The Reina Sofía celebrates the pivotal contribution of Francesc Tosquelles, a visionary psychiatrist who fought the stigmas of madness
The Catalan psychiatrist and intellectual Francesc Tosquelles was a true visionary, a pioneer who understood that to help the mentally ill, “the institutions had to be cured”. And that an effective way to do that was through art, culture and promoting their autonomy and the self-esteem of their prisoners. The exhibition dedicated to him by the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid until March 27 revolves around this idea and art as therapy. Titled ‘Like a sewing machine in a wheat field’ – a surreal and inspiring expression by Lautréamont in ‘The songs of Maldoror’ – it contains over 700 pieces, including documents, films, objects, drawings and paintings, many of them created by patients of psychiatric institutions.
Tosquelles’ revolutionary experimental and psychiatric practice linked clinical practice with politics and culture. In doing so, he humanized the lives of thousands of patients, first in the Second Spanish Republic and during the Civil War, then in Nazi-occupied France and the Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole psychiatric hospital. Tosquelles considered himself “a reformer rather than a revolutionary” and advocated the constant transformation and adaptation of psychiatric institutions to the needs and circumstances of patients. He took care to open them and promote the social bond of patients, considering theater, film, art or writing as effective therapeutic tools.
The exhibition’s eleven halls feature works by Dalí, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, Antonin Artaud or Joan Miró and many other creators who have explored the subconscious, madness and creative nooks and crannies of the mind. Promoters of ‘Art brut’ such as Jean Dubuffet, Karel Appel, Henry Michaux or Léon Schwatz-Abrys, whose works are confronted with those of psychiatric patients such as Marguerite Sirvins, Auguste Forestier, Aimable Jayet and other psychotics and schizoids. 25% of the works on display were created by patients of the institutions where mad art was used as a liberating therapy.
Tosquelles was a pioneer in recognizing that we live in a society of discomfort. “It breaks the segregation of madness. Knowing that it does not heal but becomes chronic, it humanizes and makes it visible”, emphasizes Carles Guerra, curator of the exhibition together with Joana Masó. “It reconciles madness and man,” added Guerra. To do this, he uses all the means at his disposal: he collaborates with the nuns who take care of patients in the institutions, with musicians, writers or with the prostitutes who accompanied the soldiers who returned from the front in the Extremaduran city of Almodóvar del Campo. . “Soldiers wouldn’t be fair to a white coat and Tosquelles knew that without sex workers it would be hard for them to open up to what we now call post-traumatic syndrome. That in moments of catastrophe and crisis, what heals one sick person is another sick,” says Carles Guerra.
“His most revolutionary contribution was the realization that the asylums were sick,” sums up the commissioner. It shows how Tosquelles ended institutional psychotherapy and pioneered the denial of pharmacology abused in psychiatry today. “He was a survivalist who put aside intellectual narcissism to go much further,” the curators congratulate
Born in Reus (Tarragona) in 1912 and died in Granjas-sur-Lot (France) in 1994, the innovative Catalan psychiatrist was one of the originators of psychoanalysis in Spain. As a doctor in the army of the Second Republic, he mixed anarchism and Marxism with psychiatry, and advocated for the POUM (Workers’ Party for Marxist Unification) and in the BOC (Workers and Peasants’ Bloc).
Guerra believes Tosquelles “founded a school”, but laments that “he was buried in Spain and much more appreciated in France, where he developed most of his career, or in the United States”. Not surprisingly, he collaborated with Jacques Lacan on his studies of paranoia as something common to all humans, and had as a student the American Frantz Fanon, a world authority on colonization issues. “In Harvard and Columbia, Tosquelles appears alongside Foucault and Fanon, as part of the trio of great critics of the 20th century,” notes Guerra.
For the curator, the history of Tosquelles is “a journey through the European history of the 20th century”. “Because of the history of the great wars, a convulsive and dramatic time forced to confront individual and collective neuroses, questioning the traditional dichotomy between pathology and normality.”
Produced by the Barcelona-based CCCB along with the Reina Sofía and the contemporary art museum Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, where it has already been exhibited, the show will travel to the American Folk Art Museum in New York.
Source: La Verdad
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