The exhibition Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut currently at the American Folk Art Museum begins with an indelible image: a barefoot man stands on a roof with raised arms, brandishing a model ship in a pose both precarious and triumphant (Fig. 1). The year is 1947; the building is part of the psychiatric hospital at Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, in a remote corner of southern France; the ship is the work of a patient, Auguste Forestier; and the man holding it is the psychiatrist Dr. Francesc Tosquelles, though if you were to mistake him for an inmate he surely would not be surprised, nor would he mind.
The exhibition originated in Europe, where Tosquelles is far better known; it arrives here and poses long overdue questions about how we view the creations we have come to call, among other imprecise designations, art brut.
Part-utopian, part-pragmatist, Tosquelles was a psychiatrist and a Catalan refugee from Spain’s Civil War, where he had battled both fascists and Stalinists. A man with a gift for impro- visation, he found his way to France and eventually to Saint-Alban in 1940, where he created his own synthesis of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and other influences, crafting a humane approach to mental illness by treating patients, staff, and the institution itself. All this despite the Vichy regime’s determined brutalization of the mentally ill.
To Tosquelles’s undoubted dismay, he and Saint-Alban may be better known for giving safe harbor during the Vichy regime and afterwards to dissident artists and intellectuals such as Paul Éluard, Tristan Tzara, and Frantz Fanon, and best known for the visits of Jean Dubuffet (Fig. 5), whose acquisition of artworks by Auguste Forestier, Marguerite Sirvins (Figs. 2, 6), and other patients led to his founding of the Compagnie de L’Art Brut in 1948.
In pursuit of answers to difficult questions about how we should approach the artworks on view, the exhibition resists the temptation to celebrate them at the expense of the clinical work at Saint-Alban, keeping a steady eye on both. Tosquelles made ample use of the Super 8 camera and several of his filmed interviews are here. He is not always easy to understand, but with the aid of a French companion I was able to appreciate the warmth and wit of this nimble improviser, who likened his clinical approach to a subway map with several branching lines and many destinations. Keeping one eye on the economic and social deformations of society that play no small part in mental illness, he was able to ameliorate the isolation of the marginal and the marginalized, as is evident in the photographs showing patients participating in sports, celebrations, and theater pieces alongside Saint-Alban’s staff and their families (Fig. 4).
But what of the works on view by Forestier, Sirvins, and other artists similarly situated in the universe of mental illness? Here the exhibition and its catalogue essays by various hands are especially helpful, asking questions that are brave, essential, and inescapable . . . even if you haven’t recently brushed up on your reading of Jacques Lacan, Walter Benjamin, or Franz Fanon. Tosquelles regarded patients’ creative work as integral to the healing experience at Saint-Alban, and although he eventually came to accept that money from the sale of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and the like could benefit the community, he was never com- fortable with their isolation in Paris exhibitions and elsewhere. He viewed them as part of something bigger, something essential that binds the artwork to the institution, as that triumphal rooftop photograph shows. By contrast, you could argue, though the curators don’t quite do so, that Jean Dubuffet’s admirable pursuit of art untainted by the Western canon ended up isolating these works in the canon of art brut.
Does the exhibition choose between Tosquelles and Dubuffet? No, but it is difficult not to be captivated by the worldview of Saint-Alban, and this is especially true when you get to a section that the Folk Art Museum has added to the original exhibition: “Mental Health in the United States: Tosquelles’s Legacy.” Here our tangled history of asylum horrors, de-institutionalization, and pharmaceutical cure-alls begins with two disturbing wood pieces, Monkey and the Cat in the Cauldron and Man’s Struggle, from the Norristown State Hospital in Pennsylvania (Figs. 12, 13). They are on display for historical reasons, but perhaps they should remind us to examine our fascination with the ways in which disordered individuals figure forth their pain. Henry Darger (1892–1973) comes to mind. His disturbing artwork is not on view, of course, as he was not institutionalized as an adult, but I think Francesc Tosquelles would have asked us, at the very least, to study ourselves when we study him.
But all is not Titicut Follies, benign neglect, or pharmaceutical interventions in this American section of the exhibition. Judith Scott (Fig. 10) is here with the fabric sculptures she made at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California, where she was free to come and go after years of institutionalization, as is Melvin Way (Figs. 7a, 7b), who died this year and whose intricate drawing style was nurtured by classes at the former Hospital Audiences Inc. Neither of these institutions were asylum villages like the one Tosquelles created at Saint-Alban, but they each borrow from or perhaps were inspired by his work.
My sense is that this exhibition’s bold questions about art brut and our interest in it also constitute a step toward diagnosing our own “normopathy,” to borrow a word from Tosquelles. AFAM’s curator Valérie Rousseau has been approaching this matter for several years now with shows such as Photo | Brut and When the Curtain Never Comes Down. In the American section of this one she has put on display a copy of the pathbreaking book Asylums (1961) by the social anthropologist Erving Goffman. Near the end of the book, Goffman describes the way in which inmates in the asylums he studied are routinely punished for reserving something of themselves from the clutch of the institution by indulging in small acts of insubordination. He points out that we all do this in one way or another as we “hold off the embrace of organizations,” and that doing so is an essential part of the self. It was Tosquelles’s genius to find a way to encourage rather than punish patients as they reserved something of themselves, and that, after all, is what the art at Saint-Alban accomplished.
