The Avant-Garde Psychiatrist Who Built an Artistic Refuge

A black-and-white snapshot from around 1945 shows a man with twin shocks of hair sitting in a child’s playpen, a cigarette between his lips. This is Francesc Tosquelles, 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.

The photo appears in “Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut,” an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum that traces the career and influence of this Catalan doctor. 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.

The craft of the objects can be stunning, with a raw intricacy that speaks to their makers’ intensive attention. An elaborate scrapwood boat carved by Auguste Forestier, complete with anchor and crew, opens the show. A lustrous alpine scene embroidered by Marguerite Sirvins depicts a jagged paradise of hunters and prey. Both were patients in the Saint-Alban hospital.