This article highlights an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan that will end on August 18, 2024: 

Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut.

The Catalan doctor Francesc Tosquelles was “a psychiatrist who spent decades dismantling the hard bars between illness and health, pathology and normalcy, artists and everyone else. He drew on Freud and Marx, and also on his experience as a refugee, in exile from Franco’s fascist Spain.”

Against the historical trauma of fascism, war and displacement, Tosquelles built radical psychiatric practices around non-hierarchical relations between patients, doctors and their neighbors… He also encouraged his patients’ creativity, which put him at the confluence of Modernist avant-gardes and Art Brut. All these ideas converged at a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Alban, a small village in southern France, where Tosquelles worked from 1940 to 1962.

Tosquelles also instructed his colleagues in psychoanalytic concepts and trained local people in basic psychiatry. With fascists on the march and decades of unthinkably brutal war, it seemed clear to Tosquelles that just about everyone needed therapy.  If the affliction is social, he reasoned, the treatment must be too. [My emphasis — JMN]

The story behind “Myrllen’s Coat” is poignant: 

Its maker, a woman named Myrllen, reportedly experienced symptoms of schizophrenia, and was one of the first Americans prescribed Thorazine. Her harrowing hallucinations subsided, but so did her desire to sew.

(Travis Diehl, “The Avant-Garde Psychiatrist Who Built an Artistic Refuge,” New York Times, 7-22-24)

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved