Grey Room

In postwar France, the relation between art and madness became a privileged site for negotiating the limits of aesthetic modernism, psychiatric knowledge, and social repair. Across psychiatric institutions and artistic milieus, works made by patients in psychiatric hospitals attracted increasing attention and circulated in both clinical contexts and private collections. These works raised a series of questions that cut across disciplinary boundaries: How should such productions be understood? What kinds of value do they hold? And what relations do they establish between epistemic, therapeutic, and aesthetic frameworks?

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