Mad Minds

The entry point is that of madness, which though
strangely absent from Victor Hugo’s work, is dramatically present
in his family life: Eugène, his brother, and Adèle, his daughter,
both died in asylums. As romanticism – and its “frenetic”
creation – revived the notion of madness and its relationship
to genius, perceptions of mental illness in the 19th century
were changing, starting with the revolutionary, symbolic, and
founding gesture of “Pinel liberating the insane”, in 1793. While
Nodier wrote about literary madmen, the evolving field of
psychiatry paid closer attention to the words of the mentally ill,
and then their artistic “productions”. The artwork of mental
health patients was clandestine, fragile, using asylum walls or
whatever material they could find, but it gradually attracted the
attention of psychiatrists who became the first collectors, the
first “critics”, and who were the true inventors of the “art of
madness”, in an archaeological sense. This exhibition focuses not
on images of insanity, but rather on the artistic productions of
the mentally ill going back as far as possible, in order to examine
the driving force behind artistic creation... without safeguards.
It focuses on the collections of Dr Brownie at Crichton Hospital
(Dumfries Archives), Dr Marie (Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne),
Dr Morgenthaler at Waldau (Psychiatie-Museum, Bern), and the
Prinzhorn collection (University of Heidelberg).

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