Kaira Cabañas : art brut et art moderne au Brésil

In July 1945 Jean Dubuffet initiated his search for art brut, a type of art outside the fine art tradition, and was attracted by the drawings of mental patients. In this lecture I present similar material, but from a different cultural context. The research stems from my current book-length study “Expressive Restraint: Modern Art and Madness in Brazil and Beyond.” With this work, I explore psychiatric patients’ work and how its reception informs the understanding and practice of modern art and its institutions in Brazil. At the center of this interdisciplinary account stand two prominent psychiatrists: Osório Cesar and Nise da Silveira. Both advocated non-aggressive psychiatric treatment, principally through the creation of painting studios for their patients. In the 1920s in São Paulo, Dr. Cesar’s publications and collaborations with avant-garde artists such as Flávio de Carvalho had profound effects on discussions of modern art and creativity, while his patients’ work was summoned as an example of how to move beyond academic conventions in art. In the 1940s in Rio, leading art critic Mário Pedrosa’s reception of Dr. Silveira’s patients’ work deeply informed his theorization of Gestalt and modern aesthetic response. I argue that his ideas contributed to an understanding of modern geometric abstraction as expressive. Finally, the lecture offers a crucial transnational perspective by placing this history in relation to European developments. Psychiatric patients’ work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art São Paulo in 1949, one year after the museum’s founding. Given this fact, it is notable that other psychiatric collections such as the Prinzhorn collection were not featured in art museums in Europe until the 1960s. I thus trace key differences in the genealogy of the relationship between modernism and madness, as well as in the foundation of the modern art museum in Brazil and Europe.

Biography

Kaira M. Cabañas is an art historian and visiting professor in the Departamento de Letras at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, as well as the author of The Myth of Nouveau Réalisme: Art and the Performative in Postwar France (2013, Yale University Press). In 2012 she served as guest co-curator for the exhibition Specters of Artaud: Language and the Arts in the 1950s at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Cabañas’s writings, which include essays on postwar art and film in Europe and Latin America, have appeared in numerous museum catalogues and academic journals including the Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne. She regularly contributes to Artforum.