Madness in Brazilian art

Beauty of the week: Madness in Brazilian art
Unlike other countries, psychiatric hospitals in Brazil had a strong presence in the art system, with outstanding exhibitions and a notable influence on the avant-garde.
At different times in its history, Brazilian art was linked, in different ways, to psychiatric hospices, where innovative spaces for artistic expression were developed and which had outstanding exhibitions and even translated into specialized museums that are world references.
The path began with European representations, between the 16th and 19th centuries, with a first shipment focused on works by Pieter Brueghel “the Elder,” William Hogarth, Théodore Géricault, Richard Dadd and Hugues Merle, who focused on how people with mental problems were portrayed. In Part II, we reviewed pieces created from stories from the Bible, psychoanalysis, literature and history, by Franz Messerschmidt, William Blake, Millais, Repin and Sorolla, also with the 19th century as a limit.

Brazil is the second country in this succinct mapping of expressions of “madness” in the region, after an article focused on Argentina, which reviewed the work of painters and photographers, such as Mariette Lydis, Aída Carballo, Emilia Guitérrez, Sara Facio and Alicia D’Amico, and Eduardo Gil. It is, without a doubt, the country in this part of the world where a relationship developed that was more one of back and forth than observation, anthropological, and that is why this new volume on approaches to madness will focus more on psychiatric hospices, their founders, and the artists who came to work in them or to look for another way of understanding art, in a dichotomy between academicism and freedom.
Juquery art workshop in the 1950s (Alice Brill/ Moreira Salles Institute Collection)
At the beginning of the 20th century, the art of psychiatric patients began to gain attention thanks to the work of the Brazilian anatomopathologist, psychiatrist and intellectual Osório César, who with his innovative approach to art produced in psychiatric institutions marked a milestone in the relationship between art and psychiatry in the country.
Influenced by European psychopathological theories, César (1895-1979), who worked as a psychiatrist at the Hospital do Juquery near São Paulo, took a different approach by comparing the aesthetics of patients with those of the futurist avant-garde.

César was inspired by Hans Prinzhorn's paradigmatic book, “Bildnerei des Geisteskranken” (Expressions of Madness, 1922) to develop a perspective that linked art with psychoanalysis, since he considered the patients' works to be a form of “idolatry” that reflected an “atavistic echo” of ancestral fetishes. In this way, he moved away from the mere expression of symptoms, suggesting that art was a therapeutic process in itself, as explained in Arte, Clínica e Loucura: Território em mutação. São Paulo, by Elizabeth Lima.

César’s interest in the patients’ art led him to collect their works and analyze them in the book Expresión artística en lo alienado: concurso al estudio de los Símbolos en el arte (1929), in which he compared the drawings of the Juquery children with “primitive” and “futuristic” art, exploring the idea that artistic creation is a fundamental human need to confront suffering. In this context, art became an essential tool for the lives of the inmates, allowing them to objectify their hallucinations and delusions. Thus, César encouraged artistic production and established connections with the modernist scene in São Paulo, especially with those of the historic Modern Art Week of 1922.

During the 1940s he directed the Escuela Libre de Artes Plásticas, where he promoted more than fifty exhibitions of drawings and paintings by its inmates, attracting the attention of artists, critics and writers such as Tarsila do Amaral, Niobe Xandó, Flávio de Carvalho - an unrecognized precursor of performance -, Mário de Andrade, Lourival Gomes Machado and Quirino da Silva, among others.

The recognition of the importance of the production of the "madmen" by modernist artists led to the project of a Salon of Art of the Insane as part of the Second Week of Modern Art, planned for 1942, but which never took place
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