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artists & participants
Karel Appel,
Benjamin Arneval,
Antonin Artaud,
Paul Balvet,
Raphael Barontini,
Georges Bataille,
Albert Belloc,
Roger Bernat,
Lucien Bonnafe,
Jeanne Bonnafe,
Mohamed Bourouissa,
Brassai,
Georges Canguilhem,
Giuseppe Capone,
Georgette Chadourne,
Auguste Chauvin,
Jean Combier,
Frederic Delanglade,
Fernand Deligny,
Eugene Deslaw,
Jean Dubuffet,
Maxime Dubuisson,
Eric Duvivier,
Paul Eluard,
Frantz Fanon,
Jean Fautrier,
Gaston Ferdiere,
Celestino Ferrando Marti,
Auguste Forestier,
Michel Foucault,
Luis Garcia Gallo,
Josephine Guattari,
Aimable Jayet,
Allan King,
Yayoi Kusama,
Maurizio Lazzarato,
Leon Marguerit,
Agnes Martin,
Agnes Masson,
Jacques Matarasso,
Angela Melitopoulos,
Jean-Baptiste Metge,
Henri Michaux,
Myriam Mihindou,
Margaret Miller,
Joan Miro,
Romeo Mivekannin,
Francois Pain,
Alejandro Parriego,
Jean Paulhan,
Perejaume,
Josep Ponti Muste,
Hans Prinzhorn,
Marcel Reja,
Alejandra Riera,
Jose Roa,
Mario Ruspoli,
Salvadore Sales,
Enrique Sales,
Francisco Saura,
Leon Schwarz-Abrys,
Marguerite Sirvins,
Nancy Spero,
Helene Tosquelles,
Francois Tosquelles,
Tristan Tzara,
Romain Vigouroux,
Gerard Vulliamy
curators
press release
Art, exile and psychiatry around François Tosquelles
October 14, 2021–March 6, 2022
This unprecedented exhibition reveals a little-known story that made a special contribution to 20th-century psychiatry, lending it new connections to art brut and modern art. As its starting point, it takes the life of Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles (1912–1994). It traces paths of exile, both of the Spanish Retirada and the Second World War, describing the role this doctor played among the patients in the Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole psychiatric hospital. After fleeing along with 500,000 Spanish refugees after three years of war and after spending time in the Septfonds internment camp, he moved to Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in 1940. In this hospital, he developed new methods of treatment based on the group and on artistic work and creation by patients whose artworks would later be collected by Jean Dubuffet as art brut. During this period, the hospital of François Tosquelles and Lucien Bonnafé received exiled artists and writers, as the Surrealist Nusch and Paul Éluard, who were struck by the place and its inhabitants. After the war, the foundation of a disalienating psychiatry, known as community psychiatry began to be laid through group activities such as cinema, clubs and magazines. Avant-garde psychiatrists worked at the hospital, such as Frantz Fanon, the philosopher on decolonization. Les Abattoirs is hosting the first stage of this international project, bringing together more than 100 artworks, including art created by the hospital patients as well as films, books, archives, photographs, and a section devoted to contemporary art. In 2022 this exhibition will tour to the CCCB in Barcelona and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and in 2023 to the American Folk Art Museum in New York.