When art therapy went chemical: Alfred Bader, pharmacology, and art brut, c.1950-1970s.

This article analyzes how psychopharmacology transformed the relationship between art and psychiatry. It outlines a novel genealogy of art therapy, repositioning its origins in the context of evolving clinical practices and discourses on mind-altering drugs. Evaluating the use of psychotropic drugs in connection with psychopathology of art in the first half of the twentieth century, the article then focuses on two post-Second World War experiments involving psilocybin conducted by psychiatrist Alfred Bader and pharmacologist Roland Fischer. Illustrating how consciousness was foregrounded in discussions about mental health and illness, the examples showcase how psychotherapists increasingly sought to articulate art brut and modernist aesthetics in a neurobiological fashion to define madness as a social disease.

[Almas delirantes (1925) by Luís Cebola: the poetics of the human psyche and the physician as mediator between the universe of mental illness and society]. / Almas delirantes (1925) por Luís Cebola: a poética da psique humana e o médico como mediador entre o universo da doença mental e a sociedade.

Lúis Cebola's 1925 work Almas delirantes [Delusional Souls] presented various psychopathologies through metaphorical and lyrical portraits rather than from a medical/ scientific point of view, showing that he perceived his patients as more than objects of scientific study in a process of identification, empathy, and compassion. Cebola defined psychopathological states according to contrast with normality, but stressed that these diseases could arise in any individual, and the book simultaneously acted as a warning to readers. The text also publicized the Museum of Madness [Museu da Loucura], which he created at the Casa de Saúde do Telhal, and the art produced by his patients, positioning himself as a messenger between the closed universe of the psychiatric hospital and Portuguese society.

Almas delirantes (1925) por Luís Cebola: a poética da psique humana e o médico como mediador entre o universo da doença mental e a sociedade / Almas delirantes (1925) by Luís Cebola: the poetics of the human psyche and the physician as mediator between the universe of mental illness and society

Resumo Luís Cebola publicou em 1925 o volume Almas delirantes, onde apresentava diversas psicopatologias não de um ponto de vista médico-científico, mas elaborando retratos metafóricos e líricos, demonstrando que a perceção que tinha sobre os doentes ultrapassava a de objetos de estudo científico, constituindo um processo de identificação, empatia e compaixão. Cebola definia os estados psicopatológicos por oposição à normalidade, salientando, todavia, que estas doenças poderiam surgir em qualquer indivíduo, funcionando o livro simultaneamente como um aviso aos leitores. O volume permitia-lhe ainda divulgar o Museu da Loucura, que criara na Casa de Saúde do Telhal, e a arte dos seus pacientes, colocando-se assim na posição de mensageiro entre o universo fechado do hospital psiquiátrico e a sociedade portuguesa.

Abstract Lúis Cebola's 1925 work Almas delirantes [Delusional Souls] presented various psychopathologies through metaphorical and lyrical portraits rather than from a medical/ scientific point of view, showing that he perceived his patients as more than objects of scientific study in a process of identification, empathy, and compassion. Cebola defined psychopathological states according to contrast with normality, but stressed that these diseases could arise in any individual, and the book simultaneously acted as a warning to readers. The text also publicized the Museum of Madness [Museu da Loucura], which he created at the Casa de Saúde do Telhal, and the art produced by his patients, positioning himself as a messenger between the closed universe of the psychiatric hospital and Portuguese society.

'The Head Carver': Art Extraordinary and the small spaces of asylum.

This paper uses the unique collection of Scottish outsider art, labelled Art Extraordinary, as a window into the often neglected small spaces of asylum care in the early twentieth century. By drawing upon materials from the Art Extraordinary collection and its associated archives, this paper demonstrates the importance of incorporating small and everyday spaces of care - such as gardens, paths, studios and boats - into the broader historical narratives of psychiatric care in Scotland. Examples of experiential memorialization and counterpoints to asylum surveillance culture will be illuminated. The significance of using 'outsider' art collections as a valuable source in tracing geographical histories will be highlighted.

Drawing as Instrument, Drawings as Evidence: Capturing Mental Processes with Pencil and Paper.

Researchers in the mind sciences often look to the production and analysis of drawings to reveal the mental processes of their subjects. This essay presents three episodes that trace the emergence of drawing as an instrumental practice in the study of the mind. Between 1880 and 1930, drawings gained currency as a form of scientific evidence - as stable, reproducible signals from a hidden interior. I begin with the use of drawings as data in the child study movement, move to the telepathic transmission of drawings in psychical research and conclude with the development of drawing as an experimental and diagnostic tool for studying neurological impairment. Despite significant shifts in the theoretical and disciplinary organisation of the mind sciences in the early twentieth century, researchers attempted to stabilise the use of subject-generated drawings as evidence by controlling the contexts in which drawings were produced and reproduced, and crafting subjects whose interiority could be effectively circumscribed. While movements such as psychoanalysis and art therapy would embrace the narrative interpretation of patient art, neuropsychology continued to utilise drawings as material traces of cognitive functions.

[Art, mental health, and public healthcare: profile of a care culture in the history of São Paulo city]. / Arte, saúde mental e atenção pública: traços de uma cultura de cuidado na história da cidade de São Paulo.

By studying the inclusion of artistic and cultural activities in the care provided throughout the history of public mental healthcare in greater São Paulo, Brazil, we can better understand and characterize the practices adopted in the Psychosocial Care Centers in the city today. Experiments carried out between the 1920s and 1990s are investigated, based on bibliographic research. The contemporary data were obtained from research undertaken at 126 workshops at 21 Psychosocial Care Centers in the same city between April 2007 and April 2008. The findings indicate that the current trend in mental healthcare, whose clinical perspective spans the realms of art and mental health and has territorial ramifications, has maintained some of the features encountered in earlier mental healthcare experiments.

The Colour Treatment: A Convergence of Art and Medicine at the Red Cross Russell Lea Nerve Home.

When the Red Cross opened its new convalescent home at Russell Lea in Sydney in 1919, it contained a coloured room designed for treating 'nerve cases'. This room was painted by Roy de Maistre, a young artist, and was modelled on the Kemp Prossor colour scheme trialled at the McCaul Convalescent Hospital in London for the treatment of shell shock. Dubbed the 'colour cure' by the popular press, this unconventional treatment was ignored by the Australian medical profession. The story of de Maistre's colour experiment is not widely known outside the specialist field of Australian art history. Focusing on the colour room as a point of convergence between art and medicine in the context of the First World War, this article investigates Red Cross activities and the care of soldiers suffering from nervous conditions.

[Chance meeting of psychiatry and art on the "dissecting table"]. / Pszichiátria és müvészet találkozása a boncasztaton.

This paper shows one of many aspects of the history of the Hungarian psychiatry between the two world wars. The data were collected from the "Hungarian Museum of Mind" opened for the public in 1931. It focuses on the collecting policy and the research topics of Hungarian psychiatrists working in the asylums in those days. In 2007 Lipotmezo (the Hungarian Psychiatric and Neurological Institution the biggest Hungarian asylum since its foundations in 1868) was closed. Its art collection was rescued by the Hungarian Academy of Science. From 2007 this collection has been named The Psychiatric Art Collection of the HAS, maintained by The Research Centre for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Science. The artistic objects and documents are properly stored and available for research. Two art historians are in charge of curating the exhibitions and leading the research on the psychiatric art in the context of history, psychiatric history and contemporary culture. This work follows the well established practice of the eighties and nineties when the art historian Edit Plesznivy expert in this subject listed the pieces of this historical collection, and through the context of outsider art and art therapy she channeled it into the field of art institutions. Leaving the hospital environment and having been introduced to the academic world the research is looking toward the collection has been changed and new perspectives have been opened. Beside the art works of the patients living as inmates in mental hospitals, the collecting work and therapeutic practices of the mental physicians became a significant research topic also. Arpad Selig as an assistant physician at the Mental and Neurological Clinic in Lipotmezo started to collect the patients' works of art in the first decade of twentieth century. During the 1920s he was appointed the director of Angyalfold Asylum found in 1883. Selig died in 1929 and the Museum of Mind named after its enthusiastic founder Selig was registered in the official list of museums in 1932. In the 1930s Istvan Zsako the physician director of Angyalfold Asylum took care of the collection. He enriched it with further historical documents on the institution, bibliographies, press cuts, tableaux and photographic albums referring to the institution and the research practiceses of the physicians. After Zsako was appointed the director of Lipotmezo the collections of Lipotmezo and Angyalfold were joined. The collection suffered during the World War II and this period is can be viewed as a caesura in the practice of collecting. Later, from the late fifties, the physician Fekete Janos, head of the nurse training in Lipotmezo was in charge of the collection. He focused on sorting and installation of the remnants and also collected new works of the inpatients. During the seventies the psychotherapy was inaugurated and in the eighties the art therapy exercises began. However, through the reconstruction of the therapeutical and collecting practices show that these evolving art therapy practices partly rooted in the work of psychiatric treatment in the twenties and thirties. Psychiatrists, who lived in the asylums too, supported the so called "noble entertainments" - including artistic drawing, painting, reading and playing musical instruments - and as a part of the daily routines of these mental institutions they formed a locally particular modus operandi of therapy. The inmates of the asylums, the physicians and patients cooperated to enrich the collection which was a venue to represent the life of the institution and to demonstrate the research of the physicians. Despite of the significant differences between the pre- and postwar periods concerning the sociocultural and political structures there is a well defined connection between "curing and curating".

[Emancipation of the works of artists with psychiatric illness - Artistic reflections from the twentieth century and the Art Brut]. / Pszichiátriai beteg alkotók müveinek évszádos emancipációja - XX. századi kézömüvészeti reflexiók és az art brut.

The study presents the emancipation of the artworks of psychiatric patients through the review of four centuries, focusing on some of the most important medical cultural and art historical stages of the period between the 18th and the 21st century, which is a particularly relevant era in this regard. It touches on the collections linked to psychiatrists and hospitals that were formed primarily on the basis of the researches that were analyzing the connection between creativity and mental illness. After that, the study discusses the ever-changing attitudes and preferences of artists' and major artistic movements towards psychosis and the pictorial world of the psychotic. With great care, it analyses the aesthetic category of the art brut, which is connected to the French painter Jean Dubuffet and was born in the middle of the 1940s, and the relationship between contemporary art and art brut. In connection with some of the most significant art brut collections and exhibitions, the works of a few classical and contemporary art brut artists are also discussed (Adolf Wolfli, Louis Soutter, Aloise Corbaz, August Walla ).

[The embroidery work of the lady at Saint-Anne Hospital]. / Ouvrage de dame a l'hôpital Sainte-Anne.

In July 1974, a 72 old woman had been a patient for forty years in Sainte-Anne Hospital, Ward C. As she had again a violent brawl with her neighbour patient, she revealed being a tremendous artist. She had been confined on account of dementia paralytica in the Mecca of malariotherapy, and passionately devoted herself to embroidery. Her fancy work was rather a matter for Jean Dubuffet's art through its perfect expression and deserved being known.