Abstract

This essay critically revisits the different notions that emerged in France in the second half of the 1940s to describe works created by patients in psychiatric hospitals: I study the concepts of l’art des fous (the art of the insane) and l’art brut (outsider art), both of which were highly critical of l’art psychopathologique (psychopathological art). My analysis focuses on the divergent approaches to these concepts adopted by several psychiatrists belonging to the movement that was later called institutional psychotherapy. Among them was the Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles, a central figure at the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital, alongside Lucien Bonnafé, Jean Oury, and Roger Gentis. I retrace the history of Tosquelles’s critique of Jean Dubuffet’s concept of art brut, and unpack the reasons why the former challenged the way the latter appropriated madness by collecting thousands of artworks from asylums. Reconstructing this critical history allows us to reconsider these works by situating them within the institutional context of the hospital, rather than within the avant-garde fascination with madness and so-called primitivism.