.57 Morais’s Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Arte além da loucura is the site of a struggle between the clinical and the critical readings of Bispo’s work—­a struggle indicated by the very structure of the volume, which contains a section dedicated to constructing Bispo’s biography and a section dedicated to a critical analysis of the work. But the upshot of Morais’s choices brings with it another struggle: between the rights of the critic and the rights of the mad. Perhaps unwittingly, his study points to the implicit, unexamined, and often arbitrary means by which, as art historians, critics, and curators, we either do or do not show consideration for an artist’s speech about his or her production. Given the uncertain status of where Bispo’s work begins and where it ends, we are faced with a persistent challenge and problematic: to which

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conventions does one appeal not only to catalog but also to legitimate and analyze his work? Osorio seems to evoke this problematic in his 1999 review, when he writes: “There is always a touch of violence in ‘exposing’ his work, in giving it a meaning—­the status of art—­that it does not want. . . . On the other hand it would be a mistake to let it get shut away in some storeroom.” This issue of the status of Bispo’s work and its exhibition will likely continue unabated. The question is not whether the work of psychiatric patients should or should not be exhibited but how to exhibit it. Their creative production invites the challenge of how to create a discursive (and by extension curatorial) frame in which we can learn from the historicity of madness and also from the art of the mad. I take the particular “violence” to which Osorio refers to be not only the work’s inscription within psychiatric history but also its classification within contemporary art history, a status “it does not want.” Here we might turn again to Bispo’s speech, which intermittently appears through the quotations reproduced in the various books dedicated to his life and work. He states, “No, it’s not a glory. . . . I hear voices and the voices make me do all this. . . . I wouldn’t do it if I had the choice.”58 Do we honor Bispo’s refusal to have his works read as art? If we have the documentation of Bispo’s speech and how he described his process and his work, should the work be hijacked into the categories of art history, its movements and styles? If we want to claim for Bispo the status of being “contemporary,” what is the nature of this contemporaneity? I do not mean to suggest that a tidy solution exists to the aforementioned problematic, but I do mean to imply that one might need to abandon the autonomy of art as well as poetics in order to understand how such creative practices are in historical dialogue with the microphysics of power related to the history of the psychiatric institution. To do so from the perspective of art history demands that a different type of art history be put into play—­one that might need to do away with, at least partially, the affirmation of the autonomy of Bispo’s work in order to develop alternative genealogies and nuanced critical histories.

· · · Many psychiatric patients have declared themselves to be Jesus or even Napoléon. In the early nineteenth century, various “cures” were proposed for how to persuade the psychotic subject to return to reality, and at times doctors even built a fictional labyrinth patterned on the patient’s delirium, as a means by which to bring the patient back to normal life through the conceit of a “healing” fiction.59 With the emergence of psychiatry, medical truth is taken as given, and the asylum obliged patients to submit to regulation, obey orders, maintain regular habits, and perform labor. If this reality in the form

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of discipline was imposed on madness in the name of truth, it is startling to see how, within this paradigm, one upheld by the administration of the agricultural colony and praxiterapia programs at the CJM, Bispo produced something else. To move forward and begin to parse some of the issues discussed earlier in this chapter, I turn again to Foucault and what was decisive for him in isolating the author function in contrast to the author as an individual subject with a personal biography and history. As Foucault explains, the concept of author function “characterize[s] the existence, circulation and operation of certain discourses within a society.”60 Such functioning includes not only an author’s rights and the possibility of canon formation but also a movement beyond the limits of the oeuvre to constitute the author as a founder of discursivity. Because of this, Foucault has been accused of not addressing real subjects and the ways the process of subjectivation impinges on actual lives: it is as if the subject dissolves in discourse. Giorgio Agamben approaches this critique, aired by many of Foucault’s critics, by turning to Foucault’s “Lives of Infamous Men,” a text conceived of as a preface to a volume of archival documents, from prison records to lettres de cachet. At issue is how the “infamous” subjects named in these records, these “brief lives,” which were condemned to opprobrium, leave their traces “through quotes in the discourse of power.”61 That is, the language of power does not represent the subject or provide us with a portrait; rather, the few sentences that remain of the subjects’ existence are the product of power. Consequently, for Agamben, following Foucault, these lives appear in language, but they nevertheless remain “absolutely unexpressed” in this language, which is found in the prison or hospital record—­a language not their own.62 What does this have to do with Bispo? Recall how the madman raves, and the psychiatrist records, and let us thus turn to a few of Bispo’s records.63 In Nicolaes’s 1938 report taken at the time of Bispo’s first internment, the psychiatrist speaks of Bispo’s calm nature, lively eyes, and delusions of grandeur. He also reports on the subject’s speech: “The patient recounted to us his fantastic dreams. He has traveled through the continents on a religious mission where he appears as a friar. His body has been put to the test to see ­ duardo if he can serve Jesus Christ.”64 Almost fifty years later, in 1986, Dr. E Jorge Cur similarly begins his report by noting Bispo’s calm demeanor: “Calm and oriented, he lives in a world of his own, in which he claims to be enlightened and prophesies the impending end of the world. He says he is on earth to ‘fulfill a mission.’ ”65 Following Foucault, these texts describe a real existence, forming part of the “dramaturgy of the real” in which the discourse of power, everyday life, and truth come together in a specific way.66 In a manner that can be extended to the scant information that makes up Bispo’s psychiatric record, Foucault affirms: “Real lives were ‘played out’ in these few sentences; by this I do not mean that they were represented, but

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that their freedom, their misfortune, often their death, in any case their fate were actually decided in them, at least in part. These discourses intersected with lives in real, concrete ways; these existences were effectively risked and lost in these words.”67 Here Foucault isolates a particular paradox that arises when power is exercised at the level of everyday life. Namely, something escapes the archive, which aims to assign subjects to villainous acts or to ascribe madness to errant behaviors. Indeed, what survives are traces of a life that may have otherwise gone unknown. These traces exist precisely because they are the product of power. Similarly, Bispo—­a poor black man who may have gone unnoticed in Brazilian history—­left traces of his life on account of his subjection to the mechanisms of psychiatric power, the same power that aimed to silence him and separate him from the world. And like the infamous subjects to whom Foucault turns, Bispo’s life “can no longer be separated out from the declamations, the tactical biases, the obligatory lies that power games and power relations presuppose.”68 In this way, Paulo Herkenhoff ’s suggestion—­“A day will come when Bispo do Rosário’s art will be discussed with no connection to madness”—­is impossible to follow.69 Similarly, to assert Bispo’s relevance exclusively for contemporary art divests his life of the very history and conditions of possibility that brought his life and his art to the center of debates on art and madness. While Morais insists on reading the work “independent of the context in which it was created,” I insist that Bispo produced his work against (echoing Burrowes) the very context on which its subsequent legibility and historical meaning depend.70 Yet a crucial discontinuity obtains between Foucault’s text and how it might inform our understanding of Bispo’s life and work. Foucault’s selection of documents is restricted to the years 1660–­1760, the classical age in France, and to documents that report on existences known exclusively through what was said about them. In short, these lives have no history outside the words that document them. This might have been the case with Bispo, too, a man who could have remained obscure and confined to the psychiatric archive, present only through reduced summaries, a series of terse accounts, in his medical record—­a site of struggle to reduce madness to mental illness and Bispo to his diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenic. Indeed, Bispo’s existing hospital file, contained in the CJM administration’s archive, includes medical statistics reports and social services questionnaires in which the answers to the following questions were left blank: Do you currently work? In what? Would you like to change profession? What do you need for that? Are you currently licensed, retired, unemployed? Do you work within a community? Which one? Would you like to learn a profession? Which one? Do you own anything or have an income? What?71 All these questions aimed to establish the patient’s socioeconomic situation. On a separate nursing record, the answers checked under “general behavior” and “humor” are

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“aggressive” and “irritated” respectively.72 Under ­“occupational therapy” in the section dedicated to treatment, the nurse checked both “frequents of his own initiative” and “refuses.”73 On the basis of this nurse’s report, Bispo was administered no other treatment.74 Given that all thirty-­five questions making up the social services questionnaire were in fact left unanswered, it is safe to say that precious little of Bispo’s biography is recorded in his file. Beyond the written traces to which Foucault’s text refers, with Bispo we also have the additional record of his spoken words from two extensive interviews—­the first with Denizart in 1982, and the second with Robaina in 1988—­as well as Bispo’s brief statements in Fernando Gabeira’s video Bispo, which aired on Globo TV in the 1980s.75 In both of the longer interviews, Bispo narrates not only his delirium but also his response to the psychiatric institution. For example, in the interview with Robaina, he speaks to his ­erroneous diagnosis: Bispo: The doctors. Dr. Odilon, a portion of psychiatrists perceived: “The Mr. is God, the Mr. is God, the Mr. is God,” and have in my file that I am paranoid schizophrenic, it is there. Robaina: What do you think of having paranoid schizophrenia? Bispo: Why it is an error, an error, yes, an error. Because the doctor who is a psychiatrist and perceives. Teachers, professors and my record has that business of paranoid schizophrenic, paranoid, there. Robaina: Do you think it is wrong? Bispo: It is, it is, it is, because in the history of the sacred creator, the psychiatrist does not exist. Doctor, yes, but not psychiatric doctor. The psychiatrist came to do this . . . they gave me medicine, when the doctor is good, when he perceives, he did not give medicine to me.76

In this elliptical exchange, Bispo stresses that some of the psychiatrists, the good ones, perceived that he was Jesus even though his record states other­ wise. The conversation with Denizart unfolds as follows: Denizart: And who will rule the world, will there be a president, will there be a governor? Bispo: Oh not that. No, no, no, no. The one who will rule is me, nothing else. It is written. Denizart: Ah-­ha . . . Bispo: It is! The election is only one, of the creator, you know? This business of voting, of the party, it is just one. Denizart: Uh-­hm . . . Bispo: It is written. . . . [T]he party is only one, it is of the creator, nothing else. Denizart: And the psychiatric hospitals, what will happen?

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Bispo: That is going to end, this business of illness. Denizart: There will not be any more illnesses? Bispo: No, misery . . . nothing, nothing.

The 1980s, the decade when curatorial attention turned to Bispo’s creative production, was also a time when the media began to denounce the h ­ orrors of the psychiatric institution and the reforma psiquiátrica movement gained momentum, leading to nationwide changes in the system of mental health care that coincided with the final years of the military regime. Key figures of radical psychiatry in Europe, from Franco Basaglia to Félix Guattari, also regularly visited and lectured in Brazil.77 With the calls for reform and socialization of patients, the CJM developed a plan for the patients’ de­ institutionalization and their progressive transfer outside of the hospital.78 ­Patients also began to be paid for their labor, and the CJM opened a center for rehabilitation and social integration, among other programs. Uttered in 1982, Bispo’s words about an end to psychiatric hospitals was echoed five years later during the Conferência Nacional de Saúde Mental, which had as its motto “Por uma sociedade sem manicômios” (For a society without asylums). Two years later, in 1989, the government introduced Law No. 3.657/89, the Lei da Saúde Mental (Law of Mental Health), which proposed the regulation of the rights of individuals with mental illness and the progressive closing of the country’s asylums.79 Bispo died that same year.

· · · Beyond the verbal content of the interviews, we also have Bispo’s creative production and his words as they exist embroidered in his work. Of his sartorial production and what he planned to wear when presenting himself to the world as Christ, Bispo explained to Denizart: “I should be ready in about six or five months, with resplendent things from head to toe, to present myself to the world. . . . The world who I must present myself to are the interested right here in the asylum; that according to the indwelling of Christ [habitação de Cristo] says: I in the asylum should present my transformation to the directors, nothing else.”80 Bispo would be decked out from head to foot with his Manto da Apresentação, which he wore during the filming of his interview. Considered by Morais to be Bispo’s masterpiece, “the mental and visual synthesis” of his work, the cloak is covered with representations of Bispo’s universe.81 Its brown wool surface presents an extensive network of embroidered images and numbers. For Morais, it is an inventory of Bispo’s inventory of the world. On the right-­hand front side, just below the collar, is a heart stitched in white thread bordered by the word universo (universe). Below the heart is the word pai (father), and below it an embroidered balance, the traditional symbol of justice, made of red, blue, and white thread.

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Unlike the cloak photographed by Jean Manzon in 1943 (see figs. 35–­36), in this final preserved version, Bispo placed a fringed yellow epaulet (decorative ­shoulder piece often used on military uniforms to denote rank) on each side of the collar, which he adorned with pleated red fabric. The various colored ropes that crisscross the front and back of the cloak end in an array of decorative tassels (see fig. 46). On the vestment’s inside, Bispo embroidered the names of those who agreed to accompany him on his journey. The names of these women, the majority embroidered with blue thread on the white lining, spiral in the direction of the collar: Adriana Luisa, Maria Correia, Heloisa Sampaio, Wanda Campos, Angelina Francisca, Carlota Cordeiro, and so on. In the critical literature, Bispo’s Manto da Apresentação is often associated with Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés, a comparison that Morais established in 1989 in the first exhibition catalog.82 Subsequently, Marta Dantas, follow­ ing Morais’s lead, described how the Parangolés and Manto both engage dress and movement and that, consequently, in each “the structure of the work is its own expressive act, and this [structure] is produced to the extent that the work is used.”83 She further contends that the works’ similarity “permits the appropriation of Oiticica’s speech in the attempt to clarify A ­ rthur Bispo’s work.”84 She cites Oiticica when he states, regarding the ­Parangolés: “The body is not a support for the work; on the contrary, it is the total ‘in(corp)oration.’ It is the incorporation of the body in the work and the work in the body. I call it ‘in-­corpo-­ration.’ ”85 To be sure, in the critical literature on Oiticica, Bispo’s Manto never serves as a comparison, nor is Bispo’s delirious speech ever called upon as a means to explicate Oiticica’s work.86 The condition of legibility of Bispo’s work as art depends on twentieth-­ century avant-­garde developments, from the readymade to assemblage. But rather than ask how Bispo’s work was possible when Bispo “was unaware . . . of the existence of Duchamp . . . , or the works of French new realism, or the poetics of Italian arte povera,” one might reframe the question, as does Agnaldo Farias, in order to declare, “Were it not for the direction taken by art during the 20th century, with everyday objects and appropriation techniques . . . the work of Bispo do Rosário would still not make sense: it would be unclassifiable.”87 Without a doubt, developments in artistic practice allowed Bispo’s creative production to be recognized as art. Though at the time of Bispo’s death, various hospital guards and functionaries wanted to empty his space and get rid of the work, which they did not perceive as art. Some even wanted the work’s materials to return to their utilitarian function: for utensils and mugs to be returned to the refectory, and for the sheets to return to the beds.88 The Associação de Amigos dos Artistas da Colônia Juliano Moreira intervened and took the work to the hospital’s administrative building, which housed the Museu Nise da Silveira (since 2002, the ­Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea).

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If Morais invented Bispo the artist, he and the members of the Associação de Amigos initiated Bispo’s author function, through which Bispo would be identified as the author or artist of 802 works of art and discussed as such in a series of exhibitions, publications, and public debates. These developments provided the necessary conditions for the work’s listing as cultural heritage with INEPAC in 1994. Such developments also bolstered the search for additional details of Bispo’s biography beyond the medical language of observation and neutrality.89 Hence, the well-­deserved esteem bestowed on the efforts of Hidalgo, Morais, and Corpas, among others, who have pieced together a “life” beyond the “brief life” indicated in Bispo’s medical file, some of which was lost to bureaucratic negligence.90 The drive to legitimate Bispo’s work as art was an essential part of a broader cultural strategy to secure the work’s preservation and legal status as national patrimony. Bispo’s creative production is similarly framed as art in the museum that carries his name today.91 But how to categorize his art within art history and its various movements and stylistic categories has not been an easy endeavor, as the debate cited earlier suggests. Morais was also keen to keep Bispo’s work from being claimed for the “folk art” category.92 I always hesitate, decidedly so, when faced with assertions of Bispo’s status as a contemporary artist and of his work as contemporary art in the way some critics like Morais are wont to do. Mário Pedrosa, for example, who included the work of psychiatric patients as part of his theory of modern aesthetic response, nevertheless differentiated among sites of production by designating the works coming from Engenho de Dentro as arte virgem. With Bispo my discomfort largely stems from the fact that prior to the initiation of his particular author function, and thus a very specific type of discursivity within the field of art, Bispo was subject to an order of discourse in which his civil status was not equal to that of other artistic subjects. Put simply, he had precious few legal rights. My goal is not to disavow Bispo’s creative production as art. Instead, I hope to make a case for the difference between identifying Bispo as a contemporary artist and the contemporaneity of Bispo’s art. The difference, I argue, is one not just of degree but of kind. The specific historicity and criticality of his work are lost when that work is exclusively assimilated to specific art-­historical styles and forms. Likewise, more critical work needs to be done in order to account for how this man—­a black man whose psychopathological identification converged with race and class discrimination—­became one of Brazil’s most famous contemporary artists, legitimated both nationally and internationally. For art history, what does this dynamic of social exclusion followed by a (posthumous) aesthetic inclusion mean for the narratives crafted around modern and contemporary art in Brazil? What I would like to draw attention to here is how Bispo’s work and, more specifically, his sartorial stylization form part of a genealogy of proto-­

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antipsychiatric practices in which patients have dressed up, subverted their uniforms, and asserted their singularity against the standardization imposed on them. Take, for example, Giuseppe Versino, an Italian asylum inmate in the early twentieth century who made garments from cleaning rags that he unraveled and then wove back together. These braided pieces of clothing include a tunic and pants, as well as a full-­length tunic or dress with long sleeves and scarf, weighing about ninety-­five pounds. He also made a pair of boots with rope laces that end in tassels. The patient and his process were described (likely by psychiatrist Antonio Marro) in relation to two existing photographs: “Admitted at the psychiatric hospital in Collegno, [he] is in charge of everyday cleaning. He, after using rags, washes them, then frays them, and finally shapes drawstrings in order to weave his clothes together. . . . It will take him about one month to make his dress.”93 Today, these garments can be found in the collection of Cesare Lombroso at the Museo di Antropologia Criminale in Turin (they were donated to this father of positivist criminology by Marro). Lombroso argued that artistic genius was a form of insanity and assembled a large collection of psychiatric art to prove it.94 And while Lombroso’s theories have been discredited, his collection contains instances of work that can be read as patients’ affirmation of their singularity in the face of disciplinary subjugation. Another example is presented by Agnes Richter’s embroidered jacket, which now forms part of the Prinzhorn Collection (fig. 40). In the mid-­ 1890s, this former seamstress and patient in an Austrian asylum harnessed her craft to individualize her uniform. Her embroidered writing lines the jacket’s inside and outside, a visually dense script that relates fragments of her life. We might also include in this list of antipsychiatric clothes La robe de Bonneval (Bonneval dress), the work of a woman interned in a psychiatric hospital in Bonneval, France, in 1929. Made from leftover scraps of fabric and thread from the hospital’s sewing workshop, the dress took about ten years to complete and is embroidered with a pattern of feathers and garlands, silhouettes of men and animals, and superimposed lines. In its entirety the outfit also includes a coat, scarf, bag, as well as a curtain and carpet—­the latter two were, according to the patient, the necessary props for the robe’s use. This history perhaps brings us closer to a nuanced and more complex understanding of Bispo’s production.95 Such instances of sartorial counterpower in the disciplinary space of the asylum were also documented closer to Bispo’s institutional home. In 1946, Dr. Osório César published his lecture “Aspectos da vida social entre os loucos” (Aspects of social life among the mad), which takes up various modes of sociability and interaction among the insane: deliriums that a patient is Jesus (a delirium Bispo shared), the organization of a group escape, and patients’ drawings and ad hoc constructions.96 In these pages we also find two images of a black male patient

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40. Agnes Emma Richter (1844–­1918), handmade little jacket embroidered with autobiographical text, n.d., Inventory No. 743. © Prinzhorn Collection, University Hospital Heidelberg.

­ iagnosed with hypomania. The patient wears a jacket and tie, rolled-­up d pants, a hat, and funky round glasses of his own design (fig. 41). Similar gestures of affirmation are noted in passing but not developed in Morais’s study of Bispo’s life and work. Morais observes: “In many inmates you can sense a desire toward self-­affirmation. The women, for example, in the way they dress and make themselves up. In short, however terrible the physical ruin and abandonment, you can still see traces of dignity, an effort to affirm an identity.”97 Bispo’s sartorial production also prompted work by patients who frequented the art therapy studio at the psychiatric hospital in Villejuif (a former asylum), the historical site of Dr. Auguste Marie’s Musée de la folie. Inspired by the 2003 Bispo exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, these patients decided to engage in the collective production of their own version of Bispo’s cape (fig. 42).98

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41. Patient diagnosed with hypomania, reproduced in Osório César, “Aspectos da vida social entre os loucos,” Revista do Arquivo Municipal, v. CV, no. 12. São Paulo: Departamento de Cultura, 1946. 42. Cape produced by art therapy studio participants at the psychiatric hospital in Villejuif and inspired by the 2003 Bispo exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, Paris.

While Bispo lived inside the asylum, he was no stranger to contemporary history, which does not mean he necessarily wanted to be brought back to a determinate “normal” understanding of reality. Rosângela Maria, psychology intern (known today for the particular infatuation Bispo developed for her), followed his case for three years. She variously tried to bring him back to the real world of the asylum, a patient like the others, but also to the reality outside. When she asked if he wanted a family, a house, he supposedly responded, “Não tenho tempo para essas coisas” (I have no time for those things).99 But he was aware of what was going on in the world “outside.” Among his belongings he had stacks of newspapers and magazines.100 An ex-­guard at Bispo’s pavilion reported to Burrowes that Bispo “was an informed [esclarecido] patient, watched TV, gave money to Mr. Durval to buy things for his universe. One day I asked him: ‘Do you know what is happening in the world, Bispo?’ ‘I know, Russia is invading Afghanistan.’ ”101

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The awareness and concision of this example of Bispo’s speech contrasts with his “delirious” speech regarding the end of psychiatry. Indeed, the rules that govern the intelligibility of speech and secure one’s status as a subject are delimited by a set of implicit and explicit norms. To move outside these norms is to risk one’s status as a subject and whether one will be heard. But rather than ignore the madman’s speech, with Bispo one recognizes an evident relation between current events and the delusional speech that suggests an imminent crisis that proved to be actual in the psychiatric institution. In his delirium he also proposes the establishment of a new order in which he alone will rule. But the seemingly reciprocal relationship between Bispo’s delusion and the moves toward psychiatric reform in Brazil is no mere coincidence.102 Rather, therein lies Bispo’s contemporaneity. For Agamben the contemporary is an experience of dissonance: “Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it, through a disjunction and an anachronism.”103 In the case of Bispo, we might understand such distance and disjunction as literal, given the forced seclusion in which he lived: it was an imposition, not a choice. Agamben’s conception of the contemporary ­allows for distinct temporalities, for a certain out-­of-­jointness for those who truly belong to their time. Seen from the perspective of the present, Bispo’s disjunctions and anachronisms are multiple: his disrupted subjectivity; the persistence with which he continued his work in an inhospitable context; the precarity of his materials and outmoded methods (collecting, sewing, embroidering). He neither coincided with what society expected of the insane nor adjusted himself to the psychiatric institution’s normative demands. Yet his simultaneous proximity to his time is also evident throughout his creative production, especially in his series of banners. Through means both visual and verbal, his fifteen banners picture warships from the Brazilian fleet, the two hundred embassies Bispo knew to exist in Brazil, and, on the one posthumously titled As histórias universal (Universal histories, c. 1967–­1974; fig. 43), an embroidered military parade (or so it appears) with the words “Ministro da relações do exterior” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and “Corpo diplomáticos” (Diplomatic Corps) stitched alongside figures and other words designating doctors, visitors, and progress.104 Given the images of soldiers and the military, embassies and flags, Bispo offers up to view the machinery of nation-­states and war. Such ceremonial contexts call attention to the contemporary performative dimensions of history. In this way, Bispo’s art is not contemporary in the way we think of the contemporary as a periodization in contemporary art—­as what came after modernism and postmodernism. Bispo’s contemporaneity is the mark of an existential condition in which he was both wholly other to and at one with his time.

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43. Arthur Bispo do Rosário, As histórias universal (Universal histories), c. 1967–­1974. Wood, fabric sheet, metal, thread, and plastic. 138 x 189 cm. Coleção Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea / Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro.

· · · Even if you exhibit him next to contemporary artists, Bispo remains an exception.

Ana Linnemann, 2015

Among creative work produced at a physical and psychic remove from the art world, Bispo’s work is among the most fascinating and extensive. And while I might not claim Bispo as a contemporary artist, his place in the history of contemporary art remains indisputable: he is a figure whose production not only inspired the work of contemporary artists; it participated in the construction of what counts as global and contemporary art during the past five to ten years. In the context of Brazil, he is perhaps the last in a genealogy of patient-­artists who produced their work while living in the asylum. Since the psychiatric reforms initiated at the time of and after Bispo’s death, occupational therapy studios have continued, but, with some exceptions, patients no longer live at the country’s various hospitals. 138

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By way of conclusion, I would like to evoke the “exalted” and the “abject,” attributes that often structure the subjectivity of schizophrenic subjects like Bispo. In the extant archival sources and interviews, we read that Bispo is Jesus but also that he is forced to make objects by the voices he hears. The doctors “recognize” him as Jesus, but he is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He is at once supernatural and subjected to external forces and d ­ iagnoses. From Sigmund Freud to Hans Prinzhorn, the type of ambivalence evinced by Bispo’s speech has been considered structural to clinical descriptions of schizophrenia; it is put into sharper relief when contextualized within the material conditions of the asylum. Prinzhorn describes it thus: “A patient is God but sweeps the floor willingly.”105 I bring up Prinzhorn’s observation to draw attention to the fact that what exclusively gets taken up in the art discourse surrounding Bispo is precisely the subject’s exaltation, his delusions of grandeur, as well as the accoutrements—­whether his extensively ornate cloak or the banners the size of history paintings—­ that reinforce this image. What is left out of the art-­historical and curatorial reckoning with Bispo’s art is the abject aspect of his condition and context. In the 1980s and early 1990s, particularly in the United States, artists participated in what Hal Foster identified as a general turn to the abject in art. Contemporary artists, including Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy, produced fictive spaces of mimetic regression in their art, often flagrantly including references to excrement. Such works not only tested the limits of aesthetic sublimation; they were motivated by protest against consumerism, rage about the AIDS crisis, and anxiety about the demise of the social contract. For Foster, “these factors, both intrinsic and extrinsic, drove the fascination with trauma and abjection.”106 Recall, too, as Foster does, that some versions of postmodernism (with which this art is often aligned) were defined with descriptive references to schizophrenia. Fredric Jameson, for example, aligns the weakening of historicity in postmodernism with a schizophrenic experience of time: a “perpetual present with which the various moments of [one’s] past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future.”107 Both Foster’s use of the abject and Jameson’s use of the schizophrenic are descriptive and not diagnostic, at least in the clinical sense. These conditions provide ways to describe the forces and effects of a decade, as seen and experienced at the moment of late capitalism in the “former” West. They serve as critical analogies proffered by writers who remain on this side of reason, describing artistic production that does so too. I bring up the abject and the excremental in this instance because Hidalgo reports that after Bispo’s death, “amid the about eight-­hundred works, one found plastic bottles filled with urine and feces, arranged in series, in the salon of the confinement rooms that Bispo inhabited in the 1980s.”108 Although this is the only reference I have found to Bispo’s abject collecting activities, it has remained at the core of my thinking and conversations regarding Bispo and 139

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his work.109 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bispo’s piss and shit is nowhere listed or cataloged among his 802 registered works. Whether Bispo would have conceived of the bottles as works is not at issue—­after all, he never stated that any of his production was art. What is at issue is how, within the realm of contemporary art, the psychotic artist is allowed to produce only “beautiful” images, whereas the purview of the “normal” contemporary artist extends to the fictive conjuring of the abject in their choice of materials and representations. Consequently, the constitutive ambivalence at the heart of Bispo’s condition, but also his art and art of living, is kept at bay. In the context of Brazil, and in the context of the global biennials with which this study concludes, critics and writers always insist on the work’s aesthetic or poetic and imaginative qualities. It follows that the work is legitimated on the basis of an aesthetic and not an antiaesthetic challenge to traditional artistic conventions. As evinced by Morais’s study and the official discourse of the Venice Biennale, the afterlife of various modernist myths can be observed in the approach to Bispo’s work. In short, such work is not mined for its abject potential or for what it might reveal in relation to psychiatric or art history. Hence my challenge to how Bispo’s work is at present understood requires that as art historians and curators we confess that conventions of art history and exhibition display do not reveal essential, timeless truths and that such conventions, when applied to the creative work of psychiatric patients, are neither neutral nor natural.110 Instead, they impose a different language of order and a different episteme on the work, an order and an episteme to which the patient never laid claim. In the end it is on account of the previously cited debates and the problematic his work evinces that Bispo continues as part of Brazilian art history and undeniably so. For Morais, Bispo’s work arrived “at once, whole, complete, fully realized.”111 The statement unwittingly echoes Bispo’s own account: “One day I simply appeared.”112 If the artist and his work simply appeared, their afterlives have functioned to continually upend normative assumptions about the sane and insane, the status of art and what art can do. The challenge of Bispo’s work lies in the paradoxical obligations it places before contemporary viewers: the imperative to engage in a critical and contextual analysis of the work and at once acknowledge Bispo’s disrupted subjectivity, to preserve the work for its extraordinary creative expression and at once acknowledge the subject’s psychic suffering and abject material conditions.

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SCENE He puts on and takes off his glasses. And he murmurs that this time he will not take part in the play—­that this was the night of his death. We exchange a few words and a few minutes later I am relieved to see him back at the microphone. But his voice, which was normally tremulous and stirring, was now slurred and washed out. In the middle of a scene in which he plays Charon, he suddenly walks right across the stage and heads for the theater exit. I find him sitting in the street, deathly still, murmuring the demand for an ambulance—­his time had come. I kneel down beside him and he tells me: “I’m going to the swamp.” The situation lightened up after that and we negotiate: he would accept a cheeseburger from McDonald’s instead of the ambulance. I hear the final applause coming from inside the theater, and the public starts to exit through the small door that leads to the street, where both he and I are. What they see as they exit is Hades, king of the underworld (my character), kneeling at the feet of the living-­dead Charon. And for this we receive the respect of each member of the audience who passes by us, because, for them, this intimate scene of collapse seems to be part of the performance.

Peter Pál Pelbart, “Inhuman Polyphony in the Theater of Madness,” in O avesso do niilismo: Cartografias do esgotamento / Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out, trans. John Laudenberger (São Paulo: n1 publications, 2013), 116.

5 MONOLINGUALISM OF THE GLOBAL If two objects look the same, it does not mean that they have much in common—­much less that they have the same meaning. Yve-­Alain Bois, 2015

I begin this final chapter with an account by Jacques Derrida, to establish the contours of what I call the monolingualism of the global, a phenomenon that takes various forms in the world of modern and contemporary art history and curatorial practice. In the context of a lecture at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, for a conference titled “Echoes from Elsewhere,” Derrida began by telling the audience to “picture this” and then described how someone cultured in the French language, “a French citizen . . . a subject of French culture,” speaks to them in perfect French and says, “I have only one language; it is not mine.”1 Such an utterance would be experienced as inconsistent with the seeming competence with which the individual had spoken the words—­as if, “in one and the same breath,” this person had lied and confessed to the lie.2 That is, in performance he or she would have revealed the opposite of the actual content and cadence of his or her speech. This is what Derrida calls a performative contradiction. In addition to speaking to the philosophical absurdity of the scene, Derrida further explained that he was talking not about a foreign language but a language that is not mine.3 Thus he affirmed how subjects competent in several languages often tend in fact to speak only one. But what does such a scene demonstrate for modern and contemporary art history and for contemporary curatorial practice? Moreover, given the subject of this study, what does it mean when a vogue for so-­called outsider art returns at the moment when critics, curators, and art historians alike attempt to define what constitutes art in the age of the “global contemporary”?

· · · The title of Derrida’s lecture was “Monolingualism of the Other,” from whence in recent years I have developed my thoughts on the condition in contemporary art that I diagnose as “monolingualism of the global.” For

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me, a monolingualism of the global manifests itself, among other ways, in the rampant pseudomorphism that characterizes many contemporary art exhibitions. In the 1960s, Erwin Panofsky offered this definition of pseudo­ morphosis: “The emergence of form A, morphologically analogous to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point of view.”4 Panofsky was comparing a third-­century BCE Punic sarcophagus with one from the High Gothic. While similar in morphology, the historical processes and conditions of possibility leading up to the two cases are decidedly different. The historian of modern art Yve-Alain ­Bois departs from Panofsky to describe pseudomorphism as a kind of “historical telescoping.”5 He suggests how it “keeps fueling curatorial enterprises to great acclaim,” and confesses that in the recourse to pseudomorphosis “ignorance is key: The less one knows about the context, the genesis, the more easily one falls prey to the jolt of pseudomorphosis—­which is another way of saying that the less one approaches an object with the skepticism afforded by rational thought, the more one can let one’s imagination run its course.”6 For Bois, at issue is not that the jolts produced by pseudomorphism are necessarily bad but that they often remain superficial in relation to process and history and consequently are hardly “jolts” at all. Dominant pseudomorphic trends tend to summon similarities of a generic kind (e.g., both artists collect shoes, create white paintings, drip paint). In the course of his text, Bois takes a divergent path to demonstrate how superficial similarities can be productive in relation to understanding art, skillfully showing how—­through “almost similar means and with almost similar end products”—­a work by François Morellet and one by Sol LeWitt convey “entirely opposite messages.”7 The prevailing pseudomorphic emphasis on the similarity of visual effect rather than differences in process and context impinges on contemporary exhibitions that claim to show contemporary art from a global perspective. Consider another contemporary scene: the appearance of geometric abstraction from Latin America in the context of Jens Hoffmann’s Other Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York City in 2014. The original Primary Structures, curated by Kynaston McShine in 1966, was an exhibition of new sculpture—­in particular, minimal art—­by artists from both the United States and Great Britain, among them Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Anthony Caro. The promotional text for the newer exhibition explains that “Other Primary Structures asks what might have been included in the original exhibition if the art world of the 1960s had been as global as it is ­today” and continues by noting its inclusion of “cultural groups that have been marginalized, suppressed, or underrepresented in the hegemonic Western art-­historical canon.”8 Fair enough: the canon has had a repressive function, and thankfully, in the Unites States the history of modern art and its institutions have in large measure moved beyond the condition diagnosed by John Yau when he published “Please Wait by the Coatroom,” identifying the less-­than-­prestigious site accorded to Latin American art at the Museum 144

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of Modern Art in New York in the 1980s (although, admittedly, more critical work remains to be done).9 Among its “other” artists, Other Primary Structures included Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and the singular Gego. Yet the exhibition was less an opening onto the “other” than an appropriation of the other’s work to an aesthetic category contrary to their histories. Hence the monolingualism of the global, which I use in this instance to evince how, in the search for a global dialogue, Hoffmann proceeds by focusing on the visual language of similar forms. In so doing, his curatorial ambition to be global trumps differences that obtain at the level of materials, contingencies of context, and sites of production.10 What is more, with the emergence of the global contemporary, hegemonic constructions and power have not been just whisked away. They subsist but in a new guise. That is, the claim to integrate work from Latin America into the category of “primary structures” abandons one type of epistemic control (i.e., the canon of the 1960s) to inscribe the work within another: a formal and timeless art history, passing itself off as contemporary and global. In Derrida’s “Monolingualism of the Other,” the philosopher also refers to a historical situation whereby “one entered French literature by losing one’s accent.”11 By extension, we might say that in the case of Other Primary Structures Venezuelan abstraction and Brazilian neo-­concretism entered the category of “global art” by losing their names, their history, their cultural specificity. The cumulative effect of such a self-­identifying global art exhibition is to put to work the art of all nations as global art in an exhibition that literally displays its confidence in the ability of similar forms to be read as a global art history but whose origin continues to be framed in the language of the West. Given this situation, let me ask you to picture this: A Brazilian institution—­ let’s say the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro—­decides to redo the seminal 1959 Primeira exposição neoconcreta. Because the world was not so “global” back then in the late 1950s, the curators decide to show Donald Judd and Robert Morris in an exhibition titled Other Neo-­concretisms. This imaginary scene is decidedly absurd, but it reveals vis-­à-­vis Other Primary Structures and similar exhibitions how the dominant language often retains the privilege and purview to make the art of “others” legible and knowable, even “global,” whereby knowledge production is revealed as a one-­way street of appropriation and reassertion of discursive power. Such moves toward assimilation to one’s own language and categories, rather than allowing for discontinuity and difference, are similarly manifest in the recent trend to include modern psychiatric patients’ work in global art biennials. In these contexts the works of Bispo do Rosário and other outsider artists are legitimated as contemporary art, but this occurs at the expense of what we might learn from the specificity of their work’s contemporaneity. In the 2010s, “madness,” “outsider,” and “self-­taught” became the “new” in the contemporary global circuit and were often included in exhibitions 145

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in which the curators turned to beauty, the poetic, and imagination as unifying themes. But do these global exhibitions, including the exhibition of psychiatric patients’ work in the specific cases of the Fifty-­Fifth Venice Biennale (2013) and the Thirtieth Bienal de São Paulo (2012), account for, or even approach, the divergent histories of the critical and the clinical?12

· · · “Is Everything in My Mind?” is the title of Massimiliano Gioni’s curatorial text for the Fifty-­Fifth Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace. Like his catalog text, the exhibition at the biennial’s main venue, the Arsenale di Venezia, opens with a large-­scale architectural model by Italian immigrant Marino Auriti, who settled in rural Pennsylvania in the 1930s. In the 1950s, after retiring from work as an auto mechanic, Auriti spent years designing what he called the Encyclopedic Palace (from whence the biennial’s title derives), a museum that was to house all of human knowledge and discoveries, although art apparently was not included among them. Auriti filed a legal claim for the design with the US Patent Office in 1955, and the patent was issued the following year.13 For Gioni, Auriti’s model (since 2002 part of the American Folk Art Collection) shows how the “dream of a universal, all-­embracing knowledge crops up throughout the history of art and humanity as one that eccentrics like Auriti share with many other artists, writers, scientists.”14 Examples of such “flights of the imagination” and “personal cosmologies” became the guiding curatorial principle for Gioni to combine “contemporary artworks with historical artifacts and found objects” as well as to blur “the line between professional artists and amateurs, insiders and outsiders, reuniting artworks with other forms of figurative expression.”15 If Auriti opened the space at the Arsenale, evoking a dream of an expansive structure to organize a collection in commemoration of humanity’s achievements, then the biennial’s second venue, in the Giardini, redirected visitors to internal visions. At the outset, one encountered thirty-­nine high-­ resolution reproductions from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung’s Liber Novus, while the actual volume, an illuminated manuscript, was exhibited in a glass case in the center of the darkened space. The book, which was initially drafted in the 1910s, is a record of Jung’s “visions” or “imaginations” in which he provoked fantasy while in a waking state. Jung collected and subsequently transcribed these imaginative episodes into the volume known today as the Red Book. Just behind it, in the same line of sight, was displayed a plaster life mask of André Breton by René Iché (fig. 44). With closed eyes and pursed lips, the mask literally figured the turn away from external reality to internal worlds. Through recourse to Jung’s conception of primordial images, or archetypes, Gioni’s curatorial text swiftly moves on to describe how the exhibition also incorporated drawings by Pirinisau, a shaman from the Solomon 146

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44. The Encyclopedic Palace with the display of Carl Jung’s Red Book, 2013. Exhibition view (on the back wall is the mask of André Breton by René Iché). La Biennale di Venezia, ASAC, Photo Library, Carl Jung, The Encyclopedic Palace 2013. 45. The Encyclopedic Palace with work by Augustin Lesage, 2013. Exhibition view. La Biennale di Venezia, ASAC, Photo Library, Augustin Lesage, The Encyclopedic Palace 2013.

Islands; Tantric paintings; as well as Hilma af Klint’s abstract images and the highly elaborate work of Augustin Lesage (among the artists in Jean Dubuffet’s canon of art brut; fig. 45). Although the specific process and purpose of the chosen works include the products of séance and a prompt for meditation, Gioni cautions against thinking of his biennial as an exhibition of the artist as a medium. Rather, he states that these artists’ works show how “we ourselves are media, channeling images, or at times finding ourselves ­possessed by images.”16 Thus, he seamlessly arrives at a discussion of Ryan Trecartin’s work: as if the purposefully overwhelming installations of the 147

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latter, which mimetically exacerbate contemporary identity-­technology relations, were identical to the compositional restraint of Tantric painting or Lesage’s dense compositions, which by his own account were dictated to him by his dead sister. Gioni uses works belonging to the category of “outsider art” to promote his vision for contemporary art in a global context. But the uncritical return of this category as it relates to the creative production of psychiatric patients, which concerns me here, abandons contextualized histories of both modernism and the contemporary, just as it fails to account for changes in psychiatric practice—­Gioni turns to Jung as foundational for his exhibition and its curatorial conceit. Such mythmaking rings out clearly from Gioni’s words: “A sense of cosmic awe pervades many of the works”; it is “a show about obsessions and about the transformative power of the imagination”; the show is “a mental architecture as fantastical as it is delirious.”17 While his language seems to accommodate just about anything and everything from any part of the globe, Gioni insists that “the Encyclopedic Palace does not have universalist aims.”18 He ends with a call to “turn our inner images into reality.”19 As a result, the exhibition papers over the complex relations that psychiatric patients’ works have historically had in relation to the history of modern art and notions of artistic subjectivity. Invoking Hans Prinzhorn’s inaugural work, Benjamin Buchloh criticizes The Encyclopedic Palace precisely for aiming “to revitalize a myth of universally accessible creativity.”20 Similarly for Lynne Cooke, Gioni’s curatorial strategy “divests the works of all traces of the material and intellectual conditions that originally imbued them with meaning and value.”21 With unconscious and inner visions emerging as the global contemporary art system’s final frontier, the upshot of The Encyclopedic Palace was to suggest a contemporary version of the 1989 Magiciens de la terre (Magicians of the earth), an important precedent that Okwui Enwezor mentions in his biennial review.22 As is now well documented within the historiography of curatorial and exhibition practice, Magiciens de la terre was among the earliest large-­scale exhibitions to address the place of non-­Western art within the history of modern and contemporary art (the first is commonly identified as MoMA’s controversial “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern in 1984–­1985). The exhibition was criticized on multiple fronts, most notably for how the selection of non-­Western artists was motivated by a primitivist projection of an “authentic” and “traditional” conception of culture, whereas the artists from the West were predominantly culled from modern urban centers and responded to cosmopolitan contexts. Such an opposition between the authentic “other” and the urban-­cosmopolitan artist is perhaps unsurprising given that surrealist André Breton’s personal art collection served as one inspiration for the exhibition’s curator, Jean-­Hubert Martin.23 Furthermore, not only did Martin’s curatorial framing naturalize the primitivist assumptions that underwrote 148

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his choices; he e ­ xacerbated them by displacing the term artist in favor of magician when identifying the image makers invited to present their art. For most contemporary critics, Magiciens de la terre marked “the embodiment of a neo­colonialist attitude that allowed the contemporary art system to colonize, commercially and intellectually, new areas that were previously out of bounds.”24 For Magiciens de la terre, Martin chose three Brazilian artists. Each contributed work of religious significance. Mestre Didi and Ronaldo Pereira Rego each made explicit reference to Afro-­Brazilian religions, and Cildo Meireles engaged a dark chapter of political history in his installation Missão/ missões: Como construir catedrais (Mission/missions: How to build cathedrals, 1987), which evokes the country’s religious colonization as well as the human cost of exploitation through its eight hundred communion wafers, six hundred thousand coins, and two thousand suspended animal bones.25 In the face of such curatorial decisions with regard to the art produced in the region, Colombian art critic Álvaro Medina noted how the exhibition “confused magic and craft in the choice of Latin Americans.”26 Twenty-­four years later, the three artists from Brazil included in The Encyclopedic Palace all aligned with Gioni’s visionary thematic: Bispo do Rosário’s Manto da Apresentação (Presentation cloak) was hung above a platform displaying some of his other objects (fig. 46); Paulo Nazareth presented a collection of commercial products with the names of his mother’s saints; and Tamar Guimarães and Danish artist Kasper Akhøj exhibited their film A família do Capitão Gervásio (Captain Gervasio’s family, 2013–­2014), which recounts a medium’s psychic voyage. With Guimarães, viewers saw a film whose subject—­mystic visions—­remains at the core of her artistic production and in her collaborations with Akhøj, as in their recent A Minor History of Trembling Matter (2017). In the case of Nazareth, contemporary viewers were not presented with his more representative durational and trans­continental walking practice.27 As with Magiciens de la terre, these works’ presentation suggests the exoticism that subtended the choices, whereby artists from Brazil were expected to leverage cultural identity and deliver an image of the country as a land of diverse spiritual visions, from the schizophrenic to the devotional. In each exhibition, the curators, by favoring of a decontextual­ ized presentation of both subjects and objects, seemed to suggest that modernity had never arrived on Brazilian shores. In the wake of Magiciens de la terre, other exhibitions attuned to postcolonial concerns, such as ­Enwezor’s documenta 11, responded by instead emphasizing the situatedness of artistic practice and drawing attention to specific cultural and political histories. Magiciens de la terre was nevertheless a crucial turning point in the global art scene. Beyond its evident failures, it did productively displace the opposition of acting (Western) subject versus passive (non-­Western) subjects by putting forth an exhibition of “makers” that refused the legacy of the exhibition of silent objects. Curator and writer Pablo Lafuente describes how the 149

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46. The Encyclopedic Palace with work by Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 2013. Exhibition view. La Biennale di Venezia, ASAC, Photo Library, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, The Encyclopedic Palace 2013.

exhibition initiated a “historical shift towards the inclusion of the artist as cultural producer as an acting subject within the contemporary exhibition context, rather than his or her inclusion as a represented subject (the ‘indigenous’ or ‘primitive’ creator or maker), or the inclusion of the objects for which he or she is responsible.”28 Lafuente further develops this historical shift into a system of relations whereby one can map four types of exhibitions that engage contemporary art on a global scale—­“exhibitions of contextualized objects; exhibitions of contextualized subjects; exhibitions of decontextualized subjects; and exhibitions of decontextualized objects.”29 But within the system of relations that Lafuente develops, a stable conception of subjectivity and artistic agency is nevertheless assumed. This leads me to pose the following question: How do we account for the work of psychiatric patients within the dialectic of decontextualization and contextual determination that defines exhibitions in the global circuit of contemporary art? In The Encyclopedic Palace Bispo do Rosário was represented exclusively by his work, some of which, as the catalog insists, “recall[s] the work of avant-­garde artists such as Arman and Claes Oldenburg.”30 The site of production was nowhere accounted for in the space of exhibition, nor was the particular viewing subject for which Bispo’s work was made: God at the Final 150

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Judgment. Given the latter, what type of viewers are contemporary Biennale visitors asked to be? How does one understand the work in an exhibition that promotes so many personal visions independent of history? In short, not only were Bispo’s objects decontextualized; his subjectivity and the ends for which he understood his creative production to be directed were displaced. Such a dynamic of decontextualization extended to Gioni’s decision to include contemporary artist Eva Kot’átková’s work Asylum (2013; fig. 47) in the Biennale. For this work Kot’átková engaged patients at the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital outside Prague and based the work on the modes of communication and social hierarchies described by the patients. The ensuing installation included sculptural elements suggestive of cages and walls—­that is to say, an iconography of confinement. Small-­scale collages and sculptures combined photographs of unidentified people with everyday objects. Each day performers extended their heads and hands through the holes constructed in the work’s pedestal, as if trying to break free from captivity. One critic described Asylum as suggesting “an alternative body politic designed around a vision of a fragmented body, reflecting the perspective of those who live outside the normative social order.”31 Accordingly, art writers often describe Kot’átková’s work as surrealist in aesthetic.32

47. The Encyclopedic Palace with Eva Kot’átková’s installation Aslyum (2013) and Anna Zemánková’s flower pastels (1960s and 1970s), 2013. Exhibition view. La Biennale di Venezia, ASAC, Photo Library, Eva Kotátková, The Encyclopedic Palace 2013.

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Like the medical files with which the first chapter of this book began, Kot’átková’s Asylum includes typewritten reports on the patients, presented here as in the original: “One patient claimed that he sees fobias, fears and anxieties flying around him in a room. He said that they keep leaving his head from time to time and sometimes refuse to go back but scare him from the outside.”33 The report continues, “Another patient, suspected all objects in his room from having fears hidden inside of them. He didn’t trust a wardrobe, pillow, umbrella, because he supposed they were containers for something bad. This way he rarely could use any object.”34 Still another report, with “Fragmented body” as its heading, states: “Some patients complain or worry about their uncompleteness. They are persuaded that their bodies do not hold together.”35 The artist explains, “Asylum presents a collection of fears, anxieties, phobias and phantasmagoric visions of patients and children suffering from communication difficulties or struggling to fit within social structures, a chaotic archive of inner visions.”36 Consequently, in the context of The Encyclopedic Palace the installation reads as surrealist not only in aesthetic but also in ambition: Kot’átková collaborates with the patients, but the experience serves as a source of inspiration for her final work in which the contemporary psychiatric patient is reflected, represented, archived. Curiously, the mere inclusion of outsider art or the representation of nonnormative subjects is often read as if it were a progressive move within the modern and/or contemporary art institution, as when Gioni makes a case for how the Biennale “blurs the line between professional artists and amateurs, insiders and outsiders” in his curatorial essay. But as with the Western and non-­Western inclusions in Magiciens de la terre, mere inclusion is not the issue. The critical question remains how inclusion is done. In The Encyclopedic Palace, a historical patient like Bispo was exclusively represented by his work, while present-­day mental health patients were represented by Kot’átková, an artist whose work spoke for them. The effect of the latter installation was exacerbated by the fact that Asylum was surrounded by Anna Zemánková’s historical work, a series of floral pastel patterns that she produced while in a trancelike state (see fig. 47).37 Such juxtapositions put in relief the persistent logic of exclusion that subtends Gioni’s exhibition, despite the claims for blurring boundaries. Contemporary psychiatric patients were neither presented as acting subjects, nor did the exhibition include works of which living patients are authors. Bispo’s work, which was produced within and against the modern psychiatric institution, together with the iconography of confinement that characterized Kot’átková’s installation, presented a modern (and thus outdated) conception of the psychiatric hospital and its disciplinary function. Magiciens de la terre aimed to move beyond the modern museum’s traditional curatorial exclusions of non-­Western cultures, and it did so by maintaining certain modern-­primitivist assumptions. So too the global turn to 152

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outsider art and that of psychiatric patients perpetuates an anachronistic approach to the psychiatric institution and mental health. Magiciens de la terre was critiqued for not taking into account postcolonial critiques of Western authority,38 and Gioni’s The Encyclopedic Palace should similarly be taken to task for not taking into account critiques of psychiatric authority and instead upholding an ahistoricized notion of inner vision.39 In the Biennale’s host country such an evasion seems particularly glaring given the central role of the Italian Franco Basaglia’s work in the radical psychiatry and de­ institutionalization movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Basaglia was key to Italy’s approval of Law No. 180, which abolished asylums, and he was a vital reference and advocate for psychiatric reform internationally, first lecturing in Brazil in 1978.40 In drawing structural parallels between the two exhibitions, I do not mean to seamlessly map one onto the other but instead point to the persistence of another modernist myth that, to my mind, has not provoked the same level of critical engagement and questioning: the allure of the inner visions evinced by psychiatric patients’ art.

· · · “Language is always a state of exhibition.” The line perfectly encapsulates one of the dominant aesthetic strategies on view at the Thirtieth Bienal de São Paulo, A iminência das poéticas (The Imminence of Poetics).41 Taken from Alejandro Cesarco’s film Methodology (2011), one of the most thoughtful of the three thousand works exhibited, the sentence is part of a conversation that revolves around the fundamental absences—­of the self from language, of language from the other—­that often structure narrative, time, and social relationships, and in this sense it responds to the core motif of the biennial. With his call for an “imminence of poetics,” chief curator Luis Pérez-­Oramas evoked a time of becoming, as well as an understanding of communication that accounts for both that which remains unsaid and that which may be said in the future.42 Bispo’s creative production occupied one of the largest ­ oetics resonated spaces allocated to a single artist (fig. 48). The curatorial p with his use of language as an instrument for mapping his world. At the biennial, language itself—­understood as both writing and speech —­was predominantly on display. Such an approach was exemplified by works that treat language as material; for instance, Franz Mon explored visible language by spatializing text, as in the octagonal form that housed his work Mortuarium für zwei Alphabete (1970), an immersive installation composed of text and its recorded performance. Also on view, Erica Baum’s Card Catalogue (1996–­1997) and Index (1999–­2000), which juxtapose image to text or words to numbers, mine typographic forms for the production of a visual poetry. These artists and others also explored the ways in which spoken language both reinforces and destabilizes meaning. While engaging the materiality of language was a primary concern for many artists in 153

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48. The Imminence of Poetics, Thirtieth Bienal de São Paulo with works by Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 2012. Exhibition view. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

the exhibition, the obsessive deployment of language was most remarkably evinced in Bispo’s work, which in many ways also formed the conceptual center of the biennial. Elsewhere in the exhibition, artists’ deployment of formal repetition in their work was by no means limited to language. Many artists also played with the category of “photographic collection.” In these instances, a serial format engaged a quasi-­archival logic in order to produce different types of knowledge or elicited countermemories as an alternative to official accounts of history (e.g., August Sander, Iñaki Bonillas). Other installations, such as Roberto Obregón’s, resorted to the materials of nature. His collection of real and watercolor rose petals recalled the seriality of some of the biennial’s photographic work but was motivated by a desire for a universal symbolism that could comment on the precarity of life and communication. In a gallery neighboring Bispo’s, Brazilian artist and curator f. marquespenteado’s installation for the biennial combined fabrics and embroidery with found images and sculpture to address issues of gender and power in society (fig. 49). While viewing his laboriously constructed work, I overheard a visitor ask, “Is this also Bispo do Rosário?” By positioning works with 154

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49. The Imminence of Poetics, Thirtieth Bienal de São Paulo with an installation by Fernando Marques Penteado, 2012. Exhibition view. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

superficial similarities near each other, the very layout invited confusion. At issue is not the fact that Bispo was included in the biennial but a difference in institutional practices highlighted by his work: in a psychiatric context, obsessive production is related to the diagnosis of a clinical condition, whereas the institutions of the art world legitimate obsessive elaboration as an aesthetic strategy or choice. Therefore, I return to the question of how an exhibition display can make legible the psychiatric context of such works. As I have charted in this book, creative production like that of Bispo’s is not foreign to the history of modern art in Brazil, and such inclusions define the specificity of Brazilian aesthetic modernism and its institutionalization. But Bispo’s exhibition at the Bienal de São Paulo next to contemporary artists (as at Gioni’s Venice Biennale the following year) raises challenging questions about reception, appropriation, and artistic agency in the engineering of a global art scene. These global biennials have inserted Bispo’s art more fully into the contemporary art system. But unlike the perpetuation of modernist myths in The Encyclopedic Palace, in the context of A iminência das poéticas Pérez-­ Oramas’s turn to language as a structural operation—­of the said and un­ said—­directed attention to multiple communication models, both verbal and nonverbal. In doing so, the exhibition also shifted an understanding of Bispo’s work away from art-­historical pop, conceptual art, and nouveau réalisme, and thus the curatorial and art-­historical accounts that hastily assimilate Bispo’s work to these movements. While some exhibition visitors may have fallen under the spell of pseudomorphism when seeing Bispo next to 155

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f. marquespenteado, the curator’s resistance to any single unifying visionary theme and turn to language, beyond the superficial similarities of the artists’ work, also demonstrated how language is always already never one’s own. The writer and educator Fernand Deligny searched for a language of description that resisted symbolic domestication, relying on the body and the trace. Conceived in 1969 within the context of the support network that he founded for autistic children in the Cévennes region of France, Deligny used the notion of wander lines to designate the movements and gestures of autistic children as well as their actual transcription by the adults who accompanied them. The ensuing drawings (a group of which Pérez-­Oramas included in the biennial; fig. 50) include sheets of transparent paper that chart the children’s and adults’ paths in different colors or modes. Another sheet usually lies under the transparent ones, revealing a background map that represents the physical space of the traversed terrain. With regard to this practice, Deligny wrote: “To respect the autistic being is not to respect the being he or she would be as other; it is to do what is needed so the network can weave itself.”43 The philosopher Peter Pál Pelbart further clarifies how there is “nothing worse than to isolate the autistic from the network, to focus on him or her as a ‘person,’ a ‘subject,’ who would be, for example, lacking language.”44 At stake is how to document a nonverbal language and move away from an understanding of the subject as defined by language and unified conceptions of the self. Given that “they are exposed, exposed to the Outside, detecting at times that which escapes Us, precisely that which we do not see because we speak, and that they see because they do not speak,” the ethical obligation remains to not appropriate their mode of being into “our” language of subjecthood.45 The meaning of these wander lines is not bound to the child or to the adult but is immanent to the structure in which each is put into play in his or her environment. At the center of each tracing sheet is thus a fundamental absence: the child and adult enter into relation on account of its production, but neither is subjectively expressed in the final work.46 Such lines of wandering, a means of displacing logocentric speech and offering a trace of a different a-­subjective humanity, remained absent from Gioni’s curatorial emphasis on inner visions. In the case of A iminência das poéticas, critics often noted the biennial’s almost overwhelming choice of works with tabular spatial rearrangements. The essential reference for such a curatorial strategy is art historian Aby Warburg, who in his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1927–­1929) hung images—­including gestures of love and combat, gestures of the movement of desire, of terror, among other passions and classifications—­on a monochromatic background and held them together with little pegs across multiple panels. At the center of Warburg’s image collection were what he called Pathos­formeln, or “formulae of pathos,” the fundamental gestures he identified as having been transmitted from antiquity and transformed in the course of time. By tracking

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50. The Imminence of Poetics, Thirtieth Bienal de São Paulo with Fernand Deligny’s “lines of wandering,” 2012. Exhibition view. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

the transmission and transformation—­hence the after­life—­of such gestures, Warburg introduced a “sensible dimension” into knowledge, one indelibly linked to the “multiple, the diverse, the hybridity of any montage.”47 That human gestures survive is what Warburg’s Mnemosyne shows in its breadth and scope. As a model for art history and, by extension, curatorial practice, such an anachronic time works against an art history that locks the meaning of works of art in the past or mythically revives their meaning in the present. Accordingly, the importance of the tableau—­as, too, the unique compositional and narrative masterpiece—­is ­replaced by fragments that are brought together, as Georges Didi-­Huberman clarifies, in the service of “constantly renewed opening of possibilities, of new meetings, of new multiplicities, of new configurations.”48 This was, in part, the São Paulo biennial curator’s aspiration: an imaging of links across space and time that might lead to new understandings of art and its histories. The difference between Gioni’s and Pérez-­Oramas’s biennial is thus cast in sharper relief: in curatorial conception it is the difference between having faith in inner personal visions and betting on what art can do in relation to knowledge.49 Gioni’s disavowed universalism in the end delivered a universalizing appeal to turn “inner images into reality.” In contrast, for the Bienal de São Paulo, Pérez-­Oramas issued a call to be local. He writes, “I am going to risk stating what I believe: that it is impossible to be global.”50 His insistence on the local was refreshing in the midst of the increasing pressure to be global, as if such a comprehensive stance in relation to art is tenable or

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desirable, for the reasons I have outlined in these pages. If within the span of one year on the global contemporary art circuit, both curators included ­psychiatric patients’ work in their respective biennials, the meaning of this inclusion differed in curatorial ambition as well as in their exhibitions’ ­effects. Gioni legitimated an uncritical return to a surrealist-­inflected figurative style, as evinced by various artists’ works with alternative bodily schemas (e.g., Friedrich Schröder-­Sonnenstern, Guo Fengyi, Cathy Wilkes, Carol Rama). Pérez-­Oramas included work that, admittedly, too often resorted to tabular displays that at times resulted in a homogenizing exhibition display (think here of the installation of work by Alair Gomes, August Sander, and Hans Eijkelboom). But he did so to suggest how these collections of images offered an “inexhaustible resource—­of a rereading of the world.”51 Certainly, Peréz-­Oramas’s appeal to poetics gives this reader some pause (as did the exhibition’s moments of seeming pseudormorphism), but his exhibition actively displaced questions of style and normative subjectivities to insist on new articulations of form and content that challenge secure visibilities and already-­formed identities, as evinced most notably in his display of ­Deligny’s and the autistic children’s wandering lines.52

· · · In his 1946 lecture “Aspectos da vida social entre os loucos” (Aspects of social life among the mad), Osório César describes the life of the patients inside the asylum, focusing on moments from camaraderie to deliriums. At one point he describes the music group formed by Juquery patients with prior music experience. He indicates how they would play a diverse repertory at the hospital during holidays and for important visitors. As is common with such a group, a psychotic break or seizure would sometimes interrupt the performance. Although these breaks were noteworthy to César and likely were alarming to visitors, he affirms how the other musicians, themselves patients, were “not impressed with these unexpected moments and continued, with the utmost calm, to play the score.”53 Today, this right to be mad in life and in performance is at the center of the most compelling work by contemporary artists who approach the issue of mental health such as Javier Téllez and Alejandra Riera, the two artists I have chosen to focus on here. Through their work they present critical alternatives to the contemporary currency of so-­called outsider art and to the frequent problems that attend its presentation in global exhibitions. Consequently, in what follows I turn my attention to the specificity of individual artistic practices that depart from the lessons and practical effects of radical psychiatry and that turn for inspiration to figures such as Antonin Artaud and psychiatrists François Tosquelles and Jean Oury.54 Where modernist artists often sought art’s essence or a purity of vision in the creative pro-

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duction of psychiatric patients, these contemporary artists instantiate a shift away from modernist visuality and posit a break with curatorial appropriations of the finished (and displayable) outsider-­art object. Both Téllez and Riera collaborate with present-­day mental health patients and reevaluate the history of psychiatry through various means: in fictional films that border on documentary through the use of “real actors” in the case of Téllez, or by way of an experience of cinema that evokes life practices beyond the image in the case of Riera.55 Rather than represent inner visions or speak for others, their works reveal different modes of being and subjectivation such that stable subjectivities are never assumed or uncritically reproduced. Téllez’s Caligari und der Schlafwandler (Caligari and the sleepwalker, 2008) is a film that takes creative license in its remake of Robert Wiene’s ­silent classic Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920).56 The original film opens with Francis, the narrator in the frame tale, and then shifts to chart the story-­within-­the-­story through a series of tableau-­like scenes that introduce the showman-­hypnotist Caligari and the somnambulist Cesar who is under his control. Caligari uses Cesar to commit murders, and one of the victims is Francis’s friend and rival Alan, whom Francis seeks to avenge. Among its many critical readings, the film pre­sents a triangulation of conflicts between the older (Caligari) and younger man (Francis) and their rivalry competing for Jane’s affection. What is more, given the film’s explicit theme of a manipulative and powerful Caligari together with the historical context of its making (i.e., 1920s Weimar Germany), Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari has been understood allegorically as “the premonitory image of a long line of tyrants, an image of German military dictatorship and its demonic mesmerizing hold over an unsuspecting somnambulist population.”57 Even so, as film historian Thomas Elsaesser observes, the narrative confounds both Freudian and allegorical readings through its hybrid status as evinced by “the clash of expressionistic sets, ­realist objects and naturalist acting.”58 Téllez’s version similarly opens with a frame tale, in which a man sitting on a bench reads from a book: “Quiet please. This evening we will perform for you.” He continues, “There is no danger of such dramas worming themselves into your precious lives.”59 The film cuts to the title credits, after which we see five individuals seated in an otherwise-­empty film theater. They, too, are about to watch the film that we will see. The shots that follow intercut the film-­within-­the-­film and medium shots of each audience member. The nestled film begins with a scientist who, wearing a top hat and cape (like the Caligari of the original), speaks from the steps of the Einstein Tower in Potsdam, which is identified in Téllez’s film as the Tower of Fools. This Caligari explains that he will present a sleepwalker from the planet Slave Star. In a scene that follows, a medical assistant escorts Cesar, the sleepwalker, to Caligari’s office. Caligari’s dialogue with the sleepwalker, which takes place

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by means of chalkboards, alternates written questions and written answers. Thus, we read: “What problem do you have?” Cesar’s response: “I want to wake up.” Next question: “Do you hear voices?” Cesar’s response: “Not always. Sometimes” (fig. 51). Cesar explains that he is an extra­terrestrial, whereby Caligari acknowledges that he should be admitted to a hospital. At this point in the film-­within-­the-­film there has been precious little spoken speech, given the visualization of dialogue as written text. As the two protagonists walk up the tower stairs to the solar observatory, one hears in voice-­over: “I know I’m having a psychotic episode when I feel I’m in a different film.” The film then cuts to one of the five audience members, who strikingly resembles Caligari. As Caligari and Cesar ascend the stairway, the voice-­over continues: “When the normal state is back it is a bit easier to live.” The film action, as with the historical film that served as its inspiration, proceeds with intertitles that announce each of the various acts, including “Die Hypnose“ (The Hypnosis), “Erwache“ (Wake Up), “Slavenstern” (Slave Star), “Erdkunde“ (Geography), and “Die Therapie” (The Therapy).60 In “Slave Star,” for example, Caligari questions Cesar about whether there are psychiatric hospitals on the planet, and in “The Therapy” Caligari himself, constrained in a straitjacket, is subjected to questioning from a doctor dressed in a white lab coat, signifier of psychiatric power. He asks, “Are you still searching for extraterrestrials?” suggesting that Caligari’s authority is based on fantasy alone. Given such shifts in perspective and in the identification of roles between doctor and patient, sane and insane, Téllez’s production maintains further structural similarities with the original film. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari reveals an asylum director to be an insane hypnotist, but as asylum director, Caligari ultimately returns to this distinguished status in the frame tale. Rather than elucidate the story by means of Francis’s narration, the frame tale actually complicates the narrative through Francis’s own internment and Caligari’s charge as a psychiatrist to cure him of his delusion. For Elsaesser the result is that “one never quite knows whose narrative one actually inhabits at any given moment.”61 By extension, in the original as in Téllez’s film-­within-­the film, the challenge to the viewer is to separate a “true” story from its potential delusional fabrication. Psychiatry as well as the narrative’s multiperspectivism was certainly key to Téllez’s choice to remake this particular film. But Téllez’s film goes further. Around twelve minutes into the film a person speaks in voice-­over: “I often hear voices when I’m alone at home, and Cesar, whom I play, also hears voices.” At this moment the film audience (if they did not know already) is explicitly keyed in to the fact that the actors in the film-­within-­the film are the same five individuals who have been recorded in the theater watching the film (see fig. 51). Crucial in this context is that Téllez produced his film in collaboration with nonprofessional patient-­actors in a series of workshops that he conducted at the Vivantes Klinikum Neuköln, Berlin. Henry Buttenberg plays Cesar, Hanki plays Caligari, Eckehard Ide opens the 160

51. Javier Téllez, Caligari und der Schlafwandler, 2008. Frame enlargements. Courtesy the artist.

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frame tale, Christoph Wendler plays the doctor, and Swen Zoembick plays a medical assistant. Where Gioni’s Biennale mined a seemingly frozen history of the modern psychiatric institution and the appearance of patients’ art within it, Téllez engages this history (and is fully knowledgeable of it) but in his artistic practice he insists on contemporary mental health patients as co-cultural producers. Téllez watched the original Caligari film with the patient-­actors multiple times, and they all participated in writing the script. As with Téllez’s other collaborative work, the patient-­actors were involved in everything from plot development and casting decisions to acting, and through their work and creative input they turned the Weimar horror film into a science-­fiction narrative of their own design. With regard to his collaboration with patient-­actors, Téllez explains, “I’m interested in working right on that line where patients will continue to be themselves but at the same time will be possessed by the characters they’ve created.”62 In this way, Téllez’s work in part draws on the history of self-­ performance in the work of Italian neorealist and French cinéma vérité directors, actively courting the unscripted results that occur in performance by employing untrained actors.63 Hence the patients’ status as “real actors” who address their actual conditions with the film’s frame. Téllez intercuts the fictional film-­within-­the film with the audio documentation of the patients’ self-­reporting on their conditions, and it is these experiential accounts that are essential to the film’s critical effect. Because of their status as actual, firsthand accounts, the nondiegetic voice-­overs serve as an important link back to the patients’ reality as embodied viewers of the film-­within-­the-­film and as a catalyst of awareness for viewers outside of the film. As Shoshana Felman clarifies with regard to life testimony, it “cannot be simply relayed, repeated, or reported by another without thereby loosing its function.”64 In contrast to Kot’átková’s textual records of the patients’ speech in Asylum, which classify and archive, Téllez’s film affirms the right to speech through the real patient-­actors’ firsthand accounts, including their speech as both an aesthetic choice and an ethical imperative. Yet by participating in the remake of a historical film, the real patient-­ actors’ speech does not promote any easy or transparent access to personal self-­representation. This is to say that the testimonies of their conditions are not called upon to perform as statements of truth, but instead are put forth as performative statements that offer a possible mode of access to a truth as enunciated within the cinematic fiction. In this way, Caligari und der Schlafwandler does not aim to reveal “truth” through a “reality to be seen” or even heard. The film instead poses the “problem of reality” through the actors’ shifting roles and a cinematic language that marries a fictional presentational mode with the effects of a critical realism.65 To be sure, Téllez’s objective has never been to present a cure for madness but rather, he explains, “to cure the sane of their lucidity.”66

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· · · If Téllez turns to the critical possibilities of using real patient-­actors within a cinematic fiction, questioning the border between the normal and pathological in films such as his Caligari und der Schlafwandler, Alejandra Riera proposes what she calls a document-­film (film-­document) to exceed the boundaries of what film records and to resist the categorical determination of roles both on and off the screen. In an essay from May 2014, Riera opens with the question Et que nous dissent certaines images? (“And what do some images tell us?”). She refers the reader to the text’s opening photograph: psychiatrist François Tosquelles dressed in black and standing barefoot on a roof. Above his head, in a gesture of presentation and display, he holds a sculpture by Auguste Forestier, a patient whose fantastical sculptures made it into the chronicles and collection of Dubuffet’s art brut.67 Confined on the inside of a psychiatric institution, Forestier devised his own means of imaginary travel through elaborate boat constructions, like the one Tosquelles holds, among the other magical and winged creatures he created. Forestier was a patient at the Saint-­Alban asylum where Tosquelles theorized and practiced institutional psychotherapy, a therapeutic approach informed by Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, which understood the hospital, its architecture, activities, patients, and staff as a “healing collective.”68 Care was administered not only to individual subjects deemed “mad” but also to the institution itself and to the social relations produced within it, developing situations (as in the various clubs) for which the patients were responsible. (In fact, Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Georges Canguilhem, Paul Éluard, and Tristan Tzara were all exiles in the small town of Saint-­Alban during the war; their experiences living under occupation had a profound impact on their critique of mental illness, as well as its ­diagnosis and treatment.) Riera’s essay also describes La Borde, a psychiatric clinic founded in the French Loire Valley in 1953, which she began visiting in 2009. Her essay is as much an account of what she learned at the clinic as a ­homage to psychiatrist Jean Oury, La Borde’s founder, who passed away earlier that May. Oury had worked alongside Tosquelles at Saint-­Alban and also had cared for Forestier. In relation to her collaborative work at La Borde and the institutional psychotherapy for which it is known, Riera invokes the moments-­lieux (places-­moments) that were collectively invented, moments that displaced divisions between caretaker and cared for, the healthy (sane) and others who are sick (mad), to reconfigure the ensemble of relations and dynamic of care.69 Through her essay’s particular mode of exposition Riera confers on the photograph of Tosquelles and the Forestier work he displays the status of such a place-­moment. She draws attention to how this photograph suggests that being human is an experience of being “in relation with” and poses the question of how to achieve “a transmission of practices, with no icon-­images.”70 Penned one year after the Venice Biennale paraded inner 163

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visions and revived art brut’s figurative impulse in exhibition, Riera’s essay foregrounds a different but contiguous psychiatric history and the role of patients’ work within it.71 Hers is an aesthetic and ethical concern with relations and that which exceeds representation. In the pages that remain, I turn to , documentation d’une expérience, [. . . -­2007-­2011 -­ . . .], which Riera produced in collaboration with the Cia. Teatral Ueinzz (Ueinzz Theater Company) in São Paulo.72 Established in 1997, Ueinzz comprises philosophers, mental health patients, therapists, performers, and “normopaths,” and includes among its ranks the philosopher Peter Pál Pelbart. On theater programs, however, the actors’ names are never categorized in this way; they are first and foremost individual actors participating in a theatrical proposition.73 This said, through their different subjectivities each Ueinzz presentation includes moments when an actor might not follow the script. Whether they are performing Daedalus or the installments of Gravidade Zero, an actor might refuse to participate or enter a paranoid state, as narrated in the scene that precedes this chapter. As a document-­film primarily records moments from the September 2009 Ocupação Ueinzz (Ueinzz occupation), when Riera and the company transformed the cultural center SESC São Paulo into a space for lectures, experimentation, and rehearsals for their theatrical adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). Together they inhabited the space for twelve days. As a film, incorporates only a few scenes from the Finnegans Ueinzz performance as well as its ambulatory presentation in the city streets, which unites the film’s end with its beginning in a kind of Joycean loop. These shots are intercut with footage from a group visit to a Volkswagen plant in Kassel, Germany, in 2007, as well as scenes in which the group throws an imaginary, invisible ball back and forth to one another on the streets in front of the Salon des Refusés that was celebrated alongside the documenta 12 exhibition in Kassel that same year. By including the group’s actions outside the occupation’s temporal frame, the film testifies to the years during which they have accompanied one another in life and work in ways irreducible to the occupation’s twelve days. The footage that documents Ocupação Ueinzz, which comprises approximately three-­fourths of , demonstrates Riera’s interest in capturing the moments in between the rehearsals and lectures, those moments that exceed the representational forms of a cultural institution.74 Accordingly, the film largely proceeds through medium shots and close-ups, partial views and unusual framings (many shots focus on the floor as one listens to off-­ frame voices). In the dark SESC space we are privy to the space’s transformation through fragmented views of photographs that hang from wires across the space, written texts on a concrete column, white paint brushed across the building’s windows, and an anagram diagrammed in chalk on the floor (more on this to come). 164

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The film also records and participates in the continual unhinging of purportedly fixed roles—­such as director, cameraman, artist, custodian, therapist, psychiatric clients, actors, and the public—­as well as dismantling the assigned spaces of each. The film explicitly exposes such a transformation at eighteen minutes. One sees close-ups of the floor being mopped, while the camera follows the mop’s movement. The subsequent shots reveal two female custodians at work in their white uniforms and gloves: Zilda Maria dos Santos sweeps, and Luzinete Riveiro Alves mops. At twenty minutes they replicate their earlier work gestures but in the absence of the tools of their trade (fig. 52). They move their arms back and forth as in a dance, while film viewers listen to Jean Oury speak in voice-­over about silence and aesthetic creation (Oury was one of the Ocupação Ueinzz guests). In the subsequent shot, Thomas Bauer, the sound engineer, films and we see Riera take up the broom and sweep while Luzinete peers through a modified coffee can as if filming the same scene through a second invented camera. Luzinete, Zilda, and a third custodian, Silvana Aparecida dos Santos, abandon their uniforms and join the occupation’s activities, initiating the reconfiguration of roles on which the meaning of in part depends.75 These women, who, before Finnegans Ueinzz had never seen a theater piece staged in the very institution they care for, participated in what Riera describes as the “here and now” of the experience created “in and through” the group.76 These women’s work gestures became a dance, and in the course of the occupation other participants took up the broom to clean. In the film, we also see the broom deployed to sweep the images hanging in the space above, as if the broom might accrue a different, even magical, function. To be sure, such transformation of responsibility in support of common care are at the core of La Borde’s ethic and by extension the Ocupação Ueinzz: to share rather than assign roles and their attendant responsibilities.77 In another scene the group’s discussion centers on how gestures are also words. Here Riera aims to evoke what Antonin Artaud searched for in the theater: a language in which “gesture and speech have not yet been separated by the logic of representation.”78 A sequence toward the film’s end shows how the group destroys the space of theatrical representation in a way that affirms Artaud’s desire and at once performs what Riera’s camera accomplishes through its fragmented and partial framings. They disassemble the public’s reserved seating area, detach individual seats, turn the scaffold on its side, and use the scaffold as a prop. They begin to walk, crawl, and climb through the metal frame (see fig. 52), bringing to mind the choreography that characterizes Judson Dance performances like Trisha Brown’s Floor of the Forest (1970). In this scene also seems to respond to an earlier comment by Luzinete, who (now wearing her everyday clothes) at around 22 minutes reads out loud: “Who could say what a body can do.” 165

52. Images extracted by Kaira M. Cabañas from the film by Alejandra Riera with ­UEINZZ, , documentation d’une expérience [. . . -­2007-­2011 -­ . . .]. Color, 35 mm, 110 minutes.

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Luzinete’s text stems from an extended list of multiple captions that were related to the hung photographs and that Riera distributed to participants. Her proposal, modeled on Maya Deren’s 1946 anagram on art and film, was to use these texts and images as a way of putting into practice a different reading of the anagram. At approximately 1 hour 18 minutes, we see Alexandre and Paula, both Ueinzz members, sitting under the photographs (see fig. 52), while two other particpants and Riera read the anagram’s axes (e.g., “the nature of forms,” “the forms of art,” “the art of cinematography”),79 emphasizing their nonhierarchical and combinatory relations. In the course of the film the captions serve as multiple points of references for the images, which occupy a provisional status between what has been and what will become through their discussions and the associative logic that infinitely defers fixed meanings. The question of roles, how they are inhabited and transformed, returns in a different form at 1 hour 20 minutes. Riera speaks in Spanish, and Erika Inforsato, a founding member of Ueinzz, translates her statements into Portuguese for the others.80 During the conversation, a tense moment erupts in which one hears the following: Alexandre: What she [Riera] creates or not, it is her problem. Erika: She is saying that she likes neither art nor politics. Alexandre: But she makes art, she is an artist. She is an artist! Erika: If she is an artist, what are you? Riera: And the woman who cleans, what is she?

Here Alexandre questions Riera’s role as an artist, but also art and politics and whom they serve (he uses the term manipulate). Riera challenges his observations but especially his statement’s identitarian drive (She is an artist!). She reframes attention toward the custodian who joined the occupation and thus her participation’s implication of a subjective shift, a becoming, different from the restrictions Alexandre evokes. Riera continues, “If the woman who cleans is the woman who cleans and the artist only the artist, I would have preferred to not have come.” This scene does not represent a simple opposition between art and life. Rather, Riera consciously kept this scene so as to show how the “space-­time-­place” that Ueinzz creates—­however fragile and fleeting it may be—­enables Alexandre to express his suffering and frustration with existing social and political relations outside the theater, where such oppositions subtend “normal” reality.81 Shortly after this exchange, one sees close-­ups of a few of the suspended photographs being burned with a lighter. Such actions challenge the representational nature of images, while in a shot that follows one hears the recommendation to “imagine a system of vision that excludes the framing of the camera.” About fourteen minutes later, one observes scenes that answer this directive through various proposals for a defamiliarized vision, which 167

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use the props for vision previously featured at intervals throughout the film (as with Luzinete’s invented camera mentioned earlier). In one instance a member of the group views the space through his keys, which he rotates in his hand. Another member views “reality” through a rotating disc with holes. Yet another, Adélia Faustino, peeps through the branches of a small plant and gently rotates one of its delicate branches as if turning a film reel (fig. 52). Here primary identification with these imaginary cameras is held in suspense; as film viewers we do not see the images these cameras “record” but witness the recording of an experiment that explores what it might mean to cultivate a collective unframing of vision. If cinema as an institution is a specific form of governmentality, the “conduct of conduct”—­as I have elsewhere described it, following Michel Foucault—­Riera experiments with film as an art of government in order to configure cinema otherwise.82 For Riera the film is not a thing (the filmstrip) or the apparatus of projection (e.g., projector, light, screen) within which film’s visual images unfold. Her practice includes the actual film, techniques of filming and image and sound editing, but also the experiences that, as she explains, “have always already begun and continue after and outside the film.”83 In Riera’s cinema experience, she invents a parallel to the work of ­institutional psychotherapy that so inspires her. What is more, her document-­film shows what an art practice might look like that does not appropriate patients’ work or falsely idealize inner visions and other psychic states. And it does so through what she withholds (iconic images) and what she refuses (categorized roles), but also through what she affirms: ethical relations. She explains, “For us it was about a film about the joy of being together, of composing with that which we are . . . to re-­create spaces in which other fictions touch reality, working on the material and affective conditions of our being together at the very moment of the experience and filming.”84 One might think of Riera’s document-­film as taking care of cinema in such a way that she allows cinema to engage other ways of being so as to reconfigure the social relations produced within its images but also offscreen—­ the affective and material conditions to which she refers and of which filmmaking also forms a part. In so doing, she consciously remains at a critical remove from the dominant practices and modes of display in the global contemporary art system, knowingly exposing the limits of the global art scene and its inability to deal with what is not conceived within it or for it. Indeed, her occasional participation in “global” art events has been marked by her work’s fugitive presence, constituting, for this author, part of her outright refusal of the “monolingualism of the global” with which this chapter’s discussion began.85 Riera’s experimental and documentary practice courts a fragile and fluctuating reality as she searches for ways to transmit an experience of being-­there-­with (être-­là-­avec), to again invoke Oury.86 She invents places, moments-­lieux, whose precise meaning and effects cannot be wholly anticipated. 168

CODA The right to be mad and what we might learn from the mad is at the center of theatrical productions by the Cia. Teatral Ueinzz (Ueinzz Theater Company), the subject of Alejandra Riera’s document-­film described in the preceding chapter. On November 10, 2013, I attended the Ueinzz performance Cais de Ovelhas (Quay of sheep), in the course of which an actress left the stage to kiss the members of her family sitting in the front row. To this first-­ time attendee, this specific departure from the script offered a compelling reversal of what is conventionally understood by representation versus life. During a Ueinzz performance, one witnesses how actors enter and exit a character in a time that is not that of representation but that of the actor who might abandon the role to participate in a different scene, stop speaking mid-­monologue, exit the theater altogether, or enter “real” life through an expression of love as bestowed in a kiss. Consequently, what the “normal” public experiences during one of Ueinzz’s performances is immanent life and desire on stage. For Peter Pál Pelbart, Ueinzz acts out “manners of perceiving, feeling, dressing, positioning oneself, moving, speaking, thinking, asking questions, offering or removing oneself from the gaze of the other as well as from the others’ enjoyment.”1 In so doing, the performers, who include philosophers, mental health patients, therapists, and actors, reveal something else. With their actions that breach the script and its restrictive parameters—­that is, the idea that one should follow it—­they produce moments in which the power of life is cast in sharp relief. One participates in the time of the other and becomes other through a theatrical form in which the other can be and also become. In short, one unlearns and learns from other ways of being in the world.2

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is in many ways another outcome of my work toward the exhibition Specters of Artaud: Language and the Arts in the 1950s, which I cocurated with Frédéric Acquaviva at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 2012. The exhibition was formative for the present study because of its transatlantic scope but especially on account of its engagement with the subject of modern art and madness. Here, I will briefly get ahead of myself and thank the museum’s artistic director, Manuel Borja-­Villel, for his continued support of my work as well as the faith he showed when placing this exhibition in the hands of a first-­time curator. In the research leading up to the exhibition, I learned that Brazilian psychiatrist Nise da Silveira was key to Artaud’s reception in Rio de Janeiro. Consequently, I was forced to intellectually reckon with an unresolved disjunction between the critical and clinical commentaries regarding Artaud and his legacy. Although unbeknownst to me when I began Learning from Madness, my earlier research subjects would also make an appearance. Nouveau réalisme emerged as an important reference in the criticism on Arthur Bispo do Rosário’s creative production. Additional developments in France, such as Jean Dubuffet’s understanding and promotion of art brut, also play an important role in these pages but do so in order to address the discontinuities between the European and Brazilian cultural contexts for the exhibition and support of psychiatric patients’ art. Given the panorama of moments and sites this study approaches, I owe thanks to various institutions. This book was made possible thanks to the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, which supported my appointment as a visiting professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-­Rio), during which I conducted the bulk of this research. To this end, I am thankful to professor Ana Kiffer and chair Karl Erik Schøllhammer at the Departamento de Letras, each of whom welcomed my research and teaching at the university. I benefited from a Getty Research Scholar Grant early on and, more recently, at the University of Florida (UF) from a Scholarship Enhancement Fund Grant from the Office of Research, as well as a publication subvention from the School of Art and

Acknowledgments

Art History and the College of the Arts (COTA), and a Research Incentive Award from the latter. The Barr Ferree Publication Fund of Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archaeology helped cover costs associated with licensing images. That the book’s writing happened in a timely fashion I owe to the generosity of a Creative Capital/­Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Research assistant Vivian Crockett also provided vital assistance with research tasks and image permissions with characteristic acumen and good cheer. I am especially grateful to those who trusted me with their knowledge, both practical and scholarly, of the relation between art and madness, art and care, as well as Brazilian art and culture more broadly: Gina Ferreira, Lula Wanderley, and Luiz Carlos Mello gave of their expertise in incalculable ways. I also learned from conversations and correspondence with Ieda Britto, Baptiste Brun, Amy Buono, Flavia Corpas, Sophie Cras, ­Heloisa Espada, ­Heloisa Ferraz, Ana Linnemann, Felipe Meres (who also assisted me with preparing the book’s images), Luiz Camillo Osorio, Amilcar Packer, ­Peter Pál Pelbart, Alejandra Riera, Javier Téllez, and Joaquin Terrones—­each contributed to the project in various ways. Other colleagues and friends provided additional insight and encouragement: Frédéric Acquaviva, Alex­ander Alberro, Carol Becker, Sérgio Bessa, Julien Bismuth, Sonja Boos, Jesús Carrillo, Jean-­Pierre Criqui, Mela Dávila, Pascal Feinte, Daniel Gorin, Donald Johnson-­Montenegro, Kellie Jones, Branden W. ­Joseph, Eugenia Lai, Aleca Le Blanc, Jay Levenson, Thomas Y. Levin, Sarah Lookofsky, Ivone Margulies, Kiki Mazzucchelli, Kent Minturn, W. J. T. Mitchell, Adele Nelson, Iñaki ­Estella Noriega, Adriano Pedrosa, Gabriel Pérez-­Barreiro, Daniel Quiles, Guthrie Ramsey, Jorge Ribalta, Jimmy Robert, Rebecca S ­ iegel, P. Adams Sitney, Irene Small, Doris Sommer, Daniel Steegmann, Ana Wambier, and Giovanna Zapperi. I am also delighted to have collaborated with Suzanne Hudson, both in our conversations leading up to the “Critical, Clinical, Curatorial” symposium I organized with the support of the Harn Eminent Scholar Chair in Art History at UF, and in our work as coconveners for the two-­day seminar “Art: Creative Care” at the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute. I feel lucky to have worked with such an engaging cohort of scholars and practitioners at each event, and thank the two institutions for their support. Given all of my accrued debt, it will come as little surprise that Learning from Madness is also a record of my dialogue with colleagues, students, and friends and the ways that they influenced, perhaps unknowingly, the book’s final form. My research engaged collections and archives housed in various institutions and on various continents. In Brazil these included the Acervo da Fundação Biblioteca Nacional; Arquivos Históricos Wanda Svevo (formerly the Arquivo Bienal); Biblioteca e Centro de Documentação, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand; Centro Cultural do Ministério da Saúde; Centro de Documentação Cultural “Alexandre Eulálio” at the Universidade 172

Acknowledgments

Estadual de Campinas; Centro de Documentação e Memória da Universidade Estadual Paulista; Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros; Instituto Municipal de Assistência a Saúde Juliano Moreira; Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea; Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; Biblioteca Paulo Mendes Almeida e Centro de Estudos Luís Martins, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente; and the Museu Osório César, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery. In Europe, I consulted collections at the Archiv Acquaviva, Berlin; Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Centre d’étude de l’expression at the Centre hospitalier Sainte-­Anne, Paris; Collection de l’art brut, Lausanne; Museo di antropologia criminale Cesare Lombroso, Università di Torino, Turin; and the Sammlung Prinzhorn in Heidelberg. Finally, in the United States, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Getty Research Institute, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and New York Public Library all provided important resources. I am indebted to the staff, librarians, and archivists at each of these institutions. In this context, I specifically mention Bianca Bernardo, Pier Paolo Bertuzzi Pizzolato, Léia Cassoni, Sabine Hohnholz, Ana Paula Marques, Vincent Monod, Priscilla Moret, Marize Parreira, Fernando ­Piola, Pamela Sant’Anna, and Aline Siqueira for always responding and being ­attentive to my research requests. I also express gratitude to Vera Pedrosa for generously facilitating my access to her father’s archive. Susan Bielstein, publisher at the University of Chicago Press, has been a trusted interlocutor, and I thank her for backing the project and my research more generally. Chicago’s excellent editorial and production staff, including James Whitman Toftness and Katherine Faydash, also deserve special recognition, as do the two anonymous readers who critically commented on the manuscript and supported its publication. To graphic designer Matt Avery, I owe the sophistication of the book’s design. Since arriving at UF, my colleagues have been wonderfully supportive. I thank Melissa Hyde, who served as my faculty mentor, as well as Ashley Jones, Guolong Lai, Maria Rogal, Elizabeth Ross, Maya Stanfield-­Mazzi, director Lynn Tomaszewski, and Sergio Vega in the School of Art and Art History; COTA deans Lucinda Lavelli and Tony Kolenic; Charles Perrone and Andréa Ferreira in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies; and Philip J. Williams, director of the Center for Latin American Studies. Finally, I am exceedingly grateful to friends and colleagues who have graciously responded in detail to various aspects of this work: Elizabeth Azen, José Falconi, Sérgio B. Martins, and Katja Zelljadt. I also reserve heartfelt thanks to Jennifer Josten, Ana Magalhães, Fernanda Pitta, and Rachel Silveri, who each read individual chapters (sometimes repeatedly), offering their insights and expertise, as well as to Matheus Rocha Pitta, who accompanied me to psychiatric collections both near and far. Each has sustained my passion for this material. The late Adela Rodríguez provided s­ imilar 173

Acknowledgments

­ ncouragement; she is dearly missed. When researching and writing, the e day-­to-­day is equally crucial. This book would not have been possible without my parents, Humberto and Hermys, as well as the understanding of family, my brother Alex, and dear friends. In addition to those already named, I count among them my dutiful neighbors in Rio de Janeiro, Laercio Redondo and Birger Lipinski. Thank you for the care you brought to my ­every day. This research also led me in an unanticipated way to my partner in life, Jesús Fuenmayor. Querido Jesús: Te dedico el libro. Yo más.

174

NOTES ON THE TEXT The chapters in this volume draw upon material presented in the graduate courses I taught at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and the University of Florida, as well as lectures presented at the Centre Allemand d’histoire de l’art, Centre Pompidou, College Art Association, Getty Research Institute, Ludlow 38/Goethe Institute, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-­USP), Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), the “New Worlds: Frontiers, Inclusion, Utopias” conference organized by the Comité international de l’histoire de l’art in Rio de Janeiro, the “The Legacy of Latin American Avant-­Gardes: Looking Back/Looking Forward” panel organized by Kiki Mazzucchelli for ARCOmadrid, and University of Chicago. This volume also develops my prior work published by academic journals such as Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne (no. 129), October (no. 153), O que nos faz pensar (no. 40), and the magazine Artforum (December 2012), as well as by other institutions, including Museu de Arte de São Paulo, MoMA, and MNCARS. I thank the students, audiences, organizers, curators, and editors at each of these venues for their support of this work. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from non-­English editions are my own. Original emphases are maintained, with any alterations noted. With an eye to consistency, I have opted for the consistent application of American spelling for words such as theater. For proper names in Portuguese, I have used current standards for spelling and accents, as in the case of Juquery (versus Juquerí) and Osório César (versus Osório Cesar). Readers may also notice that at times a patient-­artist is referred to using only his or her first name. This occurs in part due to psychiatric practices of the time, which often preserved patients’ partial anonymity in publications, and also because of the prominent Brazilian practice of referring to cultural and political figures on a first name basis, as when “Hélio” or “Nise” are used instead of “Oiticica” or “Silveira.”

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS All reasonable efforts have been made to identify and contact copyright holders for the works and photographs reproduced in these pages. The author apologizes for any omissions or inadvertent errors. Copyright holders not acknowledged here or in the image captions should contact the author to be acknowledged in future editions. Illustrations appear courtesy of the following institutions and individuals: Alice Brill / Instituto Moreira Salles Collection (figs. 18–­20; cover); Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo (figs. 15–­17); Biblioteca Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (fig. 41); Acervo da Fundação Biblioteca Nacional—­Brasil (figs. 27, 29); Coleção Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (figs. 23, 26); Coleção Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea / Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro (figs. 34, 37, 43); Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (figs. 25, 31); Collection de l’art brut, Lausanne (figs. 9–­10); Fundação Bienal de São Paulo (figs. 48–­50); Fundo Flávio de Carvalho, CEDAE (fig. 6); Instituto Municipal Juliano Moreira Collection (figs. 11, 38–­39); La Biennale di Venezia, ASAC, Photo Library (figs. 44–­47); Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente (figs. 13, 21, 24, 28, 30); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (fig. 33); Núcleo de Acervo, Memória e Cultura, Museu Osório César, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery (figs. 1–­4); private collection (figs. 5, 8, 12, 22, 35); Javier Téllez (fig. 51).

Photography Credits © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zurich (fig. 23); Alice Brill (figs. 15–­20); Amélie Blanc, Atelier de numérisation—­Ville de Lausanne (fig. 10); Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY (fig. 32); © The Estate of Geraldo de Barros (fig. 25); © The Estate of Ivan Serpa (fig. 26); © Estate of Waldemar Cordeiro (fig. 31); Francesco Galli (figs. 45–­46); Giuseppe Pocetti, Atelier de numérisation—­Ville de Lausanne (fig. 9); Joaquín Cortés and Román Lores, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (fig. 33); Jean Manzon (fig. 36); Kaira M. Cabañas (figs. 14, 42); © Leo Eloy / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo (figs. 48–­50); © Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2017 (fig. 7); © Prinzhorn Collection, University Hospital Heidelberg (fig. 40); Roberto Marossi (figs. 44, 47); © Soichi Sunami (1885–­1971) (fig. 32).

NOTES Introduction 1. Michel Foucault, The History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (1961; London: Routledge, 2006), 18. 2. Ibid., 120. 3. Ibid., 536. 4. Ibid., 537. Original emphasis. 5. Foucault’s analysis suggests that if madness is contained in painting (“contemporaneous with the oeuvre,” as he explains), it is not because of a painting’s theme. What Foucault identifies as the “new triumph for madness” is, at least to this reader, found in the utter singularity of these modern artists’ oeuvres, whose visual languages escape psychological classification and discursive-­descriptive language. 6. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” (1969), in Language, Counter-­Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 113–­38. 7. Foucault, History of Madness, 537. Original emphasis. 8. Ibid., 563. 9. Michel Foucault, cited in Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness” (1963; date of lecture at the Collège Philosophique), in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (1967; London: Routledge, 2001), 40. 10. To Derrida’s “Cogito and the History of Madness” (1963) Foucault responded with “My Body, This Paper, This Fire” (1972), reproduced in History of Madness, 550–­74. Derrida responded in turn with “ ‘To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis” (1992), published on the occasion of a volume to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Foucault’s work. Published in English in Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 227–­66. For a critical engagement with the Foucault-­Derrida debate on madness, see, for example, Shoshana Felman, “Madness and Philosophy or Literature’s Reason,” in “Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy,” special issue, Yale French Studies, no. 52 (1975): 206–­28; and Roy Boyne, Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason (London: Routledge, 1990). 11. Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” 41–­42. Ultimately, at issue for Derrida is not that madness was expulsed during the classical age but that madness is always already internal to reason. 12. Curated by Harald Szeemann, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, Art Brut, Insania Pingens was presented at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1963, the first time the Prinzhorn works were shown in the post-­Nazi era. Four years later, L’art brut at the Musée des arts décoratifs exhibited seven hundred works by seventy-­five creators, all from Dubuffet’s collection.

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13. Cesare Lombroso, Genio e follia (1864). His subsequent L’uomo di genio (The man of genius, 1888) argues that artistic genius is a form of hereditary insanity, which Lombroso substantiates by assembling a collection of psychiatric art. 14. This article has two versions. The first, with the title “A propósito da exposição Malfatti,” was published in the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo on December 20, 1917. The second version, titled “Paranóia ou mistificação?” was included in the book As idéias de Jeca Tatu (São Paulo: Revista do Brasil, 1919). 15. For an overview of the early twentieth-­century alignment of the art of the insane, modern art, and the discourse of degeneracy, see John M. MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. 161–­66. For further information on the convergence of these issues in the Brazilian context, see Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, “Apontamentos para uma reflexão sobre a relação entre vanguarda e arte do inconsciente,” Revista Brasileira de Psicanálise 46 (2012): 137–­48. 16. Maria Heloisa Corrêa de Toledo Ferraz, Arte e loucura: Limites do imprevisível (São Paulo: Lemos Editorial, 1998); and Luiz Carlos Mello, Nise da Silveira: Caminhos de uma psiquiatra rebelde (Rio de Janeiro: Automatica, 2014). For its focus on scientific and art museum collections, see also the recently completed doctoral thesis by Eurípedes Gomes da Cruz Junior, “Do asilo ao museu: Ciência e arte nas coleções da loucura” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, UNIRIO, 2015). 17. Lucia Riley and José Otávio Pompeu e Silva, eds., Marcas e memórias: Almir Mavignier e o ateliê de pintura de Engenho de Dentro (Campinas: Komedi, 2012) 18. See, for example, Walter Melo, Nise da Silveira, ed. Ana Maria Jacó-­Vilela and Marcos Ribeiro Ferreira, Coleção Pioneiros da Psicologia Brasileira 4 (Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora; Brasília: Conselho Federal de Psicologia, 2001); Elizabeth Araújo Lima, Arte, clínica e loucura: Território em mutação (São Paulo: Summus, São Paulo Research Foundation [FAPESP], 2009); and Gustavo Henrique Dionisio, O antídoto do mal: Crítica de arte e loucura na modernidade brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2012). 19. In the course of this book, I use “critical and clinical” to subtly evoke Gilles Deleuze’s work Critique e clinique (1993), although the contours of the present study as well as my use of clinical (referring primarily to psychiatric history) differs from the scope and premise of his study. Deleuze argues that every literary work implies a form of life and should be evaluated both critically and clinically. Accordingly, he focuses on literary modernism and authors who invent a language within language (e.g., Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, Leopold von Sacher-­Masoch, Alfred Jarry, Lewis Carroll), also addressing the consequences of when delirium is reduced to a clinical state. See Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 20. As a practice within contemporary curating, the juxtaposition of psychiatric patients’ work to modern and contemporary art has a long history in Brazil, as this book evinces. But this does not mean that such a curatorial practice in its present instantiation remains unproblematic. Most recently, as I was finishing this manuscript, the Museu de Arte do Rio presented the exhibition Lugares do delírio (Places of delirium, 2017), which was conceived by Paulo Herkenhoff and curated by the psychoanalyst Tania Rivera. It included works by a diverse roster of artists from Cildo Meireles and Anna Maria Maiolino to patient-­artists Bispo do Rosário and Raphael Domingues. In relation to the curatorial conception, Rivera wrote: “The intention is to put in suspense the delimitation between the normal and the so-­called ‘crazy.’ Art and madness have in common the force of transformation of reality and this is represented in the exhibition.” While contemporary art curators often assimilate the work of outsider artists to the formal language or movements of art history (a subject I take up 180

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in chapters 4 and 5), in this instance a psychoanalyst working as a curator (Rivera) imputes a transformative “force” to all the work on display, consequently divesting the works of their specificity within the history of art and the history of the psychiatric institution and the meaning of patients’ production within it. See the Museu de Arte do Rio’s press release for Lugares do delírio, at http://www.museudeartedorio.org.br/sites/default/files /release_lugares_do_delirio.docx_2.pdf. 21. Rosalind Krauss, cited in Catherine de Zegher, “A Subterranean Chapter of Twentieth-­ Century Art History,” in The Prinzhorn Collection: Traces upon the Wunderblock (New York: Drawing Center, 2000), 4–­5. Krauss is in part paraphrasing and directly quoting from Yve-­Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Hubert Damisch, “A Conversation with Hubert Damisch,” October 85 (Summer 1998), esp. 6 and 10. Emphasis in Krauss, as cited in de Zegher. 22. See MacGregor, Discovery of the Art of the Insane; and Sarah Wilson, “From the Asylum to the Museum: Marginal Art in Paris and New York, 1938–­68,” in Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 120–­49. 23. See Allison Morehead’s excellent article “The Musée de la folie: Collecting and Exhibiting chez les fous,” Journal of the History of Collections 23, no. 1 (2011): 101–26, esp. 114. 24. Krauss, cited in de Zegher, “Subterranean Chapter,” 5. Krauss’s full statement reads: “The Prinzhorn material is as far as we can get from that model of installation art. For me that’s what its relevance is now.” 25. See Rosalind E. Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 289–­305; Rosalind E. Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-­medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000); and Rosalind E. Krauss, Under Blue Cup (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 26. Krauss, cited in de Zegher, “Subterranean Chapter,” 5. 27. Mário Pedrosa, “The Vital Need for Art” (1947), reproduced in Mário Pedrosa Primary Documents, ed. Glória Ferreira and Paulo Herkenhoff, trans. Stephen Berg (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 110. I have chosen to translate the title of this work as “Art, vital necessity,” so as to maintain the emphasis on necessity, which I consider key to modernist discourse and the discussion of patients’ art. For an additional discussion of Pedrosa’s support of the patients’ art, see my “Una voluntad de configuración: El arte virgem,” in Mário Pedrosa: De la naturaleza afectiva de la forma (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2017), as well as chapter 3 in this volume. 28. He also organized the informative volume Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente (Museum of unconscious images), which offers a history of the museum and psychiatrist Nise da Silveira’s pioneering role in art therapy, as well as entries on specific patients’ work, including Diniz and Dominguez. Mário Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Sérgio Milliet, and Nise da Silveira, Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Nacional de Arte, 1980). 29. Mário Pedrosa, “O Novo MAMRJ Terá Cinco Museus” (1978), reprinted in Mário Pedrosa, Política das artes: Textos escolhidos, ed. Otília Beatriz Fiori Arantes (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1995–­1998), 1:309. Such a drive to universalism remains at a historical and conceptual remove from, for example, André Malraux’s “Le musée imaginaire” (Museum without walls, 1947), which decontextualized the world’s art objects to determine their meaning through the juxtaposition of photographic details. André Malraux, “Museum without Walls,” in The Voices of Silence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 21. In 1958, around the time Malraux’s ideas were gaining currency, Pedrosa had proposed to Oscar Niemeyer a museum of copies for Brasília, which would 181

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thus not have to compete with less precarious institutions and still allow for the presentation of all of art’s histories. See Mário Pedrosa, “Projeto para o museu de Brasília” (1958), reprinted in Pedrosa, Política das artes, 287–­94. Pedrosa’s proposal is likely informed by the exhibitions of reproductions organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which traveled in those years to Brazil. See Helouise Costa, “Museus imaginários no pós-­guerra: O programa de exposições didáticas da seção de arte da Biblioteca Municipal de São Paulo (1945–­1960),” in Colóquio Labex Brasil-­França: Uma história da arte alternativa: Outros objetos, outras histórias—­Da história colonial ao pós-­modernismo, ed. Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, Thierry Dufrêne, and Jens Baumgarten (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, 2016), http://www.mac.usp.br/mac /conteudo/academico/publicacoes/anais/labex_br_fr/pdfs/4_Labex_helouisecosta.pdf. 30. P. M. Bardi, “Pedrosa Critico,” Diário de São Paulo, January 23, 1950, clipping in the archive of Mário Pedrosa, Acervo da Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, Brasil. 31. Within Bardi’s thought one must also attend to the slight differences between his understanding of the “popular” and the “vernacular.” The latter, at least in the Italian context, is understood as the foundation of Italy’s classicizing culture, whereas the popular within modernist criticism is more related to what is understood as non-­Western traditions. See also the discussion in Claudia Lazzaro, “Forging a Visible Fascist Nation: Strategies for Fusing Past and Present,” in Donatello among Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, ed. Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), esp. 27–­31. While not speaking to Bardi directly, Lazzaro offers the following observation: “Fascist Italy is generally distinguished from Nazi Germany in that Mussolini permitted, and even encouraged, the coexistence of a multiplicity of artistic trends, traditionalist to modernist, representational to abstract. . . . Most artists and architects were neither fully distanced from Fascism nor totally compromised in the service of it” (14). I would like to thank Ana Gonçalves Magalhães for bringing this study to my attention. 32. More research is needed to further understand and distill the convergences and divergences in thinking and in practice between these two key figures for art history in Brazil. In addition to MASP, in the 1950s the magazine Habitat as well as the short-­lived Instituto de Arte Contemporânea (IAC, 1951–­1953) were key to the circulation of Bardi’s promotion of a modern national culture that encompassed design, art and architecture, and popular crafts. The emphasis on popular craft at MASP reached its apex with the inaugural exhibition at the new building on Avenida Paulista, A mão do povo brasileiro (1969), which featured popular Brazilian art from different regions. The initial ideas for this exhibition already existed in inchoate form in Lina Bo Bardi and Martim Gonçalves’s Pavilhão Bahia for the 5th São Paulo Bienal in 1959. See also the catalog of the exhibition Bardi organized at MASP ten years later: Arte no Brasil: Uma história de cinco séculos (São Paulo: Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, 1979). See also the excellent discussion in Luciano Migliaccio, “Pietro Maria Bardi in Brazil: Art History, Criticism, and Chronicle,” in the conference proceedings Modernidade latina: Os italianos e os centros do modernismo latino-­americano / Latin Modernity: The Italians and the Centers of South American Modernism (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, 2013), http://www.mac.usp.br/mac/conteudo/academico/publicacoes/anais /modernidade/pdfs/LUCIANO_ING.pdf. 33. While beyond the scope of the present study, during the years of the Brazilian military dictatorship, the figure of the madman repeatedly appeared in avant-­garde art, from Waltercio Caldas’s O louco (1971) and Cildo Meireles’s Zero Cruzeiro (1974–­1978), which shows a Krahô Indian on one side and a psychiatric patient on the other, to Artur Barrio’s absurd 182

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wandering through Rio de Janeiro that ends with his internment at the Instituto Philippe Pinel. These representations and performances of madness became a way for artists to draw attention to the unreason underpinning Brazil’s military regime, which came to power in April 1964. These works stand in contrast to Lygia Clark’s development of a noninstitutional therapy during her time in Paris (in inchoate form) and then in Brazil. To juxtapose these distinct but concurrent practices brings into relief the divergent contexts of each: the Brazilian military state used internment and resuscitated violent psychiatric tactics as a way to “manage” political dissidents, while antipsychiatric protests opened new paths for exploring alternative therapeutic options in France and internationally. Yet Clark was not alone in her use of therapy as the material for her art. In a forthcoming essay, I place her work in conversation with lettrist Isidore Isou’s critique of psychiatry and the alternative mental health program proposals that he and Maurice Lemaître put forth in the wake of May 1968. 34. Hugo Denizart, O prisioneiro da passagem (Rio de Janeiro: Centro Nacional de Produção Independente, 1982). Color film, available for consultation at “Hugo Denizart: O prisioneiro de passagem,” YouTube video, 30:22, posted by alexandre oliveira, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=PjgP1LYLZOU. 35. See the comprehensive and informative chapter by MacGregor, “Marcel Réja: Critic of the Art of the Insane,” in his Discovery of the Art of the Insane. 36. Marcel Réja, L’art chez les fous: Le dessin, la prose, la poésie (Paris: Société du mercure de France, 1907), 13. 37. Ibid., 25. 38. Ibid., 44. 39. Double consciousness was a concept coined by W. E. B. Du Bois and expanded on by Paul Gilroy to describe transatlantic black culture. Carol Armstrong has also developed it to analyze the practice of female photographers. 40. Kaira M. Cabañas, “Monolingualism of the Global,” position paper, response for the panel “Politics of the Performing Eye: Kinetic Art, Op Art and Geometric Abstraction in a Trans-­national Perspective,” College Art Association Annual Conference, Washington, DC, February 4, 2016. Here I echo James Elkins when he writes, “The art of all nations continues to be interpreted using the toolbox of twentieth-­century Western European or North American art history,” in his “Can We Invent a World Art Studies?” in World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, ed. Kitty Zijmans and Wilfried van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008), 113. 41. My use of the term provincializing is inspired by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing ­Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 42. The exhibitions The Arts in Therapy and Occupational Therapy: Its Function and Purpose were programmed in the auditorium galleries. Such exhibitions are key to Hudson’s current book in progress, Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process, in which she offers a historical account in response to a straightforward but elusive query: “When and under what circumstances did people in America come to believe that making art was good for them?” As cited at the website of the Arts Writers Grant Program, http://www.artswriters .org/grant/grantees/grantee/suzanne_hudson. 43. The original transcript was titled “Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America” (1923) and was first published in 1938, nine years after Warburg’s death, as “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” in Journal of the Warburg Institute 2 (1938–­1939): 277–­92. See Aby M. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Indeed, Warburg’s 183

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method has been the subject of recent scholarly interest. Formative for my own research has been Georges Didi-­Huberman, Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2011). Warburg’s work has also served as inspiration for contemporary art curators who include psychiatric patients’ work in exhibitions; see Luis Pérez-­Oramas, “The Imminence of Poetics (A Polyphonic Essay in Three or More Voices),” in Catalogue Thirtieth Bienal de São Paulo: The Imminence of Poetics (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2012). 44. Michel Foucault, “For an Ethic of Discomfort” (1979), in Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–­1984, Vol. 3 (1994; New York: New Press, 2000), 448. 45. Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France, 1973–­1974 (2003; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Chapter 1 1. The Museu Osório César was inaugurated in 1985, and its institutional home was closed in 2006; it awaits renovation. See Bianca Ludymila Peres, “Museu Osório César é sim de Franco da Rocha e será restaurado,” Franco Notícias, June 2, 2015, http://franco­ noticias.com.br/museu-­osorio-­cesar-­e-­sim-­de-­franco-­da-­rocha-­e-­sera-­restaurado.html. The museum’s contents—­both its works of art and its archival documentation—are being temporarily housed in the building that used to be Female Pavilion 1, in a space designated as the Núcleo de Acervo, Memória e Cultura, Museu Osório César, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery. 2. The first lobotomy (leukotomy) was performed under the direction of António Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist in 1935; the first electroconvulsive shock therapy was administered three years later in 1938 by Italian professor Ugo Cerlitti and his colleague Lucio Bini. 3. Originally from Paraíba, César survived in São Paulo by giving private violin lessons. See his brief biography in Maria Heloisa Corrêa de Toledo Ferraz, “O pioneirismo de Osório César,” in Arte e inconsciente: Três visões sobre o Juquery: Fotos de Alice Brill, desenhos de Lasar Segall e obras de pacientes internados (São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles, 2002); and Maria Heloisa Corrêa de Toledo Ferraz, “Osório César,” in Juquery: Encontros com a arte (São Paulo: SESC Pompéia, 1998). He was first trained in dentistry (1915) and then in medicine, which he began to study in São Paulo but completed at the Faculdade de Medicina da Praia Vermelha in Rio de Janeiro in 1925, the year he definitively returned to São Paulo. 4. See documents in the Núcleo de Acervo, Memória e Cultura, Museu Osório César, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery. 5. See Osório César, “Advertencia,” in A expressão artística nos alienados: Contribuição para o estudo dos símbolos na arte (São Paulo: Oficinas Gráficas do Hospital do Juquery, 1929). 6. César, A expressão artística nos alienados, 68. 7. Osório César, A arte primitiva nos alienados (1924): Manifestação escultórica com caráter simbólico feiticista num caso de síndrome paranóide, republished in the Revista Latino­ americana de Psicopatologia Fundamental (São Paulo) 10, no. 1 (2007): 118–­30. Originally published in Memórias do Hospital de Juquery (São Paulo) 1, no. 1 (1924): 111–­25. In this context, César’s proposal was not to study such practices in isolation but to compare them to the artistic creations of children and the “primitive.” Three years later, together with

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Dr. Durval Marcondes, his colleague at the hospital, he published “Sobre dois casos de estereotipia gráfica com simbolismo sexual,” which was illustrated using six drawings by two patients to which the men applied both Freudian and Jungian theories, c ­ laiming an exact correspondence between the patients’ artistic manifestations and Freudian sexual symbols. Osório César and Durval Marcondes, “Sobre dois casos de ­estereotipia gráfica com simbolismo sexual,” Memórias do Hospital de Juquery (São Paulo) 3–­4, nos. 3–­4 (1927): 161–­65. Memórias do Hospital de Juquery was a medical journal of limited c ­ irculation. 8. The new asylum’s construction began in 1895 and was to house eight hundred beds; it was officially inaugurated in May 1898. The hospital’s central establishment included two sections, one for men and one for women, each with four pavilions. The site also included the first agricultural colony for men. See Franco da Rocha, Hospício e colônias de Juquery: Vinte anos de assistência aos alienados (São Paulo, 1912). Copy consulted at the Núcleo de Acervo, Memória e Cultura, Museu Osório César, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery. 9. Ibid., 6. 10. For an outline of Juquery’s complete organizational structure in 1912, see ibid., 45. 11. Ibid., 18. 12. See the discussion in Laure Murat, The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Toward a Political History of Madness, trans. Deke Dusinberre (2011; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 42. For an excellent history of nineteenth-­century French psychiatry, see Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 13. Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–­1974, trans. Graham Burchell (2003; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 152. In fact, Pinel’s importance for Brazilian psychiatry is so popularized that one slang term for madman in Brazilian Portuguese is pinel. 14. See Maria Clementina Pereira Cunha, O espelho do mundo: Juquery, a historia de um asilo (1986; São Paulo: Editora Paz e Terra, 1988), 85–­86. 15. Ibid., 93. 16. Ibid., 103. 17. Marcel Réja, L’art chez les fous: Le dessin, la prose, la poésie (Paris: Société du mercure de France 1907), 174. 18. Ibid.. 19. Line of flight, a concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, designates an infinitesimal possibility of escape. “Line of flight” is Brian Massumi’s English translation of the French ligne de fuite, where fuite means the act of fleeing or eluding. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xvii. 20. This article has two editions. The first, with the title “A propósito da exposição Malfatti,” was published in the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo on December 20, 1917. The second edition, with the title cited above, was included in the book As idéias de Jeca Tatu (São Paulo: Revista do Brasil, 1919). 21. Osório César, A expressão artística nos alienados: Contribuição para o estudo dos símbolos na arte (São Paulo: Oficinas Gráficas do Hospital do Juquery, 1929). 22. Pernambucano had also completed some studies on patients’ art in the early 1920s at the Hospital da Tamarineira, but, to the best of my knowledge, they were not published. Subsequently, in 1923, Sílvio Moura presented his thesis on the subject in Rio de Janeiro, but his work’s distribution was limited. See Arley Andriolo, “A ‘psicologia da arte’ no Olhar de Osório César: Leitura e escritos,” Psicologia: Ciência e Profissão 23, no. 4 (2003): 74–­81.

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23. Osório César, “Advertência,” xxi. The book was the result of six years of study, and he acknowledges the support of the hospital’s second director, Dr. Antônio Carlos Pacheco e Silva, as key to the establishment of the library and museum. 24. See Franco da Rocha, “Valiosas apreciações sobre este trabalho,” Folheto de divulgação da obra de Osório César, n.d., cited in Maria Heloisa Corrêa de Toledo Ferraz, Arte e loucura: Limites do imprevisível (São Paulo: Lemos Editorial, 1998), 47–­48. 25. See the entries in the catalog Brasil: Psicanálise & modernismo (São Paulo: Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, 2000). 26. Letter from Sigmund Freud to Osório César, January 10, 1927, Núcleo de Acervo, Memória e Cultura, Museu Osório César, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery (my translation). 27. Tarsila do Amaral also provided the illustrations for Osório César, Misticismo e loucura: Contribuição para o estudo das loucuras religiosas no Brasil (São Paulo: Officinas Graphicas do Hospital de Juquery, 1939). 28. Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” trans. Leslie Bary, Latin American Literary Review 19, no. 38 (July–­December 1991): 38–­47. In 1925, A Revista de Minas Gerais published a transcript of the first lecture Freud delivered in the United States in 1910. This, too, served as an important vehicle for further disseminating Freud’s ideas. 29. Andrade mined the indigenous figure as a way of synthesizing the past and the present and of moving toward a future that takes into account the sociocultural reality of Brazil. See Benedito Nunes, Antropofagia alcance de todos (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira, 1972), xxxvi–­liii. 30. César, A expressão artística nos alienados, 6. 31. Ibid., 39. 32. Ibid., 66. 33. Patient “O,” as reported by Dr. César, in ibid., 66–­67. 34. César, A expressão artística nos alienados, 68. 35. Ibid., 70. He also compares another one of her works with primitive Japanese art. 36. Ibid., 27. 37. Ibid.. In the pages that follow, he discusses his 1927 study, penned with Marcondes. See note 7. 38. César, A expressão artística nos alienados, 33. 39. Ibid., 1. In the 1920s and 1930s in Brazil, the preoccupation with mental health was extensive, driven by ideas of degeneracy and eugenics. Generally associated with the Movimento de Higiene Mental, the driving idea was to improve mental health by bringing together psychiatrists and psychologists along with social scientists, educators, and public administrators. The Liga Brasileira de Higiene Mental was founded in 1923 in Rio de Janeiro and revealed fascist tendencies, coming close to tendencies in Nazi psychiatry. In São Paulo in 1926, the Liga Paulista de Higiene Mental, which had its office at Juquery, revealed a diverse orientation between eugenics and psychoanalysis. In contrast, in Recife, the psychiatrist Ulysses Pernambucano encouraged community participation and social and therapeutic action, also resulting in projects for the construction of a school for “exceptional” individuals. For a more extensive discussion, see the section “A higiene mental,” by Eleonora Haddad Antunes in Psiquiatria, loucura e arte: Fragmentos da história brasileira, ed. Eleonora Haddad Antunes, Lúcia Helena Siqueira Barbosa, and Lygia Maria de França Pereira (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2002), 88–­94. 40.

Georges Didi-­Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (1982; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 49.

41. Jean Martin Charcot and Paul Richer, Les démoniaques dans l’art (Paris: Place de l’École de médecine, 1887). 186

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42. Charcot, “Preface,” in Les démoniaques dans l’art, xi. The full French phrase reads: “Nous retrouvons dans la figure du possédé tout un ensemble de caractères et des signes que le hasard seul n’a pu réunir, et des traits si précis que l’imagination ne saurait les avoir inventés.” With Les démoniaques Charcot holds the contingencies of artistic choice at bay to affirm the knowledge produced in his staged photographs. By all accounts he was a man of artistic competence and “taste,” but with his turn to art history he unwittingly belied the artifice of the illness and his procedures. 43. Désiré Magloire Bourneville and Paul M. Régnard (photographer), Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière: (Service de M. Charcot) (Paris: Progrès médical, 1876–­1880); and J. M. Charcot and Albert Londe (photographer), Nouvelle iconographie de la Salpêtrière (Paris: Lecrosnier et Babé, 1888–­1892). 44. Hans Prinzhorn, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, trans. Eric von Brockdorff (1922; New York: Springer-­Verlag, 1995), 262. See the discussion of Prinzhorn’s refusal to apply psychoanalysis to this art in John M. MacGregor, “Hans Prinzhorn and the German Contribution,” in his The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 203. While Hans Prinzhorn’s 1922 volume Bildnerei der Geisteskranken shares with Marcel Rejá’s L’art chez les fous (1907) an attention to the aesthetic quality of patients’ art, Prinzhorn’s study remains exceptional both in its original published presentation and in its subsequent reception. Bound in black linen with white embossed lettering, it runs 350 pages and contains 187 illustrations as well as twenty images on plates. Before its publication no other book had included such extensive visual documentation of patients’ art with such high quality. Two years later, Vinchon would publish L’art et la folie (1924) with only twenty-­eight illustrations. 45. The six drives Prinzhorn identifies to account for dominant characteristics in the patients’ (and all art’s) representations include the drive toward the expression of inner feelings, playfulness in expression, ornamental elaboration, patterned order, obsessive copying, and the development of complex symbolic systems (however, he largely avoided investigating the symbolic implications of works). See Prinzhorn, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, 14. 46. For Prinzhorn, the distinction between the artist and patient-­artist rested upon the latter’s lack of contact with humanity: “The schizophrenic . . . is detached from humanity, and by definition is neither willing nor able to reestablish contact with it. If he would he would be healed.” He continues, “We sense in our pictures the complete autistic isolation and the gruesome solipsism that far exceeds the limits of psychopathic alienation, and believe that in it we have found the essence of schizophrenic configuration.” Prinzhorn, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, 266. Prinzhorn also recognizes “the particularly close relationship of a large number of our pictures to contemporary art” (270). César, when turning to the difference between the art of his patients and that of the avant-­garde artist, maintains that the latter approximates the “aesthetic of the primitive” with the explicit aim of critiquing academic conventions in art. In 1934 he writes, “Futurism saw the breaking of classicism’s chains, bolstered by the artistic manifestations of primitives. . . . The avant-­garde schools, tormented by the secret of emotion, attempted at the beginning to undo any manifestation of things that could be identified with real life. They wished to thus end with the sound principles of academicism.” Osório César, A arte nos loucos e vanguardistas (Rio de Janeiro: Flores e Mano, 1934), 21. Copy consulted at the Arquivo Pessoal Nise da Silveira, Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, Rio de Janeiro. 47. Prinzhorn asserts that biographies are “insufficient” and claims that the “objectivity of medical histories is easily shattered. Pictures on the other hand are objective, e ­ xpressive representations, and an observer who clearly reveals his theoretical premises may achieve a higher degree of objectivity in their interpretation.” Prinzhorn, Artistry of the 187

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Mentally Ill, 237–­40. Consequently, Prinzhorn’s psychological “urges” were of little use in a diagnostic approach that would lead from the images to a specific clinical condition. In the final pages of his study, he emphasizes the “modest” results and how “we cannot say with certainty that any given picture comes from a mentally ill person just because it bears certain traits.” Prinzhorn, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, 265. 48. See the detailed discussion in Bettina Brand-­Claussen, “The Collection of Works of Art in the Psychiatric Clinic, Heidelberg—­from the Beginnings until 1945,” in Beyond Reason, Art and Psychosis: Works from the Prinzhorn Collection (London: Hayward Gallery, 1996), 9–­11. 49. Prinzhorn’s study contained works made from 1890 to 1922. César likely turned to works produced from 1923, the year he arrived at Juquery, until 1929, the year of A expressão artística nos alienados’s publication. 50. César, A expressão artística nos alienados, 35. 51. He collaborated with almost all the newspapers, among them Diário da Noite, Diário de São Paulo, Jornal de Notícias, Diário Nacional, Folha da Manhã, O Estado de São Paulo, and A Gazeta. See Ferraz, Juquery: Encontros com a arte, 12. 52. See J. Toledo, Flávio de Carvalho: O comedor de emoções (São Paulo: Brasiliense; Campinas: Editora da Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 1994), 147; as well as “Uma exposição de cartazes no Clube dos Artistas Modernos,” Diário da Noite, July 15, 1933, among other clippings in the Fundo Flávio de Carvalho, Centro de Documentação Cultural ­“Alexandre Eulálio” (CEDAE), Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem, Universidade Estadual de Campinas. 53. See the discussion in Raquel Carneiro Amin and Lucia Reily, “O ‘Mês das Crianças e dos Loucos’: Um olhar sobre a exposição paulista de 1933,” ARS (São Paulo) 11, no. 22 (2013): 130. Accordingly, Carvalho was also deeply invested in children’s perception. He also gave various lectures on the topic, including a lecture titled “A percepção da criança,” in the context of an exhibition of children’s art from Great Britain at the Galeria Prestes Maia in São Paulo. 54. Toledo, Flávio de Carvalho, 162. In this context, he also mentions studies dedicated to the work of Klages. 55. The Clube dos Artistas Modernos was founded on November 24, 1932, in the same building where Carvalho resided and had his studio. The building on Rua Pedro Lessa 2 also housed the studios of Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Antonio Gomide, and Carlos Prado, thereby offering CAM’s members a venue in close proximity to where they each developed their respective practices. CAM’s main space was reserved for exhibitions, lectures, concerts, dance, a reading room, a small library, and a bar. Its various committees, which were dedicated to administrative functions and various disciplines from painting to music, included notable culturati among its ranks: Amaral, Anita Malfatti, and Sérgio Milliet, among many others. CAM drafted an advertising circular, typed in all lowercase, that describes its objective as follows: “a group of modern artists decided to found a small club for the following purposes: meeting, collective model, subscription to the best art magazines, maintenance of a small bar, lectures and exhibitions, formation of an art library, defense of class interests. the club will rent a space that occupies an entire floor and is large enough for 120 people. our budget shows that we can start operations, right away renting the main headquarter space, with our 45 members; and we look forward to your support. please return the slip below addressed to: clube dos artistas modernos, pedro lessa street no. 2—­são paulo. send a copy to a modernist friend. gomide—­di cavalcanti—­carlos prado—­flávio de carvalho.” Cited in Toledo, Flávio de Carvalho: O comedor de emoções, 131; original published in Diário da Noite (São Paulo), December 24, 1932.

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56. “Club dos Artistas Modernos,” Base: Revista de arte, técnica e pensamento, no. 1 (August 1933): 24. 57. Thus, the writer for A Platéa describes how others think “the club is in fact a laboratory and expect that from there will emerge something important.” A Platéa, July 20, 1933, 3. 58. Pedrosa’s lecture is generally considered his first foray into art criticism. Programmed on June 16, 1933, to coincide with CAM’s exhibition of the German artist’s woodcuts, “Käthe Kollwitz e o seu modo vermelho de perceber a vida” (later published as “As tendências sociais da arte e Käthe Kollwitz”) insists on art’s active social and political role. Pedrosa thus outlines the contours of a Marxist aesthetic in ways that reflected his deep political engagement. See “As tendências sociais da arte e Kaethe Kollwitz” (1933), reprinted in Mário Pedrosa, Política das artes: Textos escolhidos, ed. Otília Beatriz Fiori Arantes (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1995–­1998), 1:35–­56. Subsequently, Pedrosa shifted his focus to art’s formal properties to analyze aesthetic response (see chapter 3). At the same time, however, he incorporated the art produced by psychiatric patients within his understanding of Gestalt. 59. See Walter Zanini, A arte no Brasil nas décadas de 1930–­40: O Grupo Santa Helena (São Paulo: Nobel/Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1991), 36–­41. 60. Daryle Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930–­1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 7. 61. See the detailed information offered in Carneiro and Reily, “O ‘Mês das Crianças e dos Loucos,’ ” 123–­42. As this article also charts, journalistic coverage of the Mês reveals discrepancies with the event’s title (some call it a Semana, thus a week rather than a month), as well as different accounts of the lecturers, their contributions, and the dates they lectured. The initial idea was for CAM to publish all of the lectures, but in the end only three were published by the individuals’ own initiative. Hence, today, we can study the lectures of César, Marcondes, and Pacheco e Silva for a sense of the event’s discursive contours as well as the varying approaches to the subject at hand. From the series’ announcement in one contemporary press venue, the program included the following: September 13, Dr. Pedro de Alcântara, “Interpretações dos desenhos de crianças e o seu valor pedagógico”; September 19, Dr. Durval Marcondes, “Psicanálise dos desenhos dos psicopatas”; September 26, Dr. A. C. Pacheco e Silva, “A arte e a psiquiatria através dos tempos”; October 3, Dr. Neves Manta, “Marcel Proust literária e psicanaliticamente”; October 10, Dr. Fausto Guerner, “O louco sob o ponto de vista da psicologia geral”; and October 17, Sr. José Kliass, “A musica nos alienados.” See “Crianças-­artistas, doidos-artistas,” Rumo, nos. 5–­6 (September–­October 1933): 29. Clipping in the Fundo Flávio de Carvalho, CEDAE. 62. “Estudo comparativo entre a arte de vanguarda e a arte dos alienados” was published as A arte nos loucos e vanguardistas the following year. Sigmund Freud, as cited in Osório César, A arte nos loucos e vanguardistas (Rio de Janeiro: Flores e Mano, 1934), 25. 63. César describes a clay sculpture with a large head, smooth and masklike face, large nose, open mouth, thick lips, and deformed eyes, which, he claims, are remembrances of a childhood that “surges from the unconscious and that [the patient] shaped in stylized deformations, constituting Freudian symbols.” Here, like the “sane” artist, infantile complexes are freed from the unconscious and fixed in a work’s formal exaggerations and monstrosities. While the process is claimed as the same, the emphasis remains on the study of symbols, as well as on the claims of atavism and archaisms inspired by Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913). César, A arte nos loucos e vanguardistas, 45–­46. 64. See clippings in the Fundo Flávio de Carvalho, CEDAE.

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65. Folha da Noite, for example, reproduced a work from Marcondes’s lecture, but whether this work, which represents a “cathedral of wonder,” was also presented in exhibition remains unclear. This image was subsequently reproduced alongside three others in the lecture’s published version in the Revista da Associação Paulista de Medicina. See “A psychanalyse dos desenhos dos doentes mentaes,” Folha da Noite, September 19, 1933, 8, clipping in the Fundo Flávio de Carvalho, CEDAE; and Dr. Durval Marcondes, “A psicanálise dos desenhos dos psicopatas,” Revista da Associação Paulista de Medicina 3, no. 4 (October 1933): 175–­82. The journalistic reports, along with the psychiatrists’ contemporaneous publications (especially César’s), provide us with additional sources about what else was potentially on view at CAM, whether as objects on display or as projected images or both. Carvalho’s press albums, which present copious documentation of the exhibition’s reception, confirm that the press more frequently reproduced patients’ work than that of children. 66. “Club dos Artistas Modernos: Um laboratório de experiências para a arte moderna,” Rumo, no. 4 (August 1933): 16. 67. “Club dos artistas modernos,” Base: Revista de arte, técnica e pensamento, no. 2 (September 1933): 48. 68. “A interpretação de desenhos de crianças e o seu valor pedagógico,” Folha da Noite, September 8, 1933, clipping in the Fundo Flávio de Carvalho, CEDAE. 69. “Prosseguem as conferencias sobre os desenhos de alienados,” Correio de São Paulo, September 26, 1933, 4, clipping in the Fundo Flávio de Carvalho, CEDAE. In the early 1930s, the reception of the patients’ work was largely affirmative, as evidenced in the reports cited earlier, which are bereft of polemicization and largely reassert the claims to the existing links between modern art and the art of the mad. Even before the exhibition opened, the press reported on these links, also in relation to the art of children, as a positive value: “The Mês das crianças e dos loucos is without a doubt the greatest achievement of Clube dos Artistas Modernos, because it is very important to note the link between the drawings of children, drawings of the mad, and modern art.” “Clube dos Artistas Modernos,” A Gazeta, July 12, 1933, 5. 70. “Curiosa exposição de trabalhos artísticos de loucos e crianças no Clube dos Artistas Modernos,” Correio de São Paulo, September 7, 1933, 6. The sentiment expressed in the cited passage is also reported in Rumo, nos. 5–­6 (September–­October 1933): 29. Clippings for both in the Fundo Flávio de Carvalho, CEDAE. 71. Thus, in the article “Crianças-­artistas, doidos-­artistas,” published in Rumo, the writer explains, “There appeared in the drawings of children and the mad an absolute spontaneity and a complete lack of interest in the rigid forms of academic art.” Rumo, nos. 5–­6 (September–­October 1933): 29, clipping in the Fundo Flávio de Carvalho, CEDAE. 72. See Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil, 54–­60. The year 1931 also represents the year that modernist artists were first begrudgingly allowed to hang their work in the National Salon, which showed Anita Malfatti, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, and those artists associated with the post-­1922 modernist movement such as Amaral, Cícero Dias, and Ismael Nery. 73. “Curiosa exposição de trabalhos artísticos de loucos e crianças no Clube dos Artistas Modernos,” 6. Carvalho upholds children’s art as a model of pure inventiveness and “absolute spontaneity,” a position he shares with his contemporaries in Europe, who also stylistically associated the work of children with the so-­called art of the insane. Flávio de Carvalho, cited in “Crianças-­artistas, doidos-­artistas,” 29. For an account of European artists’ relation to and collection of children’s art, see Jonathan Fineberg, The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 74. “Club dos Artistas Modernos: Um laboratório de experiências para a arte moderna,” 16. 190

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75. Flávio de Carvalho, Experiência n. 2: Realizada sobre uma procissão de Corpus Christi: Uma possível teoria e uma experiência (1931; Rio de Janeiro: Nau Editora, 2001), 16. 76. Ibid., 19. 77. Ibid., 31. Rather than any straightforward account, he confesses to various elements that deform his narrative, from multiple events to his choice among them, and remembering some and appreciating some more than others. 78. As his biographer J. Toledo writes, Carvalho “remained restless and imaginative, thinking of putting into practice a myriad of psychological experiences that kept him permanently connected to the ‘Freudian’ themes that he had always been interested in.” Toledo, Flávio de Carvalho, 87. Original emphasis. 79. During his time at Durham University in England, in the years 1918–­1922, Carvalho became interested in authors such as René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, as well as more contemporary theorists such as Freud, Bronisław Malinowski, and James Frazer. See Toledo, Flávio de Carvalho, 29. 80. For an account of how surrealism was perceived by artists and poets in Brazil, see Thiago Gil, Uma brecha para o surrealismo (São Paulo: Alameda, 2015). In fact, Gil’s thorough study also details how Cícero Dias’s first exhibition in June 1928 was realized during a conference on psychoanalysis in Rio de Janeiro and in the very building of the Policlínica where the conference took place. 81. Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil, 53. 82. Carvalho, Experiência n. 2, 51. 83. Brand-­Claussen, “Collection of Works of Art in the Psychiatric Clinic,” 16 and 23n81, for a list of the exhibition venues. 84. In 1922, the year of its publication, Max Ernst brought the book to France. Like Breton, he was no stranger to madness. During his studies in Bonn, Ernst attended psychiatric lectures and saw a collection of patients’ art. Breton had firsthand experience with psychiatric patients when working as an assistant at the psychiatric center of the French Second Army in Saint-­Dizier during World War I. There he worked with soldiers profoundly affected by the war. Indeed, his experience of the first machine war and his exposure to soldiers who had been shocked into another reality informed his critique of his current reality and the increased rationalization of everyday life in the course of the 1920s. 85. See Auguste Armand Marie, “L’art et la folie,” Revue scientifique 67, no. 13 (July 1929): 395. 86. The Exposition des artistes malades included a catalog with the subtitle “Catalogue des oeuvres d’art morbide.” See the discussion in Ingrid von Beyme, “Asylum Art as the ‘True’ Avant-­Garde? The Surrealist Reception of ‘Mad Art,’ ” in Surrealismus und Wahnsinn / Surrealism and Madness, ed. Thomas Röske and Ingrid von Beyme (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2009), 154–­58. Prinzhorn published the article “A propos de l’art des aliénés” in the Belgian magazine Variétés in 1929, which is likely the literal source that Breton read in those years. Moreover, the magazine’s publication preceded by about six weeks the exhibition at Max Bine. Other translation efforts in the 1930s include those by Ernst ­Jolowicz, who translated sections of Prinzhorn’s book for small-­group meetings at the Sainte-­Anne hospital in Paris. Subsequently, in 1955, Meret Oppenheim translated the chapter on August Natterer for the magazine Medium, while a complete French translation first appeared in 1984. See Thomas Röske, “Inspiration and Unreachable Paradigm—­L’art des fous and Surrealism,” also in Surrealismus und Wahnsinn / Surrealism and Madness, 18n9 and 12. 87. See von Beyme, “Asylum Art,” 154. Von Beyme, through careful research, notes the discrepancy between the Max Bine catalog numbers and the actual handwritten list in the Prinzhorn archive. Her research has made it possible to identify which works were shown 191

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in parts of the exhibition (156). Today, what remains of the Auguste Marie Collection can be found in the Prinzhorn Collection as well as in the Collection de l’art brut in Lausanne. See also Allison Morehead, “The Musée de la folie: Collecting and Exhibiting chez les fous,” Journal of the History of Collections 23, no. 1 (2011): 101–26, esp. 120. 88. Images of these works were published without commentary in La révolution surréaliste, no. 12 (December 15, 1929), and in the years 1936–­1947 patients’ work also made appearances in surrealist exhibitions. On Breton’s private collection, see Alain Jouffroy, “La collection de André Breton,” L’œil 10 (October 1955): 32–­39. See also the illustrations in André Breton: La beauté convulsive (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1991). 89. In 1936, dealer Charles Ratton presented objets trouvés and objets surréalistes alongside art of the insane at his gallery in the Exposition des objets surréalistes. See von Beyme, “Asylum Art,” 160. This exhibition was virtually overlooked by the art critics and is most often discussed in the critical literature in relation to its inclusion of tribal objects from various countries. Ingrid von Beyme, however, has identified one of the patients’ works from Breton’s collection as among the objects included in the exhibition. For a discussion of this exhibition in relation to surrealist conceptions of the object that include the sexual (Freud), the commodity (Karl Marx), and the tribal (ethnography), see Romy Golan, “Triangulating the Surrealist Fetish,” Visual Anthropology Review 10, no. 1 (1994): 50–­65. That same year similar works eventually made their way to London for the International Surrealist Exhibition at Burlington Galleries. 90. The surrealists’ engagement with politics was largely ignored by MoMA and its publications, which framed it as an escape from modern life and its exigencies. The movement was also aligned with fashion and advertising, such that Salvador Dalí became the face of surrealism in the United States. See Sandra Zalman, “The Vernacular as Vanguard: Alfred Barr, Salvador Dalí, and the U.S. Reception of Surrealism in the 1930s,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 1 (2007): 44–­67. American critic Clement Greenberg singles out the artist and surrealism in his essay “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch” (1939). He writes, “The chief concern of a painter like Dalí is to represent the processes and concepts of his consciousness, not the process of his medium.” See Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 7n2. 91. Szécsi promoted the art of the mentally ill and showed his collection at New York’s Midtown Galleries. See Surrealismus und Wahnsinn / Surrealism and Madness, 168n41. The Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism catalog reproduces Breton’s boxes, a drawing by Albert G. (the Baron de Ravallet), and a watercolor by August Klett (a key work reproduced in Prinzhorn’s study that Szécsi received as part of an exchange). 92. Alfred H. Barr Jr., introduction to Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, 2nd ed. (1936; New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1937), 12–­13. Originally published in January 1937 as “A Brief Guide to the Exhibition of Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.” Barr’s own curatorial programming for the museum points to a different development, one that exceeds, for example, his modernist torpedo diagram: Fantastic Art was followed by American Folk Art and Masters of Popular Painting in 1938. 93. Emily Genauer, “Real Value of Dada and Surrealist Show Rests on Few Good Pictures: Drawings by Lunatic Asylum Inmates as Good as Most of the 700 Items in Museum’s Fantastic Exhibit,” New York World Telegram, December 12, 1936. 94. Katherine Dreier to Alfred Barr, February 27, 1937, The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 55.2, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 95. Katherine Dreier to Alfred Barr, February 16, 1937, MoMA Exhs., 55.2. MoMA Archives, New York. 96. Katherine Dreier to Alfred Barr, February 27, 1937, MoMA Exhs., 55.2. MoMA Archives, 192

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New York. Original emphasis. Dreier is responding to the popularity of R. W. Ruckstull’s Great Works of Art (1925). The book’s self-­proclaimed purpose was “to strike a body-­blow at the insanity, sham, and degeneracy in the Modernistic art movement” and to promote good American painting. R. W. Ruckstull, Great Works of Art and What Makes Them Great (New York: Garden Publishing, 1925). See the discussion in Zalman, “Vernacular as Vanguard,” 51, 63–­64, and 64nn40–­41. 97. In interview, Dreier responds to a question about the differences between a sketch by a modern artist and an insane person by referring to how the pictures by the latter are “unbalanced” and how they “produce the fantastic but they cannot produce art.” She also refers to her meeting with Hans Prinzhorn. See the transcript of the interview of Katherine S. Dreier by Anne Hard, “Let’s Talk It Over,” WJZ (New York), January 25, 1937, Katherine S. Dreier Papers/Société Anonyme Archive, YCAL MSS 101, box 61, folder 1667, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; as well as Katherine Dreier quoted in “Exhibits by Insane Anger Surrealist,” New York Times, January 19, 1937. 98. In 1943 MoMA’s education department organized The Arts in Therapy and Occupational Therapy: Its Function and Purpose in the auditorium galleries, but these exhibitions, developed by the Armed Services Program, promoted arts and crafts as rehabilitation for disabled members of the armed forces and showed models submitted by practicing artists to be used in therapy studios (I briefly discuss these exhibitions in chapter 3). 99. See, for example, André Breton, “Crisis of the Object” (1936) and “Surrealist Exhibition of Objects” (1936), in his Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2002), as well as “Surrealist Situation of the Object” (1935), in André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Weaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972). 100. For a detailed account of Ernst’s reception of Prinzhorn, see Thomas Röske, “Max Ernst’s Encounter with Artistry of the Mentally Ill,” in Surrealismus und Wahnsinn / Surrealism and Madness, 154–­58. For their critique of psychiatry, see, for example, [Antonin Artaud, unsigned], “Lettre aux Médecins-­Chefs des Asiles de Fous,” La révolution surrealiste, no. 3 (April 15, 1925): 29. 101. Within European avant-­garde circles, Ernst had already included children’s drawings, ­African sculpture, found objects, and drawings by patients in the Cologne Dada exhibition in 1919. 102. Gaston Ferdière, Les Mauvaises Fréquentations (Paris: Jean-­Claude Simoën, 1978), 136. The exhibition’s eight-­page brochure lists sixty artists but makes no mention of Ferdière’s collection. See Surrealismus und Wahnsinn / Surrealism and Madness, 168n43. In the postwar years, works by patients were also shown at the Galerie Maeght in July 1947 in the exhibition organized by Duchamp and Breton. These works included Pujolle’s wooden revolver, and the catalog illustrated three objects from Ferdière’s collection. 103. Adam Jolles, The Curatorial Avant-­Garde: Surrealism and Exhibition Practice in France, 1925–­1941 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 8. Even so, as Jolles further explains, contrary to their intentions the contemporary press often referred to the exhibition as evincing a salesroom aesthetic. 104. I owe this formulation to von Beyme, “Asylum Art,” 160. 105. Breton, “Crisis of the Object,” 279. 106. See Peter Bürger, “The Lure of Madness,” in Surrealismus und Wahnsinn / Surrealism and Madness, 42 and 44; and Barr, introduction to Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, 12–­13. 107. In an interview, Breton describes the surrealist interest in children’s art and the art of the insane because they come “from the unconscious” and are “free of censorhip.” See “Surrealism: Interview with André Breton,” Cultura 1, no. 5 (February–­March 1939): 9, 193

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­republished in Flávio de Carvalho (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2010), 97–­98. 108. See the discussion in Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil, 47, 63, and 82. 109. Diário de São Paulo, September 24, 1936, republished in Denise Mattar, Flávio de Carvalho: 100 anos de um revolucionário romântico (Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 1999), 71–­73. 110. Max Nordau, one of Lombroso’s German disciples, provided the Nazis with a psychiatric concept of degeneracy that could be applied to a range of subjects. In his 1892 book Entartung (Degeneration), he states that “degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists.” Cited in John M. MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, 238. 111. Cited in MacGregor, Discovery of the Art of the Insane, 241. Ziegler also made a case for how German museum directors had betrayed the German nation through the collection and exhibition of such work. 112. According to Sabine Hohnholz (curator and archivist) and Thomas Röske (director) at the Prinzhorn Collection, the 1937 installment of Entartete Kunst in Munich exclusively featured modern art. Conversations with author, June 15, 2016, and June 17, 2016. See also Bettina Brand-­Claussen’s detailed account, “Collection of Works of Art in the Psychiatric Clinic,” 18. 113. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 120.

Chapter 2 1. Jean Dubuffet, quoted in Lucienne Peiry, Art Brut: The Origins of Outsider Art, trans. James Frank (1997; Paris: Flammarion, 2001), 11. 2. Jean Dubuffet, L’art brut préféré aux arts culturels (Paris: Galerie René Drouin, 1949), n.p. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Hans Prinzhorn, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, trans. Eric von Brockdorff (1922; New York: Springer-­Verlag, 1995), 228. My emphasis. 6. John M. MacGregor, “Art brut chez Dubuffet: An Interview with the Artist. 21 August 1976,” Raw Vision 7 (1993): 42, reprinted in Prospectus et tous écrits suivants (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 4:40–­58. Dubuffet first visited the Prinzhorn Collection in September 1950 and created an extensive list in which he evaluated the works. See the exhibition catalog Dubuffets Liste: Ein Kommentar zur Sammlung Prinzhorn von 1950 (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2015). 7. Because of a lack of financial support and disagreement among its members, Dubuffet dissolved the Compagnie de l’art brut in the spring of 1951. 8. André Breton, “L’art des fous, la clé des camps,” Cahiers de la Pléiade 6 (Fall–­Winter 1948–­ 1949): 101–­3. 9. Dubuffet, L’art brut préféré aux arts culturels. 10. Ferdière’s collection had been shown the previous year, in 1945, at the Musée Denys Puech in Rodez. Three objects from Ferdière’s collection were also shown in the first postwar Exposition internationale du surréalisme organized by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton at the Galerie Maeght in July 1947. See Sarah Wilson, “From the Asylum to the Museum: Marginal Art in Paris and New York, 1938–­68,” in Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 122, 131. 11. A. Lomont, “Succès fou du vernissage à Sainte-­Anne,” Libération, February 16, 1946. 194

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12. “L’art chez les fous,” La Presse, February 19, 1946, reproduced in Anne-­Marie Dubois, De l’art des fous à l’œuvre d’art (Paris: Éditions Édite and Centre d’étude de l’expression, 2009), 1:271. 13. Ibid.; and “La peinture des fous a paru bien sage,” Le Figaro, February 17–­18, 1946. 14. G.J., “Vernissage chez les fous,” L’Aurore, February 16, 1946. 15. Robert Volmat, L’art psychopathologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956), see 5–­7. 16. E. Duvivier, “Images de la folie,” 1950, color film, 16 min., http://www.canal-­u.tv/video /cerimes/images_de_la_folie.8378. 17. Volmat, L’art psychopathologique, 135. 18. Ibid., 266. Original emphasis. 19. Silveira’s patients’ work was presented under the auspices of her colleague Maurício de Medeiros. 20. Volmat, L’art psychopathologique, 11. 21. Volmat called attention to the fact that the fifty-­four drawings and paintings by ten patients from Juquery presented by César was the only collection within the Brazilian context that did not arise within a group studio setting. Ibid. 22. See Osório César to Jean Dubuffet, April 13, 1949, File: “Albino Braz Correspondence,” Collection de l’art brut, Lausanne; as well as Dubuffet’s letter to Paulo Emilio Sales Gomes, in which he concurs with César’s assessment of the work and explains how the psychiatrist “sent [him] a collection of originals which are themselves free from all outside influence, and among which there are a series of colored drawings, [by] the same author, very interesting and remarkable.” Jean Dubuffet to Paulo Emilio Sales ­Gomes, July 13, 1949, File: “Brésil,” Collection de l’art brut, Lausanne. 23. Michel Thévoz, Art brut (New York: Rizzoli, 1976), 9–­10. Lucienne Peiry, Thévoz’s successor as director (2001–­2011), at times also upholds the myth of the work’s subversive status, for example, when she writes, “These works created in obscurity had shattered the art world, opening a breach at the beginning of the twentieth century through which would surge a violent subversion: Art Brut.” Or, when referring to Dubuffet’s search, she explains: “The artistic forms which Dubuffet was drawn to were situated a million miles away from traditional cultural models. These works were created in remote places, springing up out of exclusion and confinement.” Lucienne Peiry, Art Brut: The Origins of Outsider Art, trans. James Frank (1997; Paris: Flammarion, 2001), 33, 42. 24. On October 20, César opened the series with his talk “Expressões artísticas dos alienados.” Biblioteca e Centro de Documentação, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateau­ briand—­MASP. 25. In 1942, discussion also took place about creating a Salão de Arte dos Alienados that would be part of the Segunda Semana de Arte Moderna. See Maria Heloisa Corrêa de Toledo Ferraz, Arte e loucura: Limites do imprevisível (São Paulo: Lemos Editorial, 1998), 57. 26. Like the museum’s director, Pietro Maria Bardi (whose work has been recently eclipsed by the resurgence of interest in Lina Bo Bardi’s architecture and exhibition display), César promoted a conception of an art museum that encouraged the development of educational programs as well as students’ aesthetic education. César praised the museum director and MASP courses in “O Museu de Arte e as suas realizações pedagógicas,” Folha da Noite, February 16, 1948; and again in “Cursos Regulares de História da Arte,” Folha da Noite, São Paulo, April 20, 1948. 27. In the years 1947–­1949, the temporary exhibition space and small auditorium were housed on the building’s second floor (primeiro andar) along with galleries for rotating didactic 195

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exhibitions and the permanent collection, which would eventually move to the third floor with the museum’s transformation and expansion in 1950. 28. Today the institution is named the Instituto Municipal Nise da Silveira. 29. See the comprehensive volume by Luiz Carlos Mello, Nise da Silveira: Caminhos de uma psiquiatra rebelde (Rio de Janeiro: Automatica, 2014). For Silveira’s relation to Artaud, see my epilogue in Specters of Artaud: Language and the Arts in the 1950s, ed. Kaira M. Cabañas (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2012), 224–­29. 30. See Ferreira Gullar, Nise da Silveira: Uma psiquiatra rebelde (Rio de Janeiro: Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro and Relume Dumara, 1996), as well as the catalog Nise da Silveira: Caminhos de uma psiquiatra rebelde (Curitiba: Museu Oscar Niemeyer, 2009). 31. In 1956, decades before Brazilian law mandated the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, Silveira cofounded the Casa das Palmeiras, an open rehabilitation institute that continues to use expressive activities in an outpatient manner. The clients (patients) who frequent the Casa das Palmeiras realize creative work, which is signed, dated, and archived for further study. While the diagnostic drive perseveres in relation to this site of occupational therapy, it was here that Silveira put into practice the use of animals, especially cats, for treating psychic suffering. She called them “co-­therapists.” 32. In May 1952, Silveira founded the Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, which, under the committed direction of Luiz Carlos Mello, remains dedicated to the preservation of the patients’ work. Studies on the painting studio at Engenho de Dentro published from within the field of psychology or occupational therapy include Gustavo Henrique Dionisio, O antídoto do mal: Crítica de arte e loucura na modernidade brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2012); Marcas e memórias: Almir Mavignier e o ateliê de pintura de Engenho de Dentro, ed. Lucia Riley and José Otávio Pompeu e Silva (Campinas: Komedi, 2012); José Otávio Pompeu e Silva, “A psiquiatra e o artista: Nise da Silveira e Almir Mavignier encontram as imagens do inconsciente” (MA thesis, UNICAMP, São Paulo, 2006); and Walter Melo, Nise da Silveira, Pioneiros da Psicologia Brasileira 4 (Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora; Brasília: Conselho Federal de Psicologia, 2001). 33. Lourival Gomes Machado to Almir Mavignier, September 9, 1949, Arquivos Históricos Wanda Svevo (formerly the Arquivo Bienal), São Paulo. My emphasis. The existing correspondence seems to indicate that Gomes Machado prepared his letter to Mavignier the same day he received a letter from Silveira that included her preface to the catalog as well as information regarding the works’ possible transportation. Nise da Silveira to Lourival Gomes Machado, September 3, 1949. 34. Almir Mavignier to Lourival Gomes Machado, September 20, 1949, Arquivos Históricos Wanda Svevo, São Paulo. 35. 9 artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1949), n.p. 36. Such a purely aesthetic discussion of these works continues today, as in the catalog to the recent exhibition Raphael e Emygdio: Dois modernos no Engenho de Dentro at the Instituto Moreira Salles. In his essay for the exhibition catalog, critic and art historian Rodrigo Naves introduces the psychiatric context in which the work was produced only to state that, on account of Emygdio de Barros’s internment, “one of the major Brazilian artists remained excluded from our art history” (97). While engaging in close formal analysis of the paintings, he continues: “Few times in Brazilian art have colors had such importance and structural force as in the painting of Emygdio de Barros” (99). Yet he ultimately represses the conditions determining the patient’s use and choice of color to a footnote: “At the end of the 1960s, at times, Emygdio de Barros uses only a few pigments (yellow, black, red) due to a lack of artistic material in the painting workshop at Engenho 196

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de Dentro” (98n3). In this way, the structure of Naves’s text reveals a tension between formalist criticism (in the body of the text) and an account of the psychiatric context (in the footnotes). In so doing, he reveals the uneasy relation these works have to the history of art, artistic subjectivity, as well as his conception of art’s autonomy. See his “Emygdio de Barros: O sol por testemunha,” in Raphael e Emygdio: Dois modernos no Engenho de Dentro (São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles, 2012), esp. 97–­99. In the case of Naves, he reads the works as modernist, thereby also shoring up his position as a modernist critic and, by extension, the historiography of modernist art in Brazil. Such a stance contrasts with the recent emergence of patients’ work on the contemporary global circuit, as in the Fifty-­Fifth Venice Biennale, where, as Benjamin Buchloh explains, patients’ work served “to revitalize a myth of universally accessible creativity.” See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Entropic Encyclopedia,” Artforum 52, no. 1 (September 2013): 312. I return to Buchloh’s comment and examine the Fifthy-­Fifth Venice Biennale in chapter 5. 37. See the discussion in Hal Foster, “Blinded Insights,” in Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 192–­223. 38. Osório César, “A arte dos loucos,” São Paulo, October 1949, press clipping in the Acervo da Sociedade Amigos do Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente. 39. Mário Yahn, “Sobre a criação de uma Seção de Arte no Hospital do Juquery,” Boletim de Higiene Mental (São Paulo), no. 66 (February 1950): 2. 40. Mário Yahn, “Pintores sem saber,” Habitat: Revista das artes no Brasil (São Paulo), no. 2 (January–­March 1951): 27. 41. See the excellent study by Maria Heloisa Corrêa de Toledo Ferraz, Arte e loucura. Prior to this, in 1943, a painting workshop was organized as part of the hospital’s various praxiterapia programs. Here, César began to track the patients’ work (see 57–­58). 42. See Mário Yahn’s response to Robert Volmat, April 18, 1951, reproduced in Dubois, De l’art des fous à l’œuvre d’art, 3:210–­13. 43. Sérgio Milliet, Maria Leontina, Galeria Domus, 1950, Biblioteca Paulo Mendes Almeida e Centro de Estudos Luís Martins, MAM-­SP. 44. See the critical responses cited in Ismael Assumpção, “Aspectos evolutivos da pintura de Maria Leontina Franco da Costa” (MA thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, 1982), 30–­34. 45. Maria Leontina, cited in ibid., 31. 46. Exposição de artistas alienados, 1951, copy at the Biblioteca Paulo Mendes Almeida e Centro de Estudos Luís Martins, MAM-­SP. 47. Osório César, “L’art chez les aliénés dans l’hôpital de Juquery,” reproduced in Les Annales médico-­psychologiques (December 1952): 726, copy in the Archives du Centre d’étude de l’éxpression, Centre Hospitalier Sainte-­Anne. In contrast, the works he had chosen to show in the Exposition internationale d’art psychopathologique in 1950 were, by his own account, spontaneously created in the hospital and thus produced both outside of and prior to the art workshop formalized in 1949. 48. Ibid., 726. My emphasis on the phrase “an interior world different than our own.” 49. The other artists in the exhibition listed in the brochure but not represented by this photo­ graphic documentation include Sara, José Teófilo, Maria, Benedito, Zulmira, Isolina, and José R. An additional two photographs show works by Haydée and Braz, but the photographs’ labels indicate Exposição do Congresso de St. Anne and not Exposição de artistas alienados, as with the other documented works. Arquivos Históricos Wanda Svevo, São Paulo. 50. MAM-­SP’s support of abstraction contrasts with Pietro Maria Bardi’s support for more figurative tendencies in art. Although informed by the perspective of modern art, Bardi thought of MASP as modern in program and attitude, but he was not exclusively d ­ edicated 197

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to modern art and/or abstraction. Such a stance must have also informed his acceptance of 102 largely figurative patients’ works from Osório César’s collection for MASP in 1974 (I return to this donation in the pages that follow). In relation to psychiatric patients’ art, Bardi seems in line with César’s research, supporting the patients’ creative production across the broad aesthetic-­stylistic comparative categories first identified by César in his volume A expressão artística nos alienados: Contribuição para o estudo dos símbolos na arte (São Paulo: Oficinas Gráficas do Hospital do Juquery, 1929). It remains unclear, however, where work produced by psychiatric patients fit within Bardi’s conception of art history. His 1958 volume Pequena história da arte includes work by self-­t aught artist José Antonio da Silva, but no patient work. See P. M. Bardi, Pequena história da arte: Introdução ao estudo das artes plásticas (São Paulo: Edições Melhoramentos, 1958). 51. See the excellent study that discusses Juquery patient demographics from the late nineteenth century through to the 1930s: Maria Clementina Pereira Cunha, O espelho do mundo: Juquery, a historia de um asilo (1986; São Paulo: Editora Paz e Terra, 1988), esp. 109–­61. 52. See the comprehensive article by Rosa Cristina Maria de Carvalho, in which she unites the scant material related to these years, 1949–­1957, when professional artists assisted in the organization of the art section. Rosa Cristina Maria de Carvalho, “Arte e psiquiatria: Um diálogo com artistas plásticos no Hospital Psiquiátrico de Juquery,” ArtCultura 12, no. 21 (July–­December 2010): 165–­80, esp. 172–­79. These images are among Brill’s first photojournalist reports. She was a friend of Leontina, but, with regard to her visit to Juquery, states, “I don’t know who invited me, but that was my phase of doing photo reports.” Alice Brill, cited in Arte e inconsciente: Três visões sobre o Juquery: Fotos de Alice Brill, desenhos de Lasar Segall e obras de pacientes internados (São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles, 2001[?]), 8. According to Carvalho, the images were meant to be published in Habitat, which makes sense given that Pietro Maria and Lina Bo Bardi served as editors and MASP had already featured the work of César’s patients at Primeira exposição de arte do Hospital do Juquery in 1948. 53. See Ferraz, Arte e loucura, 80. 54. See the discussion in Wilson, “From the Asylum to the Museum,” 141. 55. For his work’s connection to social psychiatry, see Osório César, “Aspectos da vida social entre os loucos,” Revista do Arquivo Municipal (São Paulo, Departamento de Cultura) 105, no. 12 (1946): 7–­24. By 1957 he no longer insisted on the patients’ work as spontaneous production. By then he had recourse to a test for artistic aptitude. He writes: “There is a test to check the artistic vocation of the patient. Sometimes it is innate, and did not develop in normal life, for lack of material conditions. By means of the test we will find in some patients great artists.” Osório César, “A arteterapia transforma loucos em exímios artistas plásticos,” Correio Paulistano (São Paulo), September 11, 1957, cited in Ferraz, Arte e loucura, 80. 56. Osório César, “Na cidade dos esquecidos, o trabalho reconquista a memória,” A Gazeta, September 6, 1957, cited in Ferraz, Arte e loucura, 96. In the course of the 1950s, he organized various exhibitions in São Paulo and other regions of Brazil, including a second one at MASP in 1954 and another at MAM-­SP in 1955. For the second exhibition at MAM-­SP, César organized the exhibition with Clélia Rocha Silva, who oriented the fine arts section at that time. The exhibition included paintings, prints, and ceramics made by patients. Ceramics were included because one objective of the exhibition was to purchase an oven for ceramics with funds raised from the works’ sale. 57. In addition to Pedrosa and Campofiorito, other critics wrote about and engaged the patients’ work, including Rubem Navarra, Antonio Bento, Flávio de Aquino, Jorge de Lima, 198

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Quirino da Silva, and Sérgio Milliet. See Glaucia Villas Bôas, “A estética da conversão: O ateliê do Engenho de Dentro e a arte concreta carioca (1946–­1951),” Tempo social, revista de sociologia da USP 20, no. 2 (November 2008): 197–­219. 58. Mário Pedrosa, “Os artistas de Engenho de Dentro,” Correio da Manhã (Rio de Janeiro), December 18, 1949, 22. 59. Quirino Campofiorito, “Arte e ciência,” O Jornal (Rio de Janeiro), December 11, 1949. 60. Sociologist of art Glaucia Villas Bôas offers a detailed account of the atelier and the critical debates surrounding the patients’ work in her article “A estética da conversão.” 61. Quirino Campofiorito, “Esquizofrenia e arte,” O Jornal (Rio de Janeiro), December 14, 1949. 62. Ibid. 63. This insight is indebted to Hal Foster’s work on European modernists’ engagement with the Prinzhorn Collection. See Foster, Prosthetic Gods, esp. 196. 64. The discourse of degeneracy that informed Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art) also found echoes in Brazil. For example, Lasar Segall’s painting was negatively targeted in both the German and Brazilian contexts. This painter’s reception is currently being studied by curators Helouise Costa and Daniel Rincon, who have organized the exhibition A arte degenerada de Lasar Segall: Perseguição à arte moderna em tempos de guerra (The degenerate art of Lasar Segall: Persecution of modern art in times of war) at the Museu Lasar Segall. Costa, in particular, has extensively researched anti­fascist demonstrations in Brazil in the 1940s, including the exhibition Arte condenada pelo Terceiro Reich (Art condemned by the Third Reich), organized by Miécio Askanazy in Rio de Janeiro in 1945; she thereby draws out the links between antifascism and the support of modern art in Brazil. See the exhibition catalog, forthcoming in 2018, for more information. 65. Flávio de Aquino, “Nove artistas de Engenho de Dentro,” Diário de Notícias (Rio de Janeiro), December 18, 1949. In this context, he invokes the surrealists and their investigations into the nonrational but describes the works by Raphael and Emygdio as “a perfectly logical art in all of its details, from its visual appearance to the poetic content of the motifs.” He concludes on the subject of artistic education: “They say that praising the work of the mentally ill constitutes an incentive/stimulus toward instinct and a bad example for the students in our art schools.” 66. J. Vilanova Artigas, “A arte dos loucos,” Fundamentos (São Paulo) 4, no. 20 (July 1951): 22–­24, clipping at the Biblioteca Paulo Mendes Almeida e Centro de Estudos Luís Martins, MAM-­SP. 67. For an account of how Marxist critics opposed abstract art, at times speaking to the “alienation” of both modern art and psychiatric patients’ work, as well as the critique of the São Paulo biennial in these years, see Aracy A. Amaral, “Realismo versus abstracionismo e o confronto com a Bienal,” in Arte para quê? A preocupação social na arte brasileira 1930–­1970 (1984; São Paulo: Studio Nobel, 2003), esp. 242–­43. 68. Copy of Albino Braz work labels, Archives du Centre d’étude de l’expression, Centre hospitalier Sainte-­Anne. Four works from the donation to MASP are represented in Volmat’s book, and I have been able to confirm that they were included in the exhibition in Paris. A comparison of the number of works exhibited by each patient in Paris with the number of works by the same patient at MASP suggests that the museum likely owns most of these historical works, while a few, like those by Braz, can also be found today at Sainte-­ Anne. For example, Braz was represented by seventeen works in Paris, and MASP has twelve of his drawings. (Careful analysis is likely to result in additional works in MASP’s collection being credited to Braz on account of their style as well as their reproduction in Osório César’s publications). Following Volmat, Cornas was represented by eleven 199

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drawings; MASP has twelve of his works. Works by Sebastião Faria and Pedro dos Reis were also shown as part of Yahn’s collection in Paris, and César, during his stay in Paris in 1952, showed his patients’ work at the Maison nationale de Charenton. Further research is necessary to establish whether the other donated works were exhibited in this context. 69. Acervo da coleção, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (hereafter MASP), copy of Pietro Maria Bardi to Osório César, June 5, 1974. 70. César, “L’art chez les aliénés dans l’hôpital de Juquery,” 725. 71. Michel Thévoz to Pietro Maria Bardi, March 17, 1988, Acervo MASP. 72. A full list of the Art brut fascicles can be found at http://www.artbrut.ch/en/21036/113 /the-­art-­brut-­fascicles-­collection. 73. Thévoz to Bardi, March 17, 1988, Acervo MASP. 74. Ibid. 75. Pietro Maria Bardi to Michel Thévoz, April 7, 1988, Acervo MASP. My emphasis. 76. According to a letter in the MASP collection archive, Aracy Amaral met César in 1954 and went with him to Juquery to visit the painting studio. She went with the Chilean artist Tario Toral, whom she later married. She explains that the works she donated in 2000 were all acquired in the 1950s. A few pieces were ceramics that had been exhibited at MAM-­SP. My guess is that if she met César in 1954, she is referring to the 1955 Pinturas e cerâmica do Juquery exhibition, which was organized by César and Clelia Rocha, who worked as the section monitor in those years. Amaral notes that it was on account of MASP’s exhibition on Freud’s reception in Brazil that she decided the institution was the most suitable repository for her modest collection. Aracy Amaral to Paulo Portella Filho, Head of Art and Education, November 16, 2000, Acervo MASP. 77. Jean Dubuffet to Nise da Silveira, March 24, 1949, Arquivo Pessoal Nise da Silveira, Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, Rio de Janeiro. I have chosen to use investigations rather than translate nos recherches as researches, which is less common in English in its plural form. 78. Nise da Silveira to Jean Dubuffet, copy, June 4, 1949, Arquivo Pessoal Nise da Silveira, Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, Rio de Janeiro. The photographs Dr. Silveira sent to Dubuffet are contained in the file “Brésil,” Collection de l’art brut, Lausanne. 79. Jean Dubuffet to Nise da Silveira, July 13, 1949, Arquivo Pessoal Nise da Silveira, Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, Rio de Janeiro. My emphasis on “not very original.” That same day, Dubuffet repeats many of the same observations in a letter to Paulo Emilio Sales Gomes, in which he also describes the works donated by Osório César as “pure of all external influence.” Jean Dubuffet to Paulo Emilio Sales Gomes, July 13, 1949, File: “Brésil,” Collection de l’art brut, Lausanne. 80. Benjamin Péret was married to the Brazilian singer Elsie Houston, Mary Houston Pedrosa’s sister. In 1931, Péret and Mário Pedrosa, both living in Brazil at the time, founded the Brazilian Communist League, for which Péret was expelled from the country, accused of political agitation. For part of World War II, he lived in Mexico, but he returned to Paris after 1947. At this time, Dubuffet was in direct contact with Péret about art brut, but their dialogue in these years seems to have not been sustained. Péret coedited with Breton the Almanach surréaliste du demi-­siecle (1950), in which they lay a claim to surrealism’s discovery of asylum art with no mention of Dubuffet’s contemporary proposals. In 1951, Breton officially announced his break with the Compagnie de l’art brut. See the discussion in Baptiste Brun, “D’un mythe son négatif: Du poids de l’historiographie surréaliste dans les manières d’appréhender l’art brut de Jean Dubuffet aujourd’hui,” in Mythologies et mythes individuels à partir de l’art brut, ed. Anne Boissière, Christophe Boulanger, and Savine Faupin (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2014), 156–­57. 200

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81. Antonio Bento, “As artes: No ‘Foyer de l’art brut,’ ” Diário Carioca, September 25, 1949, clipping in the Arquivo Pessoal Nise da Silveira, Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, Rio de Janeiro. 82. Baptiste Brun, “De l’homme du commun à l’art brut: ‘Mise au pire’ du primitivisme dans l’œuvre de Jean Dubuffet: Jean Dubuffet et le paradigme primitiviste dans l’immédiat après-­guerre (1944–­1951)” (PhD diss., École doctorale Milieux, cultures et sociétés du passé et du présent, Nanterre, 2013), 254; forthcoming from Les presses du réel as Jean Dubuffet: Face au paradigme primitiviste (1944–1951). 83. See Jean Dubuffet, “Anticultural Positions” (lecture presented at the Arts Club, Chicago, 1951), in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 192–­97; as well as Jean Dubuffet, “In Honor of Savage Values” (1951), trans. Kent Minturn, in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 46 (Autumn 2004): 259–­65. See also Kent Minturn, “Dubuffet, Lévi-­Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut,” also in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 46, 247–­58. 84. Jean Dubuffet to MAM-­SP Director, September 1, 1950, Arquivos Históricos Wanda Svevo, São Paulo. In these years, Maria Martins was frequently in Paris, including for the exhibition of her sculptures at the Galerie René Drouin (November 8–­December 4, 1948), the same gallery that housed Dubuffet’s Foyer de l’art brut. 85. Ibid. 86. Ana Gonçalves Magalhães gives an excellent account of the work’s initial reception by Lourival Gomes Machado and Pietro Maria Bardi, each of whom focuses on Silva’s use of color, while Theon Spanudis later, reflecting on a second phase of the artist’s work, focuses on its geometry, thereby assimilating it to concrete tendencies in art. See Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, José Antonio da Silva em dois tempos, exh. brochure (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, 2013). 87. Jean Dubuffet, as cited in Peiry, Art brut, 133. 88. Thévoz, Art brut, 13. 89. See Peiry, Art brut, 123. 90. Almost twenty years later, the approach to the Brazilian patients’ art shifts with Michel Thévoz’s directorship of the Collection de l’art brut. On July 20, 1976, Thévoz writes to Silveira, claiming the similar ambitions shared by the Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente and the Collection de l’art brut: “Both are designed to gather and study works of art that have been realized outside of artistic institutions themselves (galleries, museums, etc.), and that have as authors people who are not intended to be integrated into these institutions.” In contrast to Dubuffet’s earlier assessment, he claims that the work they collect is more “original” than contemporary fashions in art. He thus thanks her for her work and comments on its interest for all those dedicated to “the most authentic forms of artistic creation.” He expresses a desire to be kept abreast of the museum’s activity. In an undated letter that same year, Silveira responds and includes slides of work by various schizophrenics interned at the hospital, as well as an article about the museum and its work. Thévoz responds on April 15, 1977, sending along a set of slides from the Collection de l’art brut. Silveira then responds to him on June 18, thanking him for the slides and commentary on her patients’ work. She also explains that his slides were projected during a study group meeting. Correspondence in the Arquivo Pessoal Nise da Silveira, Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, Rio de Janeiro. The slides mentioned in the correspondence do not count among Silveira’s papers. 91. Braz’s work also traveled to New York. In late 1951, Dubuffet transferred his collection to Alfonso Ossorio, artist and collector, in East Hampton, where it received little critical 201

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attention from New York City culturati. The collection remained in Ossorio’s home for ten years, with one public exhibition at the Cordier & Warren Gallery in 1962, just before it returned to Paris. See the discussion in Valérie Rousseau, “Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet,” in Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2016), 9–­35. 92. On the first page of the medical chart we read “Name: Albino Braz. Age: 54. Color: White. Nationality: Italian. Civil status: Married. Date of internment: June 27, 1934. Died on February 20, 1950.” Other categories such as profession and religion remain empty. Medical file, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery. Information from Braz’s medical file had already been published, as in, for example, Volmat, L’art psychopathologique, 11–­12. 93. See, for example, the photographic documentation in Volmat, L’art psychopathologique, plates 3 and 4. To the best of my knowledge, Silveira was the first to show the adverse effects of lobotomy on a patient’s creative production in an exhibition of their art. 94. Nise de Silveira, in 9 artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro, n.p. 95. Ibid.

Chapter 3 1. Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology: An Introduction to New Concepts in Modern Psychology (1929; New York: New American Library, 1947). 2. These two studies, “Da natureza afetiva da forma na obra de arte” and “Forma e personalidade,” are published in Mário Pedrosa, Arte, forma e personalidade: 3 estudos (São Paulo: Kairós, 1979). All citations from these two works are to this edition. 3. Pedrosa, “Da natureza afetiva da forma na obra de arte,” 64–­65. 4. Pedrosa, “Forma e personalidade,” 97. 5. See the four volumes of Pedrosa’s collected writings: Mário Pedrosa, Textos escolhidos, ed. Otília Beatriz Fiori Arantes (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1995–­1998). For a critical biography, see Otília Beatriz Fiori Arantes, Mário Pedrosa: Itinerário crítico (São Paulo: Editora Página Aberta, 1991). In the course of writing this book, the volume of English translations of Pedrosa’s writing was at last published. See Mário Pedrosa Primary Documents, ed. Glória Ferreira and Paulo Herkenhoff, trans. Stephen Berg (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2015). 6. See Arantes, Mário Pedrosa: Itinerário crítico, 88. The phrase appears in his lecture “Brasília, a cidade nova” at the 1959 conference of the Association internationale des critiques d’art and subsequently published in Journal do Brasil, September 19, 1959 (see 160n8). 7. Max Bill, “Art” (1936–­1949), in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 74. 8. This narrative was again invoked in the press release to the gallery exhibition Sensitive Geometries: Brazil 1950s–­1980s at Hauser and Wirth, New York, September 12–­October 26, 2013. For an account of Bill’s influence, see Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s–­50s (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2010). For a reading of Bill in relation to the artistic exchanges between Brazil and Argentina, see María Amalia García, El arte abstracto: Intercambios culturales entre Argentina y Brasil (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2011). See also Mónica Amor’s careful attention to Bill’s theories and his presence in the Brazilian context in Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944–­1969 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), esp. 67–­80. 9. Curated by Luis Pérez-­Oramas, the 2013 Venice Biennale Brazilian pavilion included works by Hélio Fervenza, Odires Mlászho, Lygia Clark, Max Bill, and Bruno Munari. 202

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10. Max Bill’s work was also the subject of an exhibition at Museu de Arte de São Paulo in 1951. 11. These avant-­garde groups were formed in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in 1952 and 1954, respectively. The differences between the two groups would be cast in relief on account of Primeira exposição nacional de arte concreta in São Paulo in 1956 and in Rio in 1957. See, for example, the differences in position between Waldemar Cordeiro’s “O objeto” and Ferreira Gullar’s “Teoria do não-­objeto,” reproduced in Abstracionismo geométrico e informal, ed. Fernando Cocchiarale and Anna Bella Geiger (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1987), 223, 237–­40. For an excellent discussion of Gullar’s text, see Sérgio B. Martins, Constructing an Avant-­Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–­1979 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 17–­46. See also the nuanced accounts in Michael Asbury, “Neoconcretism and Minimalism: On Ferreira Gullar’s Theory of the Non-­object,” in Cosmopolitan Modernisms (London: Institute of International Visual Arts; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 168–­89, as well as in Alexander Alberro’s recently published Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-­Twentieth-­Century Latin American Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 173–­224. 12. See Lorenzo Mammi’s discussion in Concrete ’56: A raiz da forma (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2006), 23–­51, esp. 41–­43 on the discussion of color. 13. Upon my request, Vera Pedrosa identified this painting in email correspondence with Jay Levenson. She writes, “The painting is by Emygdio de Barros, one of the talented artists from the Engenho de Dentro  institution. The title is Tarde de Temporal. This painting subsequently disappeared from my parent’s apartment in Ipanema when it was under the care of a relative during the years of my Father’s exile from 1970 to 1977. Its destination and present whereabouts are unknown to the family.” Email from Vera Pedrosa to Jay Levenson, April 17, 2015. 14. Pedrosa’s thesis remained unpublished until 1979, the year in which he granted permission for the later work “Forma e personalidade” to be republished. Nevertheless, the thesis seems to have circulated around the time it was written. Gullar remembers reading it even before moving to Rio. See Ferreira Gullar, “A trégua—­Entrevista com Ferreira Gullar,” in Cadernos da literatura brasileira—­Ferreira Gullar (São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles, 1998), 38. Almir Mavignier also remembers meeting at Pedrosa’s home, where the critic read and discussed parts of his thesis. See Almir Mavignier in Formas do afeto: Um filme sobre Mário Pedrosa, dir. Nina Galanternik (Rio de Janeiro: Gala Filmes, 2010), HDV. 15. The sociologist of art Glaucia Villas Bôas provides a comprehensive description of the atelier and the debates surrounding the patients’ work in her article “A estética da conversão: O ateliê do Engenho de Dentro e a arte concreta carioca (1946–­1951),” Tempo Social, revista de sociologia da USP 20, no. 2 (November 2008): 197–­219. In art-­historical and curatorial writing in Brazil, Silveira’s importance to the context of geometric abstraction in Rio de Janeiro is often invoked but has not received sustained, in-­depth analysis. In a 1999 essay on Clark, Paulo Herkenhoff suggestively writes: “Lygia Clark’s own environment was impregnated with this proximity between art, reason and madness. Geometric art in Rio has a remote origin in the occupational therapy sector of the Centro Psiquiátrico Pedro II (the so-­called Engenho de Dentro hospital), directed by Nise da Silveira.” See his “A aventura planar de Lygia Clark—­de caracóis, escadas e Caminhando,” in Lygia Clark (São Paulo: MAM-­SP, 1999), 49. More recently, Luiz Camillo Osorio offers Alexander Calder’s exhibitions in Rio de Janeiro and Silveira’s painting workshop as two origins for understanding the specificity of abstraction in Rio. See his essay “The Desire of Form and the Forms of Desire: Neoconcretism as a Unique Contribution of Brazilian Art,” in Das 203

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Verlangen nach Form—­O Desejo da Forma: Neoconcretismo und zeitgenössische Kunst aus Brasilien (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 2010), 226–­34. 16. Nise da Silveira, cited in Luiz Carlos Mello, Nise da Silveira: Caminhos de uma psiquiatra rebelde (Rio de Janeiro: Automatica, 2014), 92. See also Ferreira Gullar, Nise da Silveira: Uma psiquiatra rebelde (Rio de Janeiro: Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro and Relume Dumara, 1996); and the catalog Nise da Silveira: Caminhos de uma psiquiatra rebelde (Curitiba: Museu Oscar Niemeyer, 2009). 17. Nise da Silveira, cited in Mello, Nise da Silveira, 93. 18. Studies on the painting studio at Engenho de Dentro published from within the field of psychology or occupational therapy include Gustavo Henrique Dionisio, O antídoto do mal: Crítica de arte e loucura na modernidade brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2012); Marcas e memórias: Almir Mavignier e o ateliê de pintura de Engenho de Dentro, ed. Lucia Riley and José Otávio Pompeu e Silva (Campinas: Komedi, 2012); José Otávio Pompeu e Silva, “A psiquiatra e o artista: Nise da Silveira e Almir Mavignier encontram as imagens do inconsciente” (MA thesis, UNICAMP, São Paulo, 2006); and Walter Melo, Nise da Silveira, Pioneiros da Psicologia Brasileira 4 (Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora; Brasília: Conselho Federal de Psicologia, 2001). 19. Aleca le Blanc references Serpa’s indebtedness to the painting studio and the experimental art therapy practiced therein in her essay on his pedagogical program in Ivan Serpa: Pioneering Abstraction in Brazil (New York: Dickinson Roundell, 2012). 20. Abraham Palatnik (2003), cited in José Otávio Pompeu e Silva, “Almir Mavignier and the Painting Studio at Engenho de Dentro,” in Marcas e memórias: Almir Mavignier e o ateliê de pintura de Engenho de Dentro, 273. 21. For an account of Palatnik’s response to the patients’ work, see Luiz Camillo Osorio, ed., Abraham Palatnik (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2004), 52. For Geraldo de Barros’s contact with the painting studio at Engenho de Dentro, see Heloisa Espada, “Fotoformas: Luz e artifício,” in Geraldo de Barros e a fotografia, exh. cat. (São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles and Edições SESC São Paulo, 2014), 25–­27. 22. See, for example, Mário Pedrosa, “Pintores de arte virgem,” Correio da Manhã, March 19, 1950, press clipping in the Fundo Mário Pedrosa, Centro de Documentação e Memória da UNESP, São Paulo, Brazil. 23. Pedrosa, “Forma e personalidade,” 86. 24. Silveira’s patients were included in the Exposition internationale d’art psychopathologique, which was organized alongside the Primer congrès mondial de psychiatrie, at the Centre psychiatrique Sainte-­Anne in Paris in 1950 (see chapter 2). Subsequently, in collaboration with Mavignier, she organized the exhibition A esquizofrenia em imagens, which was inaugurated by Carl Jung in the context of the second Congrès mondial de psychiatrie in Zurich. See Nise da Silveira’s account in Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Nacional de Arte, 1980), esp. 16–­19. With an eye to the preservation and scientific study of the patients’ work, Silveira founded the Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente (MII) in May 1952. Pedrosa initially opposed its foundation, instead hoping that the patients’ creative production would become part of MAM-­RJ’s collection. Today MII continues its mission under the committed direction of Luiz Carlos Mello. 25. Pedrosa, “Forma e personalidade,” 87. 26. Pedrosa, “Da natureza afetiva da forma na obra de arte,” 12. 27. See the introduction by Arantes in Arte, forma e personalidade: 3 estudos, 2. 28. “Natureza afetiva da forma nas artes plásticas: A tese defendida ontem, na Faculdade Nacional de Arquitetura, pelo candidato Mário Pedrosa,” January 13, 1951, clipping in the archive of Mário Pedrosa, Acervo da Fundação Biblioteca Nacional—­Brasil. 204

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29. Pedrosa, “Da natureza afetiva da forma na obra de arte,” 22. 30. Ibid., 58. 31. Here, I offer a correction. In my essay in the MoMA anthology of Pedrosa’s writing, I mistakenly suggest that Pedrosa relies on Koffka in the context of his “Forma e personalidade” (1951), when in fact Koffka is addressed in his 1949 thesis. See my “A Strategic Universalist,” in Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents, ed. Glória Ferreira and Paulo Herkenhoff, trans. Stephen Berg (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 33n10. 32. See the discussion in Kurt Koffka, “Problems in the Psychology of Art,” in Art: A Bryn Mawr Symposium (Bryn Mawr, PA: Bryn Mawr College, 1940), 186. 33. See ibid., 208. 34. Pedrosa, “Da natureza afetiva da forma na obra de arte,” 61. 35. Koffka, “Problems in the Psychology of Art,” 222, 229, 234. 36. Ibid., 246, 249, 261, 271, and 261. Pedrosa similarly affirms how the perception of good form exhibits the “tendency to correct irregularities.” Pedrosa, “Da natureza afetiva da forma na obra de arte,” 20. 37. Koffka, “Problems in the Psychology of Art,” 250. 38.

Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (1945; London: Routledge, 2005), 59.

39. Pedrosa opens his 1951 “Forma e personalidade” by referring to a lecture by Roger Fry on psychoanalysis and art and reviews the English critic’s questions regarding aesthetic response. Pedrosa cites the critic’s attention to formal relations in order to advance his claim that within the psychology of art the most important element is “the appreciation of the work of art, its plastic and formal qualities. Only after [passing through] these qualities, defined and classified, can psychologists begin to investigate the problems raised by, among others, Roger Fry. Not everything that analysts, even Freud, have written on art is pertinent to the authentic artistic phenomena.” Pedrosa, “Forma e personalidade,” 84. 40. Ibid., 96. 41. See Ulrich Mueller, “The Context of the Formation of Heinz Werner’s Ideas,” in Heinz Werner and Developmental Science, ed. Jaan Valsiner (New York: Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, 2005), 25–­53, esp. 45–­50. 42. See the discussion in ibid. 43. Heinz Werner, Comparative Psychology of Mental Development (1926; New York: Inter­ national Universities Press, 1980), 69. 44. Ibid. Emphasis in original. 45. See the discussion in John M. MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. 252–­61. This volume provides an excellent overview of the emergence of the “art of the insane” as an object of study. 46. For a discussion of the emergence of the physiognomic analysis of the signs of madness, see Alexa Wright’s Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), esp. 71–­78; and Sharrona Pearl, About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-­Century Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 47. Werner, Comparative Psychology of Mental Development, 77. 48. Ibid., esp. 71–­73. 49. Ibid., 81. 50.

Ibid., 414–­15.

51. Werner as cited in Mueller, “The Context of the Formation of Heinz Werner’s Ideas,” 47. 52. Wolfgang Köhler’s study Gestalt Psychology is largely blind to color. For Köhler, when color is introduced, it is in absentia. He references color-­blindness to corroborate his theory regarding the predominance of sensory patterns in the organization of a phenomenal field. 205

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Köhler explains: “Color-­blind people are, on the whole, quite capable of dealing with their environment, although their visual experience has fewer hues than that of other people.” Köhler, Gestalt Psychology, 163. Given the secondary status of color within Gestalt theory, one color historian responded: “Among the prevailing schools of psychological thought that place color in a corner is Gestalt theory.” Charles A. Riley II, “Color in Psychology,” in Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), 299. 53. Mário Pedrosa, “Os artistas de Engenho de Dentro—­Emídio,” Correio da Manhã (Rio de Janeiro), January 10, 1950, reproduced in Raphael e Emygdio: Dois modernos no Engenho de Dentro, 183. 54. Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art (1911; New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946), 64. 55. Ronaldo Brito, Neoconcretismo: Vértice e ruptura do projeto construtivo brasileiro, 2nd ed. (1985; São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 1999), 41. 56. Reproduced in Abstracionismo geométrico e informal, 219. 57. Ulrich Mueller explains: “With the concept of physiognomic perception, Werner arrives at a primordial way of being in the world. Werner’s idea that the initial and ­fundamental apprehension of the world is not logical-­rational but expressive influenced Cassirer’s (1957) philosophy of symbolic forms as well as Merleau-­Ponty’s (1962) phenomenology of perception. As Werner (1932) points out, a serious shortcoming of psychology is that it has mostly studied logical-­analytical thought and forms of cognition in which objects are unambiguous and precisely determined.” See Mueller, “Context of the Formation of Heinz Werner’s Ideas,” 49. 58.

Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 70. My emphasis.

59. Caroline Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 55–­56. 60. Clement Greenberg, “Alexander Calder,” The Nation, October 23, 1943, 480. 61. See his “Alexander Calder, escultor de cata-­ventos” (December 1944), reprinted in Mário Pedrosa, Modernidade cá e lá: Textos escolhidos, ed. Otília Beatriz Fiori Arantes (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1995–­1998), 4:62. 62. On Alexander Calder’s relation to and exhibitions in Brazil, see Roberta Saraiva, ed., Calder no Brasil: Crônica de uma amizade (São Paulo: Cosac Naify/Piacoteca do Estado, 2006). Calder’s influence in Brazil was recently taken up in the exhibition Calder e a Arte Brasileira, curated by Luiz Camillo Osorio for Itaú Cultural São Paulo, September 1–­October 23, 2016. 63. Typed circular, “The Arts in Therapy: For Disabled Soldiers and Sailors,” The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 216.2, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 64. Ibid. 65. The typed circular also included a list of objects commonly made by patients, from woodwork to clay modeling. Ibid. 66. Press release, “Museum of Modern Art Opens Exhibition of Arts in Therapy for Disabled Soldiers and Sailors,” MoMA Exhs., 216.1. MoMA Archives, New York. 67. Louise Nevelson was awarded a prize for her children’s wooden seat shaped like a horse. Other known artists who entered the competition but were not chosen for the final exhibition included László Moholy-­Nagy and Anni Albers. See the press release and correspondence in MoMA Exhs., 216.2. MoMA Archives, New York. 68. James Thrall Soby to Alexander Calder, January 30, 1943. MoMA Exhs., 216.2. MoMA Archives, New York.

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69. The archival record reveals correspondences between Soby and members of the therapeutic community in which he goes back and forth between organizing an occupational therapy exhibition and abandoning this project in favor of an exhibition organized from a psychiatric point of view. In the end, the two-­section exhibition—­occupational therapy and creative therapy—­seems to have been a compromise to address the divergent therapeutic uses of art. Interestingly, the archive also includes correspondence with Ladislas Szecsi, who had loaned work from his psychopathological collection almost twenty years earlier to the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (see the discussion in chapter 1). Szecsi criticizes how the competition was restricted to craft activities and comments that “painting . . . is missing in your list of articles.” He also responds to the circular’s specific language when reporting on his own experience with patients: “Not only could it [painting] be easily made in bed, as well as in convalescent state of neurosis, but at the same time creative arts (painting, drawings, sculptures) gave the patient the fullest medium to express the suppressed complexes, which were actually the cause of the neurosis.” Ladislas Szecsi to the Museum of Modern Art Armed Services Program, October 6, 1942, MoMA Exhs., 216.3. MoMA Archives, New York. 70. For an account of the therapeutic basis of process as it intersects with modernist aesthetics and institutional discourses in the United States, see Suzanne Hudson’s forthcoming, probing study Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process. 71. Ferreira Gullar, “Neo-­concretism Manifesto” (1959), October, no. 69 (Summer 1994): 92. Originally published as Ferreira Gullar, “Manifesto neoconcreto,” Jornal do Brasil, Sunday supplement, March 21–­22, 1959. My emphasis. 72. See Mário Pedrosa, “Paulistas e cariocas” (1957), reprinted in Mário Pedrosa, Acadêmicos e modernos: Textos Escolhidos, ed. Otília Beatriz Fiori Arantes (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1995–­1998), 3:253–­56. 73. Lygia Clark, “Lygia Clark e o espaço concreto expressional,” Jornal do Brasil, Sunday supplement, February 7, 1959, 2. Two years earlier, in the context of an interview, Lygia Pape explicitly cited patients’ work. She explained: “Yes, I accept as art the work of the alienated, children, and primitive. Its value is different from so called normal art. In those works, emotion was not educated.” Lygia Pape, “Debate sobre a gravura: Afirma Lygia Pape,” in Jornal do Brasil, Sunday supplement, December 15, 1959. I would like to thank Sérgio B. Martins for bringing this reference to my attention. 74. As Sérgio B. Martins argues, the rejection of Gestalt by neo-­concrete theorist and poet Gullar was not wholesale. Martins analyzes Gullar’s updating of Pedrosa’s interest in Gestalt theory through their shared “defense of the autonomy of artistic experience against heteronomous determination.” See Martins, Constructing an Avant-­Garde, 35. 75. See Brito, Neoconcretismo. The language of rupture is similarly put forward in the recent critical literature. For example, while attentive to the differences between the context for concrete art in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Mónica Amor describes the emergence of neo-­concretism as “the neoconcrete rupture of 1959.” See Amor, Theories of the Non­ object, 65. Pedro Erber also turns to what he portrays as the “radical rupture—­embodied in the literal and symbolic breach of the canvas frame” in his comparative study of Gutai and neo-­concretism. Pedro Erber, Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 19. 76. See my discussion in the introduction to this study. 77. Heinz Werner, as cited in William H. Rosar, “Film Music and Heinz Werner’s Theory of Physiognomic Perception,” Psychomusicology 13, no. 1–2 (Spring–­Fall 1994): 157. 78. Pedrosa, “Forma e personalidade,” 64.

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79. Ibid., 74. 80. Ibid., 107. 81. Ibid., 106. My emphasis. I further detail Pedrosa’s reception of Prinzhorn’s work in “Una voluntad de configuracíon: El arte virgem,” in Mário Pedrosa: De la naturaleza afectiva de la forma (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2017), 64–­79. 82. At the time Pedrosa was writing, he turned to the psychology of art and its emphasis on form in part to argue against psychoanalytic interpretations of works of art as well as psychopathological approaches to patients’ work, as later consolidated in Robert Volmat’s L’art psychopathologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956). 83. Gustavo Henrique Dionisio also remarks on this remarkable proto-­Foucauldian section in his O antídoto do mal: Crítica de arte e loucura na modernidade brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2012), 99. 84. Pedrosa, “Forma e personalidade,” 103. 85. Ibid., 104. 86. Ibid., 106. 87. Ibid. 88. Arantes, Mário Pedrosa, 54. 89. Dionisio, O antídoto do mal, 14. 90. Psychoanalyst Tania Rivera offers a different reading of Pedrosa’s ethics via the interpretive framework of Jacques Lacan. See her “Ethics, Psychoanalysis and Post-­modern Art in Brazil: Mário Pedrosa, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark,” Third Text 26, no. 1 (January 2012): 53–­63. My account of Pedrosa’s reception of the patients’ work as well as his proto-­ Foucauldian stance challenges Caroline Jones’s claim that “this form of abstraction [i.e., concrete art] represented a liberation from (figuring) the difference of actual bodies, while entering the unmarked category of the normative.” See Caroline Jones, “Anthropophagy in São Paulo’s Cold War,” ARTMargins 2, no. 1 (2013): 35. My emphasis. See also Sérgio B. Martins’s incisive critique of Jones’s article in “Letter to the Editor,” ARTMargins, February 20, 2014, http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/archive/731-­letter-­to-­the-­editor. 91. Lygia Clark, “1965: About the Act,” October 69 (Summer 1994): 104. My emphasis. 92. Suely Rolnik, “Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-­Full of Lygia Clark,” in The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica and Mira Schendel (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999), 59–­108; Suely Rolnik, “Politics of Flexible Subjectivity: The Event Work of Lygia Clark,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 97–­112; Susan Best, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-­Garde (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 47–­66. See also the exhibition catalog Lygia Clark: De l’œuvre à l’événement (Nantes: Musée des beaux-­arts de Nantes, 2005). 93. The exhibition Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–­1988 was presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from May 10 to August 24, 2014. For a nuanced reading of the exhibition in relation to its title, see Aleca le Blanc, “Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–­1988,” caa.reviews, November 23, 2016, http://www.caareviews.org/reviews /2335#.WUVoMmU2Vdk.

Chapter 4 1. See, for example, Frederico Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Arte além da loucura, ed. Flavia Corpas (Rio de Janeiro: NAU: Livre Galeria, 2013), 240–­41. Citations from this volume are taken from the English translation by Anthony Doyle, 238–­78. 208

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2. The existing record of Bispo’s speech is scant. Thus, I write that the phrase “I am not an artist” was “attributed” to him. In a couple of instances in the course of this chapter, I will use supposedly or allegedly to flag moments of doubt as to Bispo’s speech as well as his activities. Bispo’s speech has been reported on by others, but I mainly quote him directly from existing documentation, that is, from four primary sources: (1) the text embroidered in his work; (2) Hugo Denizart’s film O prisioneiro da passagem: Arthur Bispo do Rosário (1982); (3) Conceição Robaina, interview with Bispo do Rosário, March 11, 1988; and (4) Fernando Gabeira’s video O Bispo (1985). 3. For purposes of this chapter, I take contemporary art to mean the institutionalized network—­from global exhibitions to art magazines—­in which the art of today is exhibited, displayed, discussed. For Terry Smith, the art world’s answer to the question “What is contemporary art?” would be something like the following: “It is what we say it is, it is what we do, it is the art that we show, that we buy and sell, that we promote and interpret.” He argues against such a self-­sustaining tautology in favor of an understanding of contemporary art as a “critical art alert to art’s history within history, and responsive to the shaping powers of historical forces.” Smith’s account focuses on contemporary artists whose practices probe deeper meanings of what it means to be contemporary in their work. See Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 243–­44. The specific question of psychiatric patients’ art remains outside the purview of Smith’s study. 4. Luciana Hidalgo presents the best-­known biography. See Luciana Hidalgo, Arthur Bispo do Rosário: O senhor do labirinto (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rocco, 1996). 5. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 244–­45. 6. Humberto Leone, cited in Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 246. 7. Hugo Denizart, O prisioneiro da passagem: Arthur Bispo do Rosário (Brazil: Centro Nacional de Produção Independente, 1982), color film, 30 mins. I thank Flavia Corpas for kindly sharing with me her transcription of the interview. 8. Bispo do Rosário quoted in Hidalgo, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 13. 9. Bispo do Rosário, copy of original record of internment, archive of the Instituto Municipal de Assistência à Saúde Juliano Moreira (hereafter, IMASJM collection). Thanks to Flavia Corpas’s careful investigation, Bispo’s original record of internment was found. See her preface in Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 238. This record is commonly referred to as the “Prontuário Praia Vermelha” (Praia Vermelha medical record). 10. Lula Wanderley, conversation with author, March 13, 2016. Lula brought up this fact on various occasions. 11. Avany Bonfim, typed and signed deposition to Frederico Morais, October 1989, reproduced in Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 249. 12. From 1954 to 1964, he was not at the CJM. See Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 248. 13. Cited in Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 252. The records from which I cite have been subsequently lost and thus exist only in the transcription and recording of those who initially had access to Bispo’s file in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The complete file was lost during the 1990s. 14. Inaugurated in 1924, the CJM was originally opened to male patients. Located on a former plantation (fazenda), whose geography is larger than Copacabana, it was intended to be a site for agricultural work as a type of therapy, similar to Juquery. Its founder, Juliano Moreira, thought that curing patients through work with agriculture and livestock as well as small workshops would also sustain the hospital, which developed an extensive praxiterapia program. Work and occupational therapy were at times complemented with rest and baths. In 1936 the CJM began to admit both sexes. At this time, electroconvulsive 209

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therapy and psychosurgery (i.e., lobotomy) were primarily reserved for schizophrenics and psychopaths; thus, in the 1940s CJM became a hospital colony. From 1952 to 1968, 536 psychosurgeries took place. During this time, patients also continued to work in agriculture and livestock, industrial activities, art, administration, cleaning, and so on. As the “Histórico da Colônia Juliano Moreira” makes clear, “the result of these therapeutic practices was not the cure of the sick; the patients’ work served to maintain the asylum’s various sectors.” See the “Histórico da Colônia Juliano Moreira,” n.d., IMASJM collection. In 1996, the CJM was renamed the Instituto Municipal de Assistência a Saúde (IMAS) Juliano Moreira, although it continues to be commonly called the Colônia Juliano Moreira. 15. During our meeting on March 23, 2016, Flavia Corpas and I discussed the cover image of Bispo on the exhibition catalog Um canto dois sertões: Bispo do Rosário e os 90 anos da Colônia Juliano Moreira, ed. Marcelo Campos (Rio de Janeiro: Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea, 2016); see fig. 36 in this volume. We observed how this image captured a very young Bispo, too young to be from the 1960s as indicated by the published caption. After our meeting, and in her characteristic method of detailed and exhaustive research, Flavia located the article with the published images from the original series of photographs taken by Jean Manzon in 1943. See David Nasser, “Os loucos serão felizes?” O Cruzeiro 16, no. 5 (November 27, 1943): 31–­38, 74. The Um canto dois sertões cover image of Bispo was not included in this illustrated essay. In her own research on Bispo to date, Corpas, who is also a practicing psychoanalyst, investigates the relation between delirium and object making through the installment of a name as a substitution, as sinthome, a concept developed by Jacques Lacan. See Flavia dos Santos Corpas, “Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Do claustro infinito à instalação de um nome” (PhD diss., Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, 2014). 16. Conceição Robaina, interview with Bispo do Rosário, March 11, 1988. Archive at the Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea. I thank Bianca Bernardo, head of education, for helping me to locate this interview. 17. Ibid. 18. To complete his work, Bispo also counted on the other patients bringing him materials. If he made money doing small jobs around the asylum, he would ask the nurses to buy the products he needed. Some reports also explain that he received spontaneous gifts from visitors who came to see his work. 19. Patrícia Burrowes, O universo segundo Arthur Bispo do Rosário (Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 1999), 44. 20. For art production under the Brazilian military dictatorship as well as Morais’s formative role in these years, see Claudia Calirman, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); and Elena Shtromberg, Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016). 21. Marília Andrés Ribeiro, interview with Frederico Morais, Revista da Universidade Federal Minas Gerais 20, no. 1 (January–­June 2013): 336–­51. 22. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 240. Translation modified. 23. Hidalgo, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 83. 24. À margem da vida, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, 1982), n.p. 25. Hugo Denizart, in À margem da vida, n.p. Morais collaborated with different individuals for each of the sections: Victor Arruda and Marluce Brasil (children), Monica Machado de Almedia (the elderly), Denira Costa Rosário (prisoners), and Maria Amélia Matei and Hugo Denizart (psychiatric patients).

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26. See Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 240. 27. Arthur Bispo do Rosário, cited in ibid., 253. 28. Hidalgo, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 80. 29. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 241. 30. The exhibition opened at Parque Lage in 1989 and in 1990 traveled to the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-­USP), Museo de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Museu de Arte de Belo Horizonte, and the Centro de Criatividade de Curitiba. Existing documentation suggests that each exhibition, with the exception of the installment at Belo Horizonte, included a roundtable or symposium on art and madness. See the exhibition chronology in Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 293. 31. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 242. 32. Luiz Camillo Osorio, “Obras que mostram ao homem que ele foi feito para brilhar,” O Globo, June 30, 1999. 33. Osorio writes, “Who knows [if] these objects are not more important than art?” Luiz Camillo Osorio, “Formas de expressão que talvez sejam mais importantes que a arte,” O Globo, November 10, 2000. 34. Osorio, “Obras que mostram ao homem que ele foi feito para brilhar.” 35. See the exhibition catalog Leonilson: São tantas as verdades, ed. Lisette Lagnado (São Paulo: Dórea Books and Art, 1998), esp. 85. 36. Lisette Langado, “Arthur Bispo do Rosário e a instituição,” in Por que Duchamp? Leituras duchampianas por artistas e críticos brasileiros (São Paulo: Paço das Artes Itaú Cultural, 1999), 102. 37. Ferreira Gullar, “Arthur Bispo e a arte contemporânea,” Folha de São Paulo, August 14, 2011. 38. In this context, Gullar takes issue with the exhibition wall text, which claims not only Bispo’s status as an artist but also that he refused psychiatric treatment and occupational therapy. Gullar, however, mistakenly claims that such therapy did not exist at the CJM, since, for him, it was created by Dr. Nise da Silveira and thus took place only at Engenho de Dentro. I credit his lack of historical awareness to a lack of information. 39. Gullar, “Arthus Bispo e a arte contemporânea.” 40. See Ferreira Gullar, “The Innumerable States of Being,” in Specters of Artaud: Language and the Arts in the 1950s, ed. Kaira M. Cabañas (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2012), 187–­90. 41. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 269–­71. 42. Samuel Beckett, cited in Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” (1969), in Language, Counter-­Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 115. 43. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 270. Morais is here using the term postmodern more in the sense offered by Mário Pedrosa in 1966 than in the meaning that emerged in architectural debates in the 1970s as well as in Jean-­François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979), which describes the loss of metanarratives. Pedrosa’s version of the postmodern, written on account of Hélio Oiticica’s work, grapples with artistic practices’ move to a more environmental dimension and how “there is no single artwork that can be appreciated in itself, like a picture” and the “sensorial perceptual whole dominates.” He also speaks of the opening onto spectator participation. Originally published as “Arte ambiental, arte pós-­moderna, Hélio Oiticica,” Correio da Manhã, June 26, 1966, reprinted in Mário Pedrosa, Acadêmicos e modernos: Textos escolhidos, ed. Otília Beatriz Fiori Arantes (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1995–­1998), 3:355–56. Given that, in this

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instance, Pedrosa does not uphold the artwork’s autonomy and instead speaks of works that court spectator participation, Morais in the end does not follow the elder critic’s lead, instead focusing his assessment of postmodern art, at least in relation to Bispo, as so many different styles. 44. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 270. My emphasis. 45. Ibid. My emphasis. 46. See, for example, Marta Dantas, Arthur Bispo do Rosário: A poética do delírio (São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2009); and Paulo Herkenhoff, “The Longing for Art and Existing Material in the World of Men,” in Arthur Bispo do Rosário (Rio de Janeiro: Réptil, 2012). I address these authors’ comparisons in the pages to follow. 47. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 274. 48. Morais also selectively cites the classic texts on art brut by Jean Dubuffet and Michel Thévoz, using them when what they each argue is actually contrary to Morais’s desire to frame Bispo as a contemporary artist and thus inscribe his work within the institutions of “official” cultural production. See my discussion of Dubuffet and Thévoz in chapter 2. 49. See Yve-­Alain Bois’s critical text on the subject of pseudomorphism in art history, “On the Uses and Abuses of Look-­Alikes,” October 154 (Fall 2015): 127–­49. I was first exposed to Bois’s text as a lecture he delivered at Princeton University in 2005. 50. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 241. 51. Frederico Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Registros de minha passagem pela Terra (Rio de Janeiro: Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, 1989). 52. Edemar Cid Ferreira, cited in Burrowes, O universo segundo Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 53. 53. Nelson Aguilar, “Brazil,” in La Biennale di Venezia: 46 Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte, ed. Manlio Brusatin and Jean Clair (Venice: Edizioni La Biennale di Venezia / Marsilio Editori, 1995), 94. 54. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 264. 55. From 1944 to 1948, Bispo was intermittently interned at the Centro Psiquiátrico Nacional in Engenho de Dentro. Although there is no record of him participating in Silveira’s workshop, he is likely to have seen one of the early exhibitions of patients’ work. Regardless, we know Bispo began his object production prior to being interned for the first time in 1938. 56. Primeira exposição de pintura e arte feminina aplicada, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: Colônia Juliano Moreira, 1950), IMASJM collection. 57. According to the Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea website, “The first record of an organization of a museum nature at the Colônia dates to 1952, when a department was created to house the production of the art therapy workshops then existing.” “O museu,” http://museubispodorosario.com/museu/o-­museu/. To the best of my knowledge, the first exhibition of patients’ work at CJM dates to 1950. 58. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 253. 59. For a discussion of Philippe Pinel’s use of “ruses” as a cure, see the discussion in Laure Murat, The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Toward a Political History of Madness, trans. Deke Dusinberre (2011; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 59–­61. See also Michel Foucault’s discussion of a case history of Mason Cox (1804, 1806) in which psychiatric practice pursues the patient’s delirium by developing a labyrinth patterned on the delirium itself. Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France, 1973–­1974 (2003; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), esp. 33–­34. 60. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 124. 61. Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men” (1979), in Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–­1984, Vol. 3 (1994;

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New York: New Press, 2000), 157; and Giorgio Agamben, “The Author as Gesture,” in Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 65. 62. Agamben, “Author as Gesture,” 66. 63. See Murat, Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon, 10. 64. Bispo do Rosário, copy of original record of internment, IMASJM collection. 65. Cited in Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 252. 66. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 160. 67. Ibid. Agamben translation followed. 68. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 161. Foucault is dealing with the classical age and disparity in language; the near grandiloquence of charges against the banal occurrence he sees as characteristic of the classical age, before the flatness of the language of ­“observation and neutrality” (172). 69. Herkenhoff, “Longing for Art,” 182n75. Herkenhoff also engages various pseudocomparisons, as when he relates the blue color of Bispo’s objects with Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue and his representation of everyday objects in simulated form with Joseph Kosuth’s semiotic investigations, also discussing Bispo’s work alongside Brazilian artists including Hélio Oiticica, Waltercio Caldas, and Cildo Meireles (see 156, 158, and 160). 70. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 267. 71. Copy of Bispo do Rosário’s medical file, IMASJM collection. The date on the remaining file is difficult to decipher. But one written note states that the patient appears to be sixty years old. Thus, the questionnaires probably date to the early 1970s. 72. Copy of Bispo do Rosário’s medical file, IMASJM collection. 73. Ibid. 74. Dr. Eduardo Jorge Curi substantiates this in his report from February 23, 1988, when he writes: “Since he started producing this work some years ago, his condition has remained stable. During all this time he has not taken psychiatric medication.” Cited in Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 252. 75. See “O Bispo,” YouTube video, 9:09, posted by Fabiano Carnevale, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=x9wc-­_XoCcw. 76. Cited in Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 252. 77. See Paulo Amarante, Locos por la vida: La trayectoria de la reforma psiquiátrica en Brasil (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 2006). 78. See the timeline in “Histórico da Colônia Juliano Moreira,” n.d., IMASJM collection. 79. For an overview of the history of psychiatric reform in Brazil, see Paulo Amarante, Locos por la vida: La trayectoria de la reforma psiquiátrica en Brasil (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 2006). 80. Bispo de Rosário in Denizart, O prisioneiro da passagem. 81. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 266. 82. See the catalog Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Registros de minha passagem pela Terra (Rio de Janeiro: Escola de Artes Visuais Parque Lage, 1989). 83. Dantas, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 192. 84. Ibid. 85. Hélio Oiticica, cited in Celso Favaretto, A invenção de Hélio Oiticica (São Paulo: EDUSP, 1992), 107. This quotation also forms part of Oiticica’s voice-­over in Ivan Cardoso’s 1979 film H.O. (color and black-­and-­white, 13 mins.). 86. In the end, Dantas assimilates both to the condition of Ferreira Gullar’s “non-­object.” Dantas, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 207. 87. Agnaldo Farias, “Ordenação e vertigem,” in Ordenação e vertigem / Ordering and Vertigo,

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exh. cat., by Jane de Almeida and Jorge Anthonio e Silva (São Paulo: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 2003), 94. Farias still claims the importance of analyzing Bispo’s work “in light of other contemporary production” at the same time that he insists that there is no convergence “from a formal point of view” between Bispo and works by other artists in the exhibition (see 94–­95). 88. See the account in Burrowes, O universo segundo Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 20–­21. 89. One of the earliest attempts at a biography was titled “Uma biografia em curso” (A biography in progress), written by Morais and published in the 1990 catalog for the traveling exhibition’s iteration at MAC-­USP. Corpas invokes Morais’s title in her “Uma biografia ainda em curso” (A biography still in progress), whereby she points to the difficulties, discrepancies, and lacunae that continue to haunt all writing on Bispo. See Flavia Corpas, “Uma biografia ainda em curso,” in Um canto dois sertões: Bispo do Rosário e os 90 anos da Colônia Juliano Moreira, ed. Marcelo Campos (Rio de Janeiro: Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea, 2016), 175–­92. 90. See Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 252. See also note 13. 91. The Museu Nise da Silveira was created in 1982, and its name was changed to the Museu Bispo do Rosário in 2002. Two years later Arte Contemporânea was added to the name, thus the current Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea. 92. “There was a danger that Bispo do Rosário’s works would start to be included in exhibitions of naïf/naive art both at home and abroad, and this ended up beclouding my view of certain of his works that are absolutely innovative and contemporary in their approach to rural themes.” Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 263. 93. See the note cited in Gianluigi Mangiapane’s entry for “Giuseppe Versino,” in When the Curtain Never Comes Down: Performance Art and the Alter Ego (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2015), 116. See also the catalog of the collection Il Museo di antropologia criminale Cesare Lombroso dell’Università di Torino, ed. Silvano Montaldo (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2015), 88–­91. Bispo’s work was included alongside Versino’s in the exhibition When the Curtain Never Comes Down. Here the curatorial discourse aimed to move beyond painting and sculpture to assimilate the works made by self-­t aught artists (a group that includes some psychiatric patients) to an art-­historical understanding of performance art. Consequently, I hold reservations similar to my critique of Morais’s writing on Bispo. See Valérie Rousseau’s introduction to When the Curtain Never Comes Down, esp. 10. 94. See Lombroso, Man of Genius (1889). 95. Marcelo Campos’s recent exhibition also moved beyond avant-­garde comparisons to introduce an anthropological perspective, comparing Bispo’s production with the popular art of the patient’s native Northeast Brazil. See Campos, Um canto dois sertões. 96. Osório César, “Aspectos da vida social entre os loucos,” Revista do Arquivo Municipal 105, no. 12 (São Paulo: Departamento de Cultura, 1946): 7–­24. 97. See Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 247–­48. 98. I thank psychiatrist Dr. Pascal Feinte for introducing me to the psychiatric collection at Villejuif, including this French art therapy version of Bispo’s cape. Villejuif, March 24, 2015. 99. Bispo do Rosário, as reported in Burrowes, O universo segundo Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 63. 100. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 256. 101. Cited in Burrowes, O universo segundo Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 41–­42. 102. In her masterful volume The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon, scholar Laure Murat, designating Paris as her center, focuses on the years 1798 to 1871 to analyze how “history

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plays a role in the etiology of delusions” (2). Between the Revolution and the Commune, and coinciding with the medicalization of mental illness, her study turns to the official discourse of psychiatrists so as to ask “what does madness have to say about politics?” (9). Among various examples, she cites how, on account of the events of the French Revolution, losing one’s head became a theme of delusion, given the spectacle of the guillotine (58). At the outset, by nature of the subject she engages, she also confesses that her turn to the archives of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century psychiatry is not a seamless or self-­ evident enterprise, whereby she affirms: “This return to the source also raised a crucial problem stemming mainly from the fact that the archives of madness can be read only from the standpoint of reason, just as a patient’s speech is delivered solely through the doctor who reports it. How, then, can we grasp the mad person’s discourse? Dispossessed of his or her own speech, reduced to a ‘summary’ that is usually more revealing of the psychiatrist’s own obsessions than the patient’s sufferings, the expression of madness is fundamentally hijacked and corrupted” (20). 103. Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” in What Is an Apparatus? and Other ­Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stephan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 41. Emphasis in original. 104. Farther down this same work, below the parade, Bispo embroidered comments on the Miss Brazil beauty pageant, while the representation of the catwalk includes large potted flowers with what looks like gardeners tending to their care. 105. Hans Prinzhorn, Artistry of the Mentally Ill: A Contribution to the Psychology and Psychopathology of Configuration, trans. Eric von Brockdorff (1922; New York: Springer Science+Business Media, 1972), 266. I owe my use of this particular phrase by Prinzhorn (“A patient is God but sweeps the floor willingly”) to Hal Foster’s book Prosthetic Gods (2004), which brought this quotation to my attention. My analysis here is also informed by his reading of Prinzhorn’s observation. 106. Hal Foster, Bad News Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (London: Verso, 2015), 27. 107. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-­aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 119. 108. Hidalgo, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 83. 109. Here I must again thank Matheus Rocha Pitta and Ana Linnemann, both of whom have endured repeated conversations with me about Bispo and what the specter of his excrement reveals about normalized assumptions about what counts as psychiatric patients’ art in the realm of contemporary art. 110. It is important to recall that Dubuffet’s art brut (discussed in chapter 2) was also the affirmation of a specific aesthetic within his avant-­garde ambition. That art brut exhibits neither neutral nor timeless conventions is revealed, as if in dialectical counterpart to the present, in the work of Marco Decorpeliada. Born in 1947 in Morocco, Decorpeliada studied medicine and was interned in various asylums, where he began work on his famous Schizomètre series, in which he reveals how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders, 4th ed., and the French brand of Picard frozen foods share a classification system. Thus, for example, 42.0 “obsessive compulsive disorder” equals 42.0 “steamed carrot sticks.” But Decorpeliada is a fictional art brut artist, invented by four psychoanalysts and a writer: Marcel Bénabou, Dominique de Liège, Laurent Cornaz, Yan Pelissier, Jacques Adam. They used the guise of art brut to challenge psychiatry while also introducing a conceptual model within art brut’s otherwise expressive and figural visual inheritance. Consequently, both psychiatric nosography and the conventions of art brut—­ both classifications—­are called into question. See the discussion in Docteur Bâton, “Schi-

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zomètres, une poétique qui dégivre,” in L’art brut en question/Outsider Art in question, ed. Carine Fol (Brussels: CFC-­Editions, 2015), 162–­65; and for information on the inaugural Marco Decorpeliada exhibition at La Maison Rouge in 2010, see the web page “Marco Decorpeladia: Schizomètres,” Maison Rouge, http://archives.lamaisonrouge.org/spip.php ?article649&date=archives. I am especially grateful to Baptiste Brun and to our engaging conversation of September 30, 2014, in which he first posed the question to me of what it means for an art brut artist to produce conceptual art. His probing query informs my consideration in these pages of the abject as it pertains to what is excluded from Bispo’s creative production. Brun is currently at work with Decorpeliada’s inventors on a performative conference that critiques the DSM and other forms of categorization. See “Marco Decorpeladia, L’Homme aux schizomètres,” Théâtre du Rond Point, http://www .theatredurondpoint.fr/spectacle/marco-­decorpeliada-­lhomme-­aux-­schizometres/. 111. Morais, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 240. 112. Hidalgo, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, 13.

Chapter 5 1. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (1996; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1. 2. Ibid., 3. 3. Ibid., 5. 4. Erwin Panofsky, cited in Yve-­Alain Bois, “On the Uses and Abuses of Look-­Alikes,” October 154 (Fall 2015): 127. 5. Bois, “On the Uses and Abuses of Look-­Alikes,” 130. 6. Ibid., 130–31. 7. Ibid., 146. Bois invokes an advertisement that was published in Flash Art by Galerie M ­Bochum in February 1973. The advertisement’s copy, together with reproductions of works by Jan Schoonhoven, Morellet, and Oskar Holweck, suggests that the American Sol LeWitt plagiarized these three European artists’ works. Bois dismisses the charge but not what one could potentially learn from such easy comparisons. Where LeWitt’s work evinces control and exhaustiveness through his serial approach, Morellet’s work avows a loss of control and disorder emerging from order. Even so, both use the modular grid as a means of creating noncompositional images. 8. See Jens Hoffmann, “Other Primary Structures,” Jewish Museum, http://ops.thejewish­ museum.org/2014/about. The latter quotation reads in full, “ ‘Other’ here has two meanings. One is literal: additional works are shown. The second evokes the cultural ‘other’—­ the many ethnic, political, and cultural groups that have been marginalized, suppressed, or underrepresented in the hegemonic Western art-­historical canon.” I take up a more extensive critique of this exhibition in my “Monolingualism of the Global,” position paper and response for the panel “Politics of the Performing Eye: Kinetic Art, Op Art and Geometric Abstraction in a Trans-­national Perspective” (College Art Association Annual Conference, Washington, DC, February 4, 2016). 9. John Yau, “Please Wait by the Coatroom,” in Out There: Marginalization & Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-­ha, and Cornel West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 132–­39. 10. If one takes into account other exhibitions organized by Kynaston McShine, one could take further issue with the language of Hoffmann’s critique of the original Primary Structures and of his singling out of the work of this particular curator. McShine was committed to international and global art before this became the lingua franca of the contemporary art system. 216

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His 1970 Information exhibition at MoMA remains a landmark exhibition that surveyed politicized conceptual art practices and was international in scope, including “150 men and women from 15 countries including artists from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and Yugoslavia” (press release, July 2, 1970, Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Archives, New York), http:// www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/4484/releases/MOMA _1970_July-­December_0004a_69D.pdf?2010. 11. Derrida, Monolingualism, 45. 12. These biennials serve as my primary examples on the global stage for the juxtaposition of modern psychiatric patients’ work to contemporary art. Modern psychiatric patients’ work was also included in the Eleventh Lyon Biennale (2011), which I do not address directly in these pages, and in smaller exhibitions such as Rational/Irrational at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2009). Since 1999, when it accepted the donation of a collection of art brut, the museum of modern art in Lille, France, has dedicated its exhibition program to both histories, as evinced by its 2008 renaming and reopening as the Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporaine et d’art brut. Other more local exhibitions have taken up the subject of madness explicitly: medical records and contemporary art dealing with the subject were juxtaposed in Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond (2016–­2017) at the Wellcome Collection in London, while the relation between mystical experience and psychotic states was approached in Madness and Mysticism (2016), a contemporary art exhibition programmed for the church of the Otto Wagner Psychiatric Hospital in Vienna, featuring artists such as Joseph Beuys and Yayoi Kusama. In terms of psychiatric patients’ art, many museums that show patients’ work exist in former asylums, such as the Museum Dr. Guislain in Ghent, Museum Gugging outside Vienna, as well as the Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente in Rio de Janeiro. Here, it is worth mentioning that Massimiliano Gioni’s Venice Biennale is largely credited for having sparked the recent return to the histories of self-­t aught/outsider art in the United States, which is understood in much broader terms than my specific focus on interned psychiatric patients and the modern psychiatric institution in this volume. On the current self-­t aught trend, see Sarah Boxer, “The Rise of Self-­Taught Artists,” The Atlantic, September 2013, https://www .theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/out-­is-­the-­new-­in/309428/; and the overview in Brendan Greaves, “The Error of Margins: Vernacular Artists and the Mainstream Art World,” Art News, October 2015, http://www.artnews.com/2015/10/07/the-­error-­of -­margins-­vernacular-­artists-­and-­the-­mainstream-­art-­world/. Outsider art has also been the subject of exhibitions in the United States such as Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2013) and Judith Scott—­Bound and Unbound (2015) at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It was also the subject of a recent exhibition at the Museum of Sex in New York, Known/Unknown: Private Obsession and Hidden Desire in Outsider Art (2017). Such shifts are also reflected, albeit in a different and more nuanced way, in Matthew Higgs’s (who also cocurated the Scott exhibition) curatorial programming at White Columns, whereby he actively collaborates with organizations such as Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland and Healing Arts Initiative in New York. Creative Growth is one among many programs that provide studio and exhibition space to artists with disabilities (not only mental health patients). During the final stages of this book’s production, curator Lynne Cooke’s exhibition project Outliers and American Vanguard Art opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in January 2018, exploring these “outsider” histories as they pertain to the American context. 13. See Megan Heuer, “The Encyclopedic Palace,” Art in America 101, no. 5 (May 2013): 49. 14. Massimilano Gioni, “Is Everything in My Mind?,” in Il Palazzo Enciclopedico / The Encyclopedic Palace (Venice: Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, 2013), 1:23. 217

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15. Ibid., 23. Gioni’s emphasis on “personal cosmologies” echoes curator Harald Szeemann’s earlier concept of “individual mythologies” for a section of documenta 5 (1972), which bore the broader title “Questioning Reality—­Pictorial Worlds Today.” While he included artists who developed intricate sign systems, such as French sculptor and alchemist Étienne Martin and outsider artist Adolf Wölfli, his documenta was also attuned to contemporary social reality. The exhibition included sculptural tableaux vivants by Edward Kienholz and painterly photorealism in addition to conceptual and institutional critique work by Ed Ruscha, Lothar Baumgarten, and Marcel Broodthaers, among others. With regard to outsider art, recall that Szeemann organized Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, Art Brut, Insania Pingens at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1963, the first time the Prinzhorn works were shown in the post-­Nazi era. 16. Gioni, “Is Everything in My Mind?,” 25. Emphasis in original. 17. Ibid., 26, 27, 28 18. Ibid., 28. 19. Ibid. 20. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Entropic Encyclopedia,” Artforum 52, no. 1 (September 2013): 312. 21. See Lynne Cooke, “World of Interiors,” Artforum 52, no. 1 (September 2013): 302–­5. 22. See Okwui Enwezor, “Predicaments of Culture,” Artforum 52, no. 1 (September 2013): 326–­29. 23. See the discussion in Lucy Steeds, “ ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ and the Development of Transnational Project-­Based Curating,” in Making Art Global (Part 2): “Magiciens de la Terre” 1989 (London: Afterall, 2013). 24. Pablo Lafuente, “Introduction: From the Outside In—­‘Magiciens de la Terre’ and Two Histories of Exhibitions,” in Making Art Global (Part 2), 11. Although the exhibition attempted to avoid a Eurocentric point of view by applying the same curatorial standard to the artworks from the so-­called center and periphery, Benjamin Buchloh challenged the curator: “How will you go about this project without falling into the seemingly inevitable and worst of all traps—­that is, without once again deploying ethnographic and hegemonic criteria in the selection of participants and their works for the exhibition?” See “The Whole Earth Show: An Interview with Jean-­Hubert Martin,” Art in America 77, no. 5 (May 1989): 152, also reproduced in Making Art Global (Part 2), 224–­37. See also Guy Brett, “Earth and Museum—­Local and Global,” Third Text 3, no. 6 (Spring 1989): 89–­96. 25. See the discussion in Steeds, “ ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ and the Development of Transnational Project-­Based Curating,” 56. 26. Álvaro Medina, “L’art latino-­américain dans quatre expositions internationales,” Vie des Arts 36, no. 143 (1991): 44. 27. Nazareth is perhaps best known for walking on foot from his native Minas Gerais to New York and then to Miami in Notícias de América (News from America, 2011–­2012). Along the way, he documented performances, created social sculptures, and filmed biographical portraits to reveal different visions and modes of being in the Americas. See “Paulo Nazareth,” in Enciclopédia Itaú cultural de arte e cultura brasileiras (São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2017), http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa425936/paulo-­nazareth. 28. Lafuente, “Introduction: From the Outside In,” 13. 29. Ibid., 17. 30. C.W., “Bispo do Rosário,” in Il Palazzo Enciclopedico/The Encyclopedic Palace, 384. 31. Marco Rabino, “Re-­education Machine,” Detenzioni, November 5, 2013, http://www .detenzioni.eu/carcere_cultura_arte.php?content_type=9&?content_type=9&content_id= 3124. See also Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, “Eva Kot’átková: Mental Armours,” Afterall/­ 218

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Online, February 25, 2014, https://www.afterall.org/online/eva-­kot_tkov_mental-­armours# .WR4WBBT3Vos. 32. See Rabino, “Re-­education Machine”; Laura Cumming, “Eva Kot’átková: A Storyteller’s Inadequacy,” The Guardian, December 7, 2013; and, more recently, Thomas Micchelli, “Quickly Aging Here: The 2015 Triennial,” Hyperallergic, February 28, 2015, https://­hyperallergic. com/186058/quickly-­aging-­here-­the-­2015-­triennial/; and Jamilee Lacy, “To Set a Trap: Eva Kot’átková at MIT List Visual Arts Center,” Art in America, May 21, 2015, http://www .artinamericamagazine.com/news-­features/previews/to-­set-­a-­trap-­eva-­kotrsquotkov -­at-­mit-­list-­visual-­arts-­center/. 33. See Eva Kot’átková, Asylum (2013), at http://zoltanjokay.de/zoltanblog/eva-­kotatkova -­asylum-­5/. 34. Ibid. 35. See Eva Kot’átková, Asylum (2013), at http://zoltanjokay.de/zoltanblog/eva-­kotatkova -­asylum-­9/. 36. Eva Kot’átková, cited in Muñoz, “Eva Kot’átková: Mental Armours.” 37. I thank Giovanna Zapperi for bringing this detail to my attention. 38. See, for example, Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 207–­34. 39. Beyond Venice, Gioni recently introduced Bispo’s work in the context of the exhibition The Keeper (2016), which focused on individuals who preserve and collect objects and images, at the New Museum in New York. Indicative of the lack of information and understanding surrounding Bispo’s work, in the audio guide to the exhibition assistant curator Natalie Bell mistakenly suggests that Bispo suffered from a lobotomy and electroshock. There is in fact no record that Bispo was subjected to these therapies, even though they were in vogue at the time of his internment. Listen to Bell’s statement at http://235bowery.s3 .amazonaws.com/exhibitionlinks/190/111%20Arthur%20Bispo%20do%20Rosario.mp3. 40. Basaglia participated in a psychoanalytic conference in Rio de Janeiro alongside other international guests, including Félix Guattari, Robert Castel, and Erving Goffman. See Paulo Amarante, Locos por la vida: La trayectoria de la reforma psiquiátrica en Brasil (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 2006), 63–­64. 41. These comments on the Thirtieth Bienal de São Paulo in part derive from my review, Kaira M. Cabañas, “30th São Paulo Biennial,” Artforum 51, no. 4 (December 2012): 266. 42. Luis Pérez-­Oramas, “The Imminence of Poetics (A Polyphonic Essay in Three or More Voices),” in Catalogue Thirtieth Bienal de São Paulo: The Imminence of Poetics (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2012), 26–­51. 43. Deligny cited in Bertrand Ogilvie, introduction to The Arachnean and Other Texts, by Fernand Deligny, trans. Drew S. Burk and Catherine Porter (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2015), 14. Original French published as Fernand Deligny, L´Arachnéen et autres textes (Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2008), 95. 44. Peter Pál Pelbart, “Linhas erráticas,” in O avesso do niilismo: Cartografias do esgotamento (São Paulo: n1 publications, 2013), 263. 45. Ibid., 266. 46. My analysis here is indebted to Giorgio Agamben’s “The Author as Gesture,” in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 71. 47.

Georges Didi-­Huberman, Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back? (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía), 5.

48. Ibid., 19. 219

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49. This is, in part, what Briony Fer lauds about the exhibition. She states, “how far art criticism has come to believe that art is subservient to other determining orders of meaning, whether they be social or technological.” Briony Fer, “30th São Paulo Biennial,” Artforum 51, no. 4 (December 2012): 264–­65. 50. Pérez-­Oramas also critiques the type of curatorial parachuting the pretense to be global often implies. Consequently, his exhibition focused on work by many young artists from Brazil and Latin America, while also introducing North American and European artists who might be less known to audiences in Brazil, such as Allan Kaprow and Simone Forti. Pérez-­Oramas, “Imminence of Poetics,” 27. 51.

Didi-­Huberman, Atlas, 19. Emphasis in original.

52. What I identified as “pseudomorphism,” the curator framed as a proposal to explore “analogical relationship(s),” whereby he explains how, by means of analogy an object, for example, shows “how it is like everything that exists and at the same time unique and different from everything else.” Pérez-­Oramas, “Imminence of Poetics,” 37. 53. Osório César, “Aspectos da vida social entre os loucos,” Revista do Arquivo Municipal (São Paulo: Departamento de Cultura) 105, no. 12 (1946): 15. 54. Other contemporary artists have also turned to the history of radical psychiatry. See, for example, Dora García’s experimental documentary The Deviant Majority (From Basaglia to Brazil) (2010). Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato also collaborated on the video essay Déconnage (2011), which turns to the life and work of François Tosquelles, and on the three-­channel video installation Assemblages (2011), which brings together a discussion of psychosis and animism. 55. My use of the term real actor stems from my conversations with film historian and critic Ivone Margulies and her book In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. 56. Caligari und der Schlafwandler (Caligari and the sleepwalker, 2008) was first shown in the exhibition Rational/Irrational curated by Valerie Smith at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin in 2009. For its premiere, it was shown as a single-­channel installation and projected within a black box with an outer wall composed of black boards on which exhibition visitors could write their comments or erase previous ones. This installation is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 57. Here Thomas Elsaesser refers the reader to allegorical readings of the film such as those of Siegfried Kracauer. See his account in Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2000), 77. 58. Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, 72. 59. The opening lines are from Jean Genet’s play Les Nègres, clownerie (The blacks: A clown show, 1958). 60. Téllez’s choice of Erich Mendelsohn’s expressionist Einstein Tower for the main shooting location also served as an important period reference for evoking the sets of the original. 61. Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, 80. 62. Téllez cited in interview, Pedro Reyes, “Javier Téllez,” Bomb 110 (Winter 2010): 84. 63. In fact, Jean Genet, whose play Les Nègres, clownerie (1958) provides Téllez’s film’s opening lines, was inspired by Jean Rouch’s film Les maîtres fous (1955). 64. Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3. 65. In relation to cinema and truth, Edgar Morin framed the relation thus: “There are two ways to conceive of the cinema of the Real: the first is to pretend that you can present reality [le réel] to be seen; the second is to pose the problem of reality. In the same way, there were 220

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two ways to conceive cinéma vérité. The first was to pretend that you brought truth. The second was to pose the problem of truth.” Edgar Morin, “Cinéma et vérité,” preamble to the festival Cinéma du réel, Paris, 1980. 66. Téllez, cited in Reyes, “Javier Téllez,” 82. 67. Alejandra Riera, “Un endroit où l’on peut aller et, pour un moment, être libre de penser à ce que l’on va faire,” Chimères 13, no. 84 (2014): 204. For more on the role of art and creative expression at Saint-­Alban in relation to political developments in France as well as the emergence of art brut in the postwar years, see the catalog Trait d’union: Les Chemins de l’art brut à Saint-­Alban-­sur-­Limagnole (Lille: Musée d’art moderne Lille Métropole, 2007). Paul Éluard, a refugee at Saint-­Alban in 1943, here saw Forestier’s works, taking some sculptures back to Paris with him. 68. See the discussion in Camille Robcis, “François Tosquelles and the Psychiatric Revolution in Postwar France,” Constellations 23, no. 2 (2016): 212–­22. 69. Between 2010 and 2014, Riera, with Joris Bisschop, maintained the Lucioles (fireflies) workshop at La Borde with the residents and monitors. She evokes various moments from the workshop in the course of her essay “Un endroit où l’on peut aller et, pour un moment.” 70. Ibid., 204–­5. My emphasis. 71. The history of institutional psychotherapy at the Saint-­Alban asylum and La Borde differs from prevailing psychiatric interest in psychopathological expression in postwar Paris, as evinced by the programs organized by the Centre psychiatrique Sainte-­Anne, including the popular Exposition internationale d’art psychopathologique (First international psychopathological exhibition, 1950), which coincided with the Premier congrès mondial de psychiatrie. See the discussion in chapter 2. 72. I am indebted to Julie Beaulieu for loaning her copy of to me as I prepared my account of Riera’s work. The timecodes that I mention in the course of the text are taken from the DVD. Alejandra Riera and UEINNZ, , documentation d’une expérience, [. . . -­2007-­2011 -­ . . .], 1 hr 50 min. Riera’s first collaboration with Cia. Teatral Ueinzz was initiated in 2003. See the account in Peter Pál Pelbart, “Inhuman Polyphony in the Theater of Madness,” in O avesso do niilismo: Cartografias do esgotamento / Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out, trans. John Laudenberger (São Paulo: n1 publications, 2013), 124–­27; as well as Erika Alvarez Inforsato, “Desobramento: Constelações clínicas e políticas do comum” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 2010), esp. 135–­44, 180–­88. 73. The history of madness and theater lies beyond the scope of the present work, but it is important to point out that historically asylums also organized theatrical productions with patients, while as a contemporary theater company Ueinzz operates outside of any clinical and hospital context. For an introduction to the historical role of theater within asylums and hospitals, see Anna Harpin and Juliet Foster, eds., Performance, Madness, and Psychiatry: Isolated Acts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Perhaps most infamously, the Marquis de Sade, confined in the Charenton asylum on the outskirts of Paris, directed plays with the inmates that were open to the Parisian public. 74. Riera created a space she called Lieu(x)détudes as one that bridges and exists between the other spaces. See also Alejandra Riera, “Cinema-­Experience,” roundtable with J­ udith Abensour, Thomas Bauer, Nicolas Féodoroff, David Lapoujade, Zahia Rahmani, and Alejandra Riera about Riera’s film , documentation d’une expérience, [. . . -­2007-­2011 -­ . . .] (January 22, 2012), 10. I would like to thank the artist for generously sharing her transcript of this roundtable with me. 75. In another scene at around forty minutes one sees a man lying down on a platform. He is covered in a black, shroudlike cloth. One of women standing next to him commands, 221

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“Pass me the scissors.” She continues, “The man is sick because he was not well made.” What follows is an “operation” in which she cuts the shroud in order to extract objects from the patient’s “body” in what is described as the desire for a “body without organs,” thereby explicitly invoking Artaud. The majority of the objects (organs) resemble computer parts, from cables and a keyboard to an electrical plug and hard drive. With a gesture of pedagogical demonstration, Luzinete places the objects on a table in front of the viewing public. Once the operation concludes, the group, including the patient, gathers around the table. The scene is repeated later in the film with a shift in roles. Participants cite a Portuguese translation of Antonin Artaud, Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu (Paris: K éditeur, 1948). 76. Alejandra Riera, email correspondence with author, June 7, 2017. 77. Accordingly, the film credits list everyone who participated independent of categorization (e.g., director, actor, custodian). The actors and participants included Adélia Faustino, Alexandre Bernardes, Amélia Montero De Melo, Ana Carmen Del Collado, Ana Goldenstein, Catherine De Lima, Colazzi, Eduardo Lettiere, Erika Inforsato, Fabrício Pedroni, Iza Cremonine, John Laudenberger, Leo Lui, Luís Guilherme Ribeiro Cunha, Onés Antonio Cervelin, Paula Francisquetti, Roberto Couri, Valeria Manzalli, Yoshiko Minie, Cássio Santiago, Elisa Band, Simone Mina, Patricia Brito, Juliano Garcia Pessanha, Adelito De Jesus Marcos, Emílio Azevedo, Peter Pál Pelbart, Alejandra Riera, Janaína De Fátima Marques dos Santos, Luiz Henrique Lopes Trindade, Luzinete Ribeiro Alves, Marlene Inês Costa, Silvana Aparecida dos Santos, Jean Oury, and Zilda Maria dos Santos.  78. Jacques Derrida, “The Theatre of Cruelty,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 240. The collection of essays published as Le théâtre et son double (The Theater and Its Double) in 1938 is central to any account of Artaud’s reception. In this work, he proposes a “theater of cruelty,” in which speech returns to the body and is therefore no longer governed by a script. Artaud argues in no uncertain terms against theater’s subordination to language, which he understood as both writing (plot) and intelligible speech. The primary objective for theater (as well as for poetry), on which their conditions of possibility and effectiveness depend, according to Artaud, is “the action of movement and spoken things, never reproduced twice.” See Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder and Boyars, 1970), 59. My emphasis. 79. As Maya Deren, from whom the anagram derives, put it in relation to her anagram: “within it, nothing is first and nothing is last; nothing is future and nothing is past, nothing is old and nothing is new . . . except, perhaps, the anagram itself.” Maya Deren, “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film,” OUTCAST 9 (New York: Alicat Book Shop Press, 1946), 6. 80. Erika Inforsato has also written on the Ocupação Ueinzz in the context of her probing doctoral dissertation. See her Desobramento, esp. 180–­88. 81. Alejandra Riera, email correspondence with author, June 11, 2017. 82. See the introduction to my Off-­Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-­Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 83. Riera, “Cinema-­Experience,” 3. 84. Ibid. 85. Riera consistently evades the spaces of media as well as of exhibition. In 2014, for her participation in the Thirty-­First Bienal de São Paulo she collaborated again with Ueinzz on a film. Rather than confine the ensuing film to the parameters of the biennial space (and the white box or black box that such presentations often entail), Riera presented “. . . -­OHPERA -­MUET -­ . . .” (2014) in a temporary, ad hoc cinema space installed outside

222

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of the biennial building and on the Ibirapuera Park grounds. The film was programmed every other Wednesday during the three moths of the biennial’s run. 86. Riera, “Un endroit où l’on peut aller et, pour un moment,” 209.

Coda 1. Peter Pál Pelbart, “Inhuman Polyphony in the Theater of Madness,” in O avesso do niilismo: Cartografias do esgotamento / Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out, trans. John Laudenberger (São Paulo: n1 publications, 2013), 118. 2. With this final phrase, I evoke the title, which was inspired by Artaud, of an exhibition of Nise da Silveira’s patients’ work. See Luiz Carlos Mello, ed., Os inumeráveis estados do ser (Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, 1987).

223

INDEX Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. abject, the, 139–­40 abnormality: modern art associated with, 4, 24; valorization of, 42

Arnheim, Rudolf: Art and Visual Perception, 99 art: Gestalt psychology applied to, 91–­94;

Abramo, Livio, 31

nature of, illuminated by patients’ art,

abstract art: as criterion for viewing

12–­13; physiognomic perception ap-

­patients’ art, 58, 64, 69–­70; criticisms

plied to, 93–­99. See also contemporary

of, 70; figurative vs., 69–­70, 90, 197–

art; global contemporary art; outsider

98n50. See also geometric abstraction; modern art

art; patients’ art art as institution: conceptions of contem-

Agamben, Giorgio, 128, 137

porary art, 111–­12, 121–­22; definition of

Aguilar, Nelson, 124

art linked to, 7–­9; patients’ art in, 3–­6,

Akhøj, Kasper: A família do Capitão

11–­13, 41, 58–­59, 61, 63–­64, 69, 72–­73,

Gervásio (Captain Gervasio’s family)

76, 140, 145–­46, 155–­56; status as art

[film], 149; A Minor History of Trem-

ascribed to Bispo’s work, 11, 120–­22,

bling Matter, 149 Alcântara, Pedro de, 32

124, 127, 129, 132–­33, 155–­56 Artaud, Antonin, 1–­2, 39, 51, 56, 158, 165;

Alcina, 63–­64

Le théâtre et son double (The Theater

Alexandre (Ueinzz member), 167

and Its Double), 222n78; Van Gogh le

Almeida Júnior, A. de, 26

suicidé de la société (Van Gogh sui-

Amaral, Aracy, 73, 200n76 Amaral, Tarsila do, 26, 31, 32, 36, 188n55, 190n72; Abaporu, 27 À margem da vida (At the margin of life) [exhibition], 118–­19 American Folk Art Museum, 39 Amora, Artur: Untitled, 85, 85 Ana, 63 Andrade, Oswald de, 26; “Manifesto antropófago” (Cannibalist manifesto), 6, 26–­27

cided by society), 51 art brut, 3, 5, 47–­49, 53–­55, 58, 72–­77, 91, 119, 124, 147, 163–­64, 201n90, 215n110 arte virgem, 71, 91, 105, 133 Arthur Bispo do Rosário: O artista do fio (Arthur Bispo do Rosário: The thread artist) [exhibition], 120 Arthur Bispo do Rosário: O inventário do universo (Arthur Bispo do Rosário: The inventory of the universe) [exhibition], 111 Artigas, João Vilanova, 71

anthropophagist movement, 27, 35

art informel, 3, 102

antipsychiatric practices, 133–­35

artists: intentions of, 121–­22; madness

Aquino, Flávio de, 71

of, 1–­2; patient-­artists compared to,

Arantes, Otília Beatriz Fiori, 105

187n46; subjectivity of, 148. See also

Arman, 150; Madison Avenue, 122 Armed Services Program, MoMA, 14, 100–­101

common creativities; patient-­artists art/journalistic criticism: César’s practice of, 13, 21, 31, 61; conservative, 4, 39, 70;

Index

art/journalistic criticism (continued) didactic purpose of, 34–­35; on patients’

Baum, Erica: Card Catalogue, 153; Index, 153

art, 34–­35, 38–­39, 51, 56, 70–­71, 74;

Beckett, Samuel, 121

Pedrosa’s practice of, 83–­84. See also

behaviorism, 93

interpretations of patients’ art

Bento, Antonio, 74

art of the insane. See patients’ art

Berliner, Roberto, 6

Arts in Therapy, The (exhibition), 100–­102,

Bessière, R., 51

101, 207n69 art therapy studios and occupational

Best, Susan, 106 Bethlem Royal Hospital, London, 37

therapy: artists employed in, 59, 61,

Beyme, Ingrid von, 37

63; in CJM, 115, 125–­26; Clark and,

Bienal de São Paulo, 6, 10, 61, 71, 76, 84,

107, 120; Dubuffet on, 76; exhibitions

87, 102, 146, 153–­57

of work stemming from, 14; and

Bill, Max: Tripartite Unity, 84, 85

geometric art, 203n15; in Juquery

Binoche, Juliette, 6

hospital, 59–­61, 63–­64, 66–­69, 66, 67,

Binswanger, Ludwig, 14

68; MoMA exhibition related to, 100–­

Birnbacher, Georg: portrait, 43, 43

102; precursors of, 22–­23; purposes of

Bispo do Rosário, Arthur, 111–­40; and the

art produced in, 102; Silveira and, 56,

abject, 139–­40; artistic activities of, 115;

89; study of, 4–­5

Congas e havaianas (Tennis shoes and

Asociación arte concreto-­invención, 87

flip-­flops), 122, 123; and contemporary

assemblage, 122

art, 111–­12; death of, 111; Eu preciso des-

Assis, Machado de: O alienista (The

tas palavras. Escrita (I need these words.

Psychiatrist), 6 Associação Brasileira de Imprensa, 56 Associação de Amigos dos Artistas da Colônia Juliano Moreira, 132–­33

Writing), 112–­13, 113; exhibitions of work of, 111, 118–­21, 150–­51, 153–­55, 219n39; exposure of, to other art, 115, 124–­26; exposure of, to outside world, 136–­37;

Atlan, 92

fame of, 6, 111; As histórias universal

Auriti, Marino: The Encyclopedic Palace,

(The universal histories), 137, 138; hos-

146, 147

pitalizations of, 114–­16; hospital records

Aurora, 63–­64, 66

of, 128–­30; influence of, 120, 135, 136,

author function, 121, 128, 133

138; isolation of, 115–­16; as Jesus, 11,

authorship, 121

112–­13, 130, 131, 139; life of, 112–­14, 133,

autism, 156, 158

137; Manto da Apresentação (Presentation cloak), 115, 119, 131–­32, 149, 150;

Bagenoff (doctor), 37

montages created by, 122; Morais’s

Balázs, Béla, 99

invention of, 111, 118–­20, 124; ORFAs (ob-

Baraquiel, 63–­64

jetos recobertos por fios azuis [objects

Bardi, Pietro Maria, 10, 59, 71, 182n32,

wrapped in blue thread]), 116; personal

197–98n50

reminiscence of, 109; photographs of,

Barr, Alfred, 38, 39, 41, 192n92

116, 117; status as art ascribed to work

Barreto, Lima, 6

of, 11, 120–­22, 124, 127, 129, 132–­33, 155–­

Barrio, Artur, 182n33

56; subjectivity of, 129, 133, 137, 139–­40,

Barros, Emygdio de, 56, 71, 76, 89, 90, 97,

150–­51; at Venice Biennale, 11, 111, 124;

124, 196n36; Janela (Window), 97, 98; Tarde de temporal (Stormy afternoon), 88, 88 Barros, Geraldo de, 87, 88, 90; Função diagonal (Diagonal function), 86, 86

visions and voices experienced by, 11, 109, 111–­13, 115–­16, 119, 127, 128 Bo Bardi, Lina, 10, 55, 59 Bois, Yve-­Alain, 143, 144 Bonillas, Iñaki, 154

Basaglia, Franco, 131, 153

Bosch, Hieronymus: Ship of Fools, 1

Bauhaus, 84

Bragança, Antônio, 119

226

index

Brand-­Claussen, Bettina, 37

of, 42, 91; “L’art chez les aliénés dans

Braque, Georges, 33

l’hôpital de Juquery” (The art of the

Braz, Albino, 48–­49, 53–­55, 63, 67, 71, 72,

insane at Juquery Hospital), 63; as

77, 202n92; drawings, 49, 50, 54 Brazilian modernism: CAM and, 32;

art critic, 13, 21, 31, 61, 187n46; A arte nos loucos e vanguardistas (Art of

and Freud, 26–­27; in National Salon,

the mad and avant-­garde), 32–­33,

190n72; and patients’ art, 2–­3, 5–­6, 9–­

189n62, 189n63; “A arte primitiva nos

10; in universal art history, 104. See also

alienados,” 22; “Aspectos da vida social

contemporary art

entre os loucos” (Aspects of social

Breton, André, 31, 37, 38, 39, 41, 48, 146, 148; Nadja, 39, 41

life among the mad), 134–­35, 158; avocations of, 21, 31; collection of, 6, 21,

Brill, Alice, 63, 66–­67, 198n52

53, 71–­72; exhibitions organized by, 32,

Brito, Ronaldo, 98; Neoconcretismo, 103

55; A expressão artística nos alienados

Brown, Trisha: Floor of the Forest, 165

(The artistic expression of the alien-

Brueghel, Pieter: Mad Meg, 1

ated), 24–­30, 25, 56; influence of, 3, 4;

Brun, Baptiste, 74, 216n110

at Juquery hospital, 17, 21–­23, 69; life

Buchloh, Benjamin, 148

of, 184n3; on motivation for artmaking,

Bürger, Peter, 41

32–­33; patients’ art studied by, 21–­33,

Burrowes, Patricia, 116–­17, 129, 136

53–­54, 63, 69, 91, 198n55; Prinzhorn

Buttenberg, Henry, 160

compared to, 30–­31; Silveira and, 56; sources of information on, 5

Caldas, Waltercio: O louco, 182n33

Cesarco, Alejandro: Methodology, 153

Calder, Alexander, 100–­101

Charcot, Jean-­Martin: Les démoniaques

CAM. See Clube dos Artistas Modernos

dans l’art (The demonic in art), 29–­30

Campofiorito, Quirino, 69–­71

children’s art, 5, 27, 31, 38, 96

Canguilhem, Georges, 163

chromo-­kineticism, 87, 89–­90

Cardiazol-­induced convulsions, 13, 78

Cia. Teatral Ueinzz (Ueinzz Theater Com-

Caro, Anthony, 144 Carvalho, Flávio de, 76; academic con-

pany), 164–­65, 167; Cais de Ovelhas (Quay of sheep), 169

vention criticized by, 35, 41; O bailado

cinéma vérité, 162

do Deus morto (The ballet of the

CJM. See Colônia Juliano Moreira

dead God), 42; and CAM, 32, 188n55;

Clark, Lygia, 14, 39, 88, 102, 106–­7, 145,

Experiência no. 2, 35–­36; and Freud,

183n33; Bichos (Critters), 103; O dentro

26, 191n78; intellectual interests of,

é o fora (The inside is the outside), 106,

191n79; and the Mês, 32–­33, 35, 55;

106; Estruturação do self (Structura-

and patients’ art, 3, 31, 35; performance

tion of the self), 106; “Lygia Clark e o

art of, 35–­36, 42; Teatro da Experiência

espaço concreto expressional” (Lygia

(Theater of Experience), 42; “A única

Clark and the concrete expressional

arte que presta é a arte anormal” (The

space), 103; Máscaras sensoriais

one good art is abnormal art), 42

­(Sensorial masks), 106; Objetos senso-

Casa das Palmeiras, 196n31 Castro, Amilcar de, 102 Cavalcanti, Emiliano Di, 33, 76, 188n55, 190n72 Centre psychiatrique Sainte-­Anne, Paris, 51 Centro Psiquiátrico Nacional Pedro II, Engenho de Dentro, 45, 56, 59, 85, 89–­90, 114–­15, 121, 124, 196n28 César, Osório: and Amaral, 26; arrest

riais (Sensory objects), 106; relational objects of, 107, 120 Clube dos Artistas Modernos (CAM), 31–­ 35, 40–­42, 55, 91, 188n55 Collection de l’art brut, Lausanne, 54, 55, 72, 76, 201n90 Collection Sainte-­Anne, 55 Colônia Juliano Moreira (CJM), 114–­15, 119, 125–­26, 125, 126, 129, 131, 209–10n14 color, 97–­98, 205–6n52

227

Index

common creativities: advocates of, 9, 47–­ 48; interpretive approach based on, 4 Compagnie de l’art brut, 48, 73, 76, 194n7

Didi, Mestre, 149 Didi-­Huberman, Georges, 157; Invention of Hysteria, 29

concrete art, 84, 87–­88, 98, 102–­3

Diniz, Fernando, 9

Conjunto Cultural da Caixa, 120

Dionisio, Gustavo Henrique, 105

conservative art criticism, 4, 39, 70

Do corpo à Terra (From body to Earth)

Constitutionalist Revolution (1932), 32

[exhibition], 118

constructivism, 87

documenta 11 (exhibition), 149

contemporary art: Bispo and, 121–­22, 124,

Doesburg, Theo van, 84

127, 129, 132–­33, 138, 150, 155, 213n69; conception of, 111–­12, 121–­22; defined, 209n3; pseudomorphism and, 122–­23, 144. See also global contemporary art convulsive therapy, 19 Cooke, Lynne, 148 Cordeiro, Waldemar: Idéia visível (Visible idea), 98, 99 Cornas, Pedro, 71 Corpas, Flavia, 115, 133

Do figurativismo ao abstracionismo (From figuration to abstraction) [exhibition], 64, 90 Domingos da Criação (Sundays of creation), 118 Domingues, Raphael, 9, 56, 74, 124; Un­ titled (Vase of plants with bananas), 75 Donato de Souza, A., 71 D’Onofrio, Claudina, 19, 21; drawing, 18, 19, 20

Costa, Lucio, 35

double consciousness, 13–­15, 183n39

counterpower, 21, 24, 133–­35

Dreier, Katherine, 38–­39, 193n96

creativity. See common creativities

Dubuffet, Jean, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 47–­49, 51,

criticism. See art/journalistic criticism; interpretations of patients’ art cubism, 28, 30, 32, 33 Cubism and Abstract Art (exhibition), 38 Cur, Eduardo Jorge, 128

53–­54, 58, 69, 73–­76, 91, 105, 119, 124, 147, 163, 194n6, 201–2n91; “L’art brut préféré aux arts culturels” (Art brut preferred to the cultural arts), 47 Duchamp, Marcel, 8, 33, 40, 121, 122, 124 Duvivier, E.: Images de la folie (film), 52

dada, 2, 37–­39 Damisch, Hubert, 7

École de Paris, 64

Dantas, Marta, 132

Eijkelboom, Hans, 158

Decorpeliada, Marco (fictional artist),

electroshock therapy, 13, 19, 45, 56, 89

215–16n110

Elejade, Paulo, 89

Degand, Léon, 56, 64, 89, 90

Éluard, Paul, 31, 38, 163

Degand, Madame Léon, 90, 90

empathy theory, 93

degeneration, discourse of: art conserva-

Encyclopedic Palace, The (exhibition),

tives and, 39; in Brazil, 199n64; Nazis and, 4, 42–­43, 194n110; psychiatry and,

145–­52, 150, 151 Engenho de Dentro. See Centro Psiqui-

4; repudiation of, 4, 13, 29

átrico Nacional Pedro II; 9 artistas de

deinstitutionalization, 131, 153

Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro

Delay, Jean, 52 Deleuze, Gilles, 24, 83, 180n19 Deligny, Fernand, 156, 158

(exhibition) Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art) [exhibition], 4, 42–­43, 43, 51, 71

Denizart, Hugo, 114, 119, 130–­31

Enwezor, Okwui, 148, 149

Departamento de Cultura da Associação

ergotherapy. See labor therapy

Paulista de Medicina, 55 Deren, Maya, 167 Derrida, Jacques, 2–­3; “Monolingualism of the Other,” 143, 145 Dias, Cícero, 26, 36, 190n72

228

Ernst, Max, 39, 191n84 Escola Livre de Artes Plásticas (ELAP, or Free School of Fine Arts), 69 Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (ENBA), 35

index

Estado Novo, 42 ethics: cinema and, 168; concerning patients and patient-­artists, 105–­6, 156; Pedrosa and, 105–­6 Eu preciso destas palavras. Escrita (I need these words. Writing) [exhibition], 120 Exposição de artistas alienados (Exhibition of alienated artists), 59, 61, 62 Exposição de pintura paulista (Exhibition of Paulista painting), 76 Exposition des artistes malades (Exhibition of ill artists), 37 Exposition des objets surréalistes (exhibition), 192n89

197–98n50; art brut and, 74, 76; as criterion for viewing patients’ art, 69–­70; in Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art), 43 folk art, 12, 38, 133 Fonseca, Jorge, 120 Forestier, Auguste, 163 form, in art, 84, 90–­99, 105, 122 Foster, Hal, 43, 139 Foucault, Michel, 15, 23, 24, 128–­30, 168; History of Madness, 1–­2; “Lives of Infamous Men,” 128; Maladie mentale et personnalité (Mental Illness and Personality), 104; “What Is an Author?,” 121 Foyer d l’art brut, 48, 73–­74

Exposition d’œuvres de malades mentaux

Freud, Sigmund, 4, 26–­30, 32–­33, 35, 139;

(Exhibition of works by the mentally

Group Psychology and the Analysis of

ill), 51

the Ego, 36; Leonardo da Vinci and a

Exposition internationale d’art psychopathologique (International psycho-

Memory of His Childhood, 32; Totem and Taboo, 26, 36

pathological art exhibition), 51–­55, 52,

Fried, Michael, 9

56, 71, 78, 125

Fry, Roger, 205n39

Exposition internationale du surréalisme

futurism, 4, 22, 28, 30, 32

(exhibition), 40, 40 expression: artistic and psychological

Gabeira, Fernando: Bispo (film), 130

theories of, 91–­99, 102–­6; in geometric

Galeria Domus, 61, 76

abstraction, 3, 85–­86, 89, 99; as inter-

Galeria Sérgio Milliet, 9

pretive criterion, 63; as motivation for

Galerie des Beaux-­Arts, Paris, 40

artmaking, 30; in Pedrosa’s aesthetic

Galerie René Drouin, Paris, 47, 48

theories, 91–­95, 97–­99, 102–­6

Galerie Vavin, Paris, 37

expressionism, 30

Ganzel, Karl, 43 Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), 145

Faculdade Nacional de Arquitetura (National School of Architecture), Rio de Janeiro, 92 Fanon, Frantz, 163 Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism (exhibition), 37–­39 Faria, Sebastião, 63, 71 Farias, Agnaldo, 132

Genauer, Emily, 38 geometric abstraction: Amora and, 85; Bill and, 84; concrete art and, 84, 87–­ 88, 98, 102–­4; expressive qualities of, 3, 85–­86, 99; neo-­concretism and, 102–­3; and occupational therapy, 203n15; Pedrosa and, 3, 85, 87–­88, 103–­4; recent occurrences of, 123

Farid, 63–­64

Geração AI-­5 (AI-­5 Generation), 117–­18

fascism, 32, 41–­44, 70–­71, 89

Gestalt psychology, 83–­86, 91–­94, 97–­99,

Faustino, Adélia, 168 Felman, Shoshana, 162 Fengyi, Guo, 158 Ferdière, Gaston, 40 Ferraz, Heloisa, 71; Arte e loucura (Art and madness), 5

103–­5 Gioni, Massimiliano, 146–­49, 152–­53, 157–­ 58, 162, 219n39 global contemporary art: Brazilian modernism and, 2, 3; critique of, 158, 168; exhibitions of, 146–­58; historic-

Ferreira, Edemar Cid, 124

ity in exhibitions of, 145–­51, 157–­58;

Ferreira, Gina, 45, 107, 120

as an institution, 14; language in,

figurative art: abstract vs., 69–­70, 90,

153–­54; monolingualism of, 143–­45;

229

Index

global contemporary art (continued) outsider art/patients’ art and, 2, 11, 119–­20, 143, 145–­48, 152–­53, 158–­59,

Hôpital Sainte-­Anne, Paris, 37. See also Centre psychiatrique Sainte-­Anne, Paris

217n12, 218n15; pseudomorphism

Hospital Nacional dos Alienados, 114, 115

and, 144–­45, 154–­55, 158. See also

Hudson, Suzanne, 14

contemporary art Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 83, 95

Iché, René: life mask of André Breton, 146

Gomes, Adelina, 56

Ide, Eckehard, 160

Gomes, Alair, 158

imageries des fous, Les (The imagery of

Gomes Machado, Lourival, 56, 58, 64, 75 Gomide, Antonio, 33, 188n55 Goulart, José, 56

the mad) [exhibition], 37 iminência das poéticas, A (The Imminence of Poetics), 153–­57, 154, 155, 157

Graulle, Benjamin, 51

Império (telenovela), 6

Graz, John, 33

INEPAC. See Instituto Estadual do Patri-

Greenberg, Clement, 9, 100

mônio Artístico e Cultural

Gruhle, Hans, 37

Information (exhibition), 217n10

Grupo de artistas modernos argentinos

Inforsato, Erika, 167

(exhibition), 87 Grupo Frente, 86, 88

Instituição de Assistência Social ao Psicopata (IASP), 69

Grupo Ruptura, 86, 98–­99

institutional definition of art, 5, 7–­9

Guattari, Félix, 24, 131

Instituto Estadual do Patrimônio Artístico

Guimarães, Tamar: A família do Capitão Gervásio (Captain Gervasio’s family), 149; A Minor History of Trembling Matter, 149 Gullar, Ferreira, 120–­21; “Manifesto neoconcreto,” 102

e Cultural (INEPAC), 124, 133 Instituto Municipal Nise da Silveira. See Centro Psiquiátrico Nacional Pedro II insulin shock therapy, 78 Integralismo, 32 Intentona Communista, 42 International Association of Art Critics,

Habitat (magazine), 59 Haizmann, Richard: Fabeltier (Fabulous beast), 43

84 interpretations of patients’ art: aesthetics as basis of, 4, 11–­12, 40–­41, 51, 58,

Hanki, 160

61, 64, 69–­72, 140, 196n36; common

Haydée, 63

creativities, 4, 9, 47–­48; constructive/

Herkenhoff, Paulo, 129, 180n20, 213n69

configurative, 30, 53–­54; degeneracy,

Herzberg, Oskar, 43

4; expression, 30, 63; necessity, 7–­9, 24,

HfG. See Hochschule für Gestaltung

181n27; originality, 35, 54; purity, 12–­13;

(HfG), Ulm

regression, 29, 30, 31; sincerity, 4;

Hidalgo, Luciano, 118, 133, 139

spontaneity, 30, 60; symbolic, 28–­30,

Historias da loucura: Desenhos do Juquery

63. See also art/journalistic criticism

(Histories of madness: Drawings from

irrationality: Carvalho’s performances and,

Juquery), 21 historicity: in exhibitions of global contemporary art, 145–­51, 157–­58; of

36; valorization of, 42. See also reason/ rationality Isou, Isidore, 183n33

madness and mental illness, 104–­5; of patients’ art, 11–­12, 13, 133, 148, 150–­51 Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG), Ulm, 84, 88 Hoffmann, Eugen: Mädchen mit blauem Haar (Girl with blue hair), 43 Hoffmann, Jens, 123, 144–­45

230

Jameson, Fredric, 139 Jardim, Reynaldo, 102 Jaspers, Karl, 30 jazz band, Juquery hospital, 8 Jesus, Bispo as, 11, 112–­13, 130, 131, 139 Jewish Museum, New York, 123, 144

index

journalism. See art/journalistic criticism

Léger, Fernand, 64

Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake, 164

Lemaître, Maurice, 183n33

Judd, Donald, 144

Leonardo da Vinci, 32–­33

Judson Dance, 165

Leone, Humberto, 114, 115

Jung, Carl Gustav, 56, 148, 204n24; Liber

Leone, José Maria, 112

Novus (now known as The Red Book), 146, 147 Juquery hospital, 20; art therapy studio

Leonilson (José Leonilson Bezerra Dias), 120 Leontina Franco da Costa, Maria, 61, 66

in, 59–­61, 63–­64, 66–­69, 66, 67, 68;

Lesage, Augustin, 147–­48, 147

bird’s-­eye view of, 20; Carvalho’s visits

leukotomy, 77

to, 31; César at, 17, 21–­23, 69; disci-

LeWitt, Sol, 144

plinary order of, 23–­24; exhibitions of

Liga Brasileira de Higiene Mental, 186n39

patients’ art from, 6, 59–­63, 73; jazz

Liga Paulista de Higiene Mental, 186n39

band at, 8, 8; labor therapy in, 59, 60;

Linnemann, Ana, 138

number of patients in, 23, 68; patients’

Lobato, Monteiro, 24, 70

art practices at, 21–­22; shoemaking

lobotomy, 13, 19, 56, 77–­78

workshop in, 23

Lombroso, Cesare, 4, 12, 25, 29, 134 Lorenzato, Amadeo Luciano, 5

Kandinsky, Wassily, 70, 97–­98 Kar, Oswaldo, 119

Lúcio, 56, 78; sculptures by, before and after lobotomy, 78, 79

Keeper, The (exhibition), 219n39

Lugares do delírio (exhibition), 180n20

Kelley, Mike, 139

Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art

Klages, Ludwig, 30

(exhibition), 39

Klee, Paul, 37, 70; Die Heilige vom innern Licht (The saint of the inner light), 43 Klint, Hilma af, 147 Koffka, Kurt, 93–­94, 97 Köhler, Wolfgang, 205–6n52 Kokoschka, Oskar: two portraits, 43, 43

MacGregor, John, 12; The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, 7 MAC-­USP. See Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo madness and mental illness: of artists,

Kollwitz, Käthe, 32

1–­2; bodily manifestations of, 29–­30;

Kosuth, Joseph, 122

Brazilian literature and, 6; historicity of,

Kot’átková, Eva: Asylum, 151–­52, 151, 162

104–­5; patients’ art as indicative of, 30,

Krauss, Rosalind, 7–­9

53, 91; rights in relation to, 11, 131, 158,

Kris, Ernst, 95

162, 169; subjectivity correlated with,

Kruezlingen Sanatorium, 14

35, 58, 128–­29, 137, 159; Téllez’s Cali­

Kunst der Geisteskranken, Die (The art of

gari und der Schlafwandler (Caligari

the mentally ill) [exhibition], 37

and the sleepwalker) [film], 159–­63

Kunsthalle, Mannheim, 37

Magiciens de la terre (Magicians of the

La Borde clinic, 163

Maldonado, Tomás, 87–­88, 88

labor therapy, 22–­23, 59, 60

Malfatti, Anita, 4, 24, 31, 33, 70, 188n55,

earth) [exhibition], 148–­50, 152–­53

Lacanian psychoanalysis, 163 Lace, Itaipú, 119 Ladam, Charles, 48 Lafuente, Pablo, 149–­50 Lagnado, Lisette, 120

190n72 MAM-­RJ. See Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro MAM-­SP. See Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo

Landolt-­Sandoz, Pierre, 72

Man Ray: mannequin, 40, 40

language, 143, 153–­56

Manzon, Jean, 115, 132

Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 95

MAR. See Museu de Arte do Rio

Leal Pessoa, Kleber, 56

Marcondes, Durval, 26, 32

231

Index

Maria, Rosângela, 136

24, 181n27; patients’ art compared to,

Marie, Auguste, 8, 12, 13, 37, 135, 192n87

4, 27–­28, 30, 32–­33, 38–­39, 43, 58, 70–­

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 33

71, 73, 187n46; values of, 77. See also

marquespenteado, f., 154, 156

abstract art

Marro, Antonio, 134

Moiz, António Egas, 77

Martin, Jean-­Hubert, 148–­49

MoMA. See Museum of Modern Art

Martins, Maria, 31, 75 Martins da Silveira, Elisa, 5, 88 Marxism, 32, 42, 81, 83, 88, 91, 163

(MoMA) Mon, Franz: Mortuarium für zwei Alphabete, 153

MASP. See Museu de Arte de São Paulo

monolingualism of the global, 143–­45

Masson, André, 37, 101

Morais, Frederico, 111, 117–­22, 124, 126,

Matisse, Henri, 74

129, 131–­33, 135, 140; Arthur Bispo do

Mavignier, Almir, 5, 56, 58, 59, 87–­90, 88,

Rosário, 11, 118–­19, 126; O prisioneiro da

90

passagem (film), 119

Max Bine gallery, Paris, 37

Morehead, Allison, 8

Mayer-­Gross, Wilhelm, 37

Morellet, François, 144

McCarthy, Paul, 139

Morgenthaler, Walter: Ein Geisteskranker

McShine, Kynaston, 144, 216–17n10

als Künstler (Madness and Art), 25

Medeiros, Mauricio de, 78

Morris, Robert, 144

Medina, Álvaro, 149

Morselli, Enrico, 25

medium specificity, 9, 24, 100

Motta Filho, Cândido, 17, 24, 26

Meireles, Cildo: Missão/missões: Como

Movimento de Higiene Mental (Mental

construir catedrais (Mission/missions: How to build cathedrals), 149; Zero Cruzeiro, 182n33 Mello, Luiz Carlos, 71; Nise da Silveira, 5 mental health: contemporary art and, 158; in early twentieth-­century Brazil, 186n39 mental illness. See madness and mental illness Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 94, 99, 102 Mês das crianças e dos loucos (The month of children and the mad) [exhibition], 31–­36, 34, 55

Hygiene Movement), 29, 186n39 Mulheres de areia (Women of sand) [telenovela], 6 Müller, Charles: Pinel fait enlever les fers aux aliénés de Bicêtre (Pinel orders the chains removed from the mad at Bicêtre), 22 Muniz, 119 Murat, Laure, 214–15n102 Musée de la folie, Villejuif Asylum, 8, 12, 135 Museo di Antropologia Criminale, Turin, 134

Messerschmidt, Franz Xaver, 95–­96

Museo Osório César, 71

Meunier, Paul. See Réja, Marcel

Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contem-

Michelangelo, 33 military dictatorship (1964–­85), 117–­18, 131, 182n33

porânea, 124, 132, 133, 214n91 Museu das Origens, 9–­10 Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Uni-

Milliet, Sérgio, 9, 61, 188n55

versidade de São Paulo (MAC-­USP),

Ministério da Educação e Saúde (Min-

6, 10, 71

istry of Education and Health), 56, 76, 100

Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), 6, 9, 10, 21, 55, 56, 71–­72, 91, 197–98n50

Möbius strip, 84, 106

Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), 6, 180n20

modern art: as abnormal, 4, 24, 70; Barr’s

Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo

schema of, 38, 192n92; criticisms of, 39; Estada Novo and, 42; futurism as synonym for, 22; and medium

(MAM-­SP), 3, 56, 58–­59, 61, 63–­64, 67, 70–­73, 84, 90, 197–98n50 Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro

specificity, 9, 24, 100; Nazi attacks on,

(MAM-­RJ), 6, 9–­10, 84, 87, 100, 111,

42–­43; necessity associated with, 9,

118–­20

232

index

Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente, 69

Panofsky, Erwin, 144

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New

Pape, Lygia, 71, 88, 102

York, 14, 37–­39, 100–­102, 144–­45, 148 Museu Nise da Silveira. See Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea

Parque Lage School of Visual Arts, Rio de Janeiro, 111, 119–­20 Parque Municipal, Belo Horizonte, 118 Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’

naïf painters, 5

Party), 84

Nascimento, Wilson, 56

patient-­actors, 160, 162, 164–­65

Natale, Armando, 71

patient-­artists: antipsychiatric practices

National Salon, 190n72

of, 21, 24, 133–­35, 136; artists compared

Naturforscher-­Kongress, Leipzig, 37

to, 187n46; asylum life and treatments

Naves, Rodrigo, 196–97n36

of, 77–­79; as exalted/abject, 139; global

Nazareth, Paulo, 149, 218n27

contemporary art and, 152; rights of, 11,

Nazi Germany, 4, 42–­44, 51, 70–­71

13, 112, 126–­27, 131, 133; subjectivity of,

necessity, of art, 7–­9, 24, 181n27

100–­106, 150, 152

neo-­concretism, 102–­3

patients. See madness and mental illness

neorealism, Italian, 162

patients’ art: art brut compared to, 48, 73,

Nery, Ismael, 26, 36, 190n72

76, 201n90; art institution’s approaches

Netto, Eugenio M. O., 19

to, 3–­6, 11–­13, 41, 58–­59, 61, 63–­64, 69,

Nicolaes, Durval, 114, 128, 136

72–­73, 76, 140, 145–­46, 155–­56; Brazil-

9 artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de

ian culture and, 6; Brazilian modernism

Janeiro (9 artists from Rio de Janeiro’s

and, 2–­3, 5–­6, 9–­10; conditions of

Engenho de Dentro) [exhibition], 56,

authorship for, 13–­14; as counterpower,

57, 58, 59, 70, 78, 90, 102, 105

21, 24, 133–­35, 136; diagnostic value of,

Nise (film), 6

28–­29, 187n47; exhibitions of, 33–­34,

Nordau, Max, 194n110

37–­41, 51–­52, 56, 58–­59, 61, 63, 69–­71,

normal mentality, 35

73, 90–­91, 125–­26, 192n89, 217n12;

nouveaux réalistes, 122

features of, 12; global contemporary art

Novais, H., 71

and, 2, 11, 217n12; historicity of, 11–­12, 13, 133, 148, 150–­51; as indicative of

Obregón, Roberto, 154

mental illness, 30, 53, 91; modern art

occupational therapy. See art therapy

compared to, 4, 27–­28, 30, 32–­33, 38–­

studios and occupational therapy Oiticica, Hélio, 88, 102, 145; Núcleos (Nu-

39, 43, 58, 70–­71, 73, 187n46; and physiognomic perception, 96; psychiatric

clei), 103; Parangolés, 132; Penetráveis

approaches to, 3–­5, 7–­8, 21, 24; sale of,

(Penetrables), 103

69; study of, 2, 5, 24–­25; terminology

Oldenburg, Claes, 150

concerning, 11–­12; therapeutic effects

Opalka, Roman, 122

of, 31, 76; Western reception of, 2–­4, 7.

originality, 35, 54

See also common creativities; interpre-

Osorio, Luiz Camillo, 120, 127 Other Primary Structures (exhibition), 123, 144–­45 Oury, Jean, 158, 163, 168 outsider art: Bispo’s work as, 11, 111; in

tations of patients’ art Paula, 167 Paulhan, Jean, 48 Pedrosa, Mário: aesthetic theories of, 3, 9–­10, 30, 91–­95, 97–­100, 102–­6; and

Brazil, 5–­6; and global contemporary

art brut, 74; as art critic, 83–­84; “Arte,

art, 11, 119–­20, 143, 145–­48, 152–­53,

necessidade vital” (Art, vital necessity),

158–­59, 217n12, 218n15; pseudomor-

9, 56; Arte, necessidade vital (Art, vital

phism and, 122. See also patients’ art

necessity), 10; in Brazilian art community, 87–­88, 88; “Da natureza afetiva da

Palatnik, Abraham, 56, 87, 88, 89–­90

forma na obra de arte” (On the affective

Pancetti, José, 5

nature of form in the work of art), 233

Index

Pedrosa, Mário (continued) 83, 91–­92, 92; “Forma e personalidade” (Form and personality), 83, 104–­5; and Gestalt psychology, 83–­84, 91–­95, 105; and Kollwitz, 32, 189n58; and museums, 9–­10, 83–­84, 181n29; and patients’ art,

­Mentally Ill), 2, 25, 30–­31, 37, 39, 41, 47–­48, 187n44 Prinzhorn Collection, 3, 7, 8–­9, 25, 37, 43, 48, 69, 134, 194n6 pseudomorphism, 122–­23, 144–­45, 154–­ 55, 158

9, 56, 70–­71, 83, 89–­91, 97–­99, 102–­6,

psychiatry and asylums: antipsychiatric

133; “Paulistas e cariocas,” 103; pho-

practices in response to, 133–­35, 136;

tographs of, 88, 92; and politics, 9, 32,

approaches of, to patients’ art, 3–­5, 7–­8,

83, 189n58

21, 24; life of patients in, 158; radical,

Pelbart, Peter Pál, 141, 156, 164, 169

131, 153, 158, 220n54; reform move-

Pereira Cunha, Maria Clementina, 24

ment concerning, 131, 137, 153; Téllez’s

Pereira Rego, Ronaldo, 149

Caligari und der Schlafwandler and,

Péres, Heitor, 53, 125 Péret, Benjamin, 74, 200n80

159–­63 psychoanalysis: in Brazil, 26; interpreta-

Pérez-­Oramas, Luis, 153, 155–­58, 156

tions of art based on, 95–­96; reception

Pernambucano, Ulysses, 24, 186n39

and application of, 4, 30, 32–­33; as

Pertuis, Carlos, 56

treatment, 19

photography, 29, 96

psychology of art, 91–­99, 103–­6, 205n39

physiognomic perception, 93–­99, 102–­6,

public: education of, in patients’ art, 34–­

206n57 physiognomy, 95–­96 Pinel, Philippe, 22–­23, 185n13

35, 55; mental states and behaviors of, 35–­36 purity, of art, 12–­13

Pires, Glória, 6 Pirinisau, 146

Q., J., 71

Pohl, Franz, 48 Pompeu e Silva, José Otávio: Marcas e memórias (Marks and memories), 5

radical psychiatry, 131, 153, 158, 220n54 Rama, Carol, 158

popular culture, 6

Ramos, Nuno, 124

Portinari, Cândido, 31, 64, 103

rationality. See reason/rationality

postmodernism, 121, 124, 137, 139,

Ratton, Charles, 48, 192n89

211–12n43

reason/rationality: madness in relation to,

Prado, Carlos, 33, 188n55

1–­2; of psychiatric patients, 29; in the

Prati, Lidia “Lidy,” 87, 88

public, 36. See also irrationality

premature dementia, 28

Rediscovery (exhibition), 71

Primary Structures (exhibition), 144,

reforma psiquiátrica movement, 131, 137

216n10 Primeira exposição de arte do Hospital do Juquery (exhibition), 55 Primeira exposição de pintura e arte

Registros de minha passagem pela Terra (Records of my time on Earth) [exhibition], 111, 119–­20 regression, 29, 30, 31

feminina aplicada (First exhibition of

Reis, Pedro dos, 19–­20, 21, 71

painting and feminine applied art), 125,

Réja, Marcel (pseudonym of Paul Meu-

125 primitive art, primitives, and primitivism, 12, 27, 148–­49 “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art (exhibition), 148 Prinzhorn, Hans, 4, 13, 25, 30–­31, 37, 39, 94, 104, 139, 148; Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the

234

nier): L’art chez les fous (Art among the mad), 12, 24 Reverón, Armando, 39 Richer, Paul, 29 Richter, Agnes Emma: handmade little jacket embroidered with autobiographical text, 134, 135 Riera, Alejandra, 11, 158–­59; document-­

index

film of, 163–­64; , 164–­65, 166, 167–­68;

Sherman, Cindy, 139

“. . . -­ OHPERA –­MUET -­. . . ,”

shoemaking workshop, Juquery hospital,

222–23n85 rights: of the mad and mentally ill, 11, 131, 158, 162, 169; of patient-­artists, 11, 13, 112, 126, 133 Riley, Lucia: Marcas e memórias (Marks and memories), 5

23 Silva, José Antonio da, 5, 75–­76; Opération chirurgicale de l’œil, 76; Romance da minha vida (Novel of my life), 75 Silva, Nilo T. da, 19 Silveira, Nise da: arrest of, 42, 81, 89,

Riveiro Alves, Luzinete, 165, 167–­68

91; and Bispo, 114–­15; César and, 56;

Rivera, Tania, 180n20

collection of, 69; exhibitions of art by

Robaina, Conceição, 115, 130

patients of, 3, 9, 53, 56, 58, 69, 73–­74,

Robert-­Fleury, Tony: Pinel à la Salpêtrière,

78–­79, 204n24; and geometric art,

22

203n15; and patients’ art, 91, 105; per-

Rocha, Clélia, 61

sonal reminiscence of, 81; photograph

Rocha, Franco da, 22, 25–­26; O pansexua-

of, 90; reputation of, 6; sources of infor-

lismo e a doutrina de Freud (Pansexualism and Freud’s doctrine), 26

mation on, 5; therapeutic approach of, 56, 70, 78–­79, 89, 196n31

Roché, Henri-­Pierre, 48

Simão, Geraldo, 71

Rolnik, Suely, 106

sincerity, 4

Rubens, 63–­64, 66–­68, 66; Pátio do

Smith, Terry, 209n3

hospital (Hospital courtyard), 65, 68;

Soby, James Thrall, 100–­101, 207n69

Seção de artes plásticas (Fine arts sec-

Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise, 26,

tion), 64, 65, 66; Senhoras ao remendo (Ladies mending), 64 Ruckstull, R. W.: Great Works of Art, 193n96 Ruptura Manifesto, 98–­99

78 Sociedade Pró-­Arte Moderna (SPAM), 32 Solages, Pierre, 64 Spanudis, Theon, 9, 102 Specters of Artaud (exhibition), 106 spontaneity, of art, 30, 60

Saint-­Alban asylum, 163

subjectivity: art brut and, 76–­77; artistic,

Sales Gomes, Paulo Emilio, 73–­74

148; and the author function, 121, 128,

Salvador, Domingos, 6

133; Bispo’s, 129, 133, 137, 139–­40, 150–­

Sander, August, 154, 158

51; language and, 156; of the mad and

Santos, Silvana Aparecida dos, 165

mentally ill, 35, 58, 128–­29, 137, 159;

Santos, Zilda Maria dos, 164

of patient-­artists, 100–­106, 150, 152;

schizophrenia, 139

and perception, 94–­97; social norms

Schröder-­Sonnenstern, Friedrich, 158 Schwarz-­Abryls, Abraham, 51 Seção de Artes Plásticas, 59–­61, 63–­64, 66–­69, 66, 67, 68 Seção de Terapêutica Ocupacional e Reabilitação (STOR, or Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation Section), 89 Segall, Lasar, 32, 71, 199n64

of, 58, 73 surrealism: association of, with politics, fashion, and advertising, 192n90; exhibition of patients’ art by, 39–­41; fantastic character, 38; MoMA exhibition on, 37–­39; and patients’ art, 2–­4, 36, 37, 151, 158 symbolism: in patients’ art, 28–­30, 63; sexual, 28–­29

self-­t aught artists, 5, 39, 75–­76

Szecsi, Ladislas, 38, 207n69

senhor do labirinto, O (The lord of the

Szeemann, Harald, 218n15

labyrinth) [film], 6 Serpa, Ivan, 56, 83, 87–­89, 88; Formas (Forms), 86–­87, 87

Tantric painting, 147, 148 Tapié, Michel, 48

235

Index

telenovelas, 6 Téllez, Javier, 11, 158–­59; Caligari und der Schlafwandler (Caligari and the sleepwalker), 159–­60, 161, 162–­63 Thephilio, José, 60

Vinchon, Jean, 37; L’art et la folie (Art and madness), 25 Volmat, Robert, 61; L’art psychopathologique, 52–­53, 78 Volpi, Alfredo, 5, 76

therapies: criticisms of, 56, 89; effectiveness of artistic, 31; moral approach to,

Wanderley, Lula, 71, 107, 115, 120

22–­23; psychiatric, 13, 56, 89; work as

wander lines, 156, 158

basis of, 22–­23, 59. See also specific

Warburg, Aby: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne,

therapies Thévoz, Michel, 54, 72–­73, 76, 201n90

156–­57; “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” 14

Tosquelles, François, 158, 163

Weissman, Frank, 102

Trecartin, Ryan, 147–­48

Wendler, Christoph, 162

Tupi, 27

Werner, Heinz, 94–­97, 99, 105, 206n57;

Tzara, Tristan, 163

Comparative Psychology of Mental Development, 95

Ueinzz. See Cia. Teatral Ueinzz

Wertheimer, Max, 92

universalism, in art: dehierarchization

Wiene, Robert: Das Cabinet des Dr. Calig-

based on notion of, 10; global contemporary art and, 148, 157; Pedrosa and, 10, 70, 84, 103–­5 Unknown patient artist: La robe de Bonneval (Bonneval dress), 134

ari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) [film], 159–­60 Wilkes, Cathy, 158 Williams, Daryle, 32 Wölfli, Adolf, 25, 48

Van Gogh, Vincent, 1–­2, 39

Yahn, Mário, 19, 53, 59–­61, 64, 77–­78

Vargas, Getúlio, 32, 36, 42, 89

Yau, John, 144

Venice Biennale, 11, 61, 84, 124, 140, 146–­

Yosky, 63

53, 162 Versino, Giuseppe, 134

Zanini, Walter, 10, 71

Vicente, 56

Zemánková, Anna, 152

Vicentis Rocha, Moacyr de, 61

Ziegler, Adolf, 42

Villa Bôas, Glaucia, 70

Zinglers Kabinett, Frankfurt, 37

Villejuif Asylum. See Musée de la folie,

Zoembick, Swen, 162

Villejuif Asylum

236