Common Creativities
Common Creativities
The understanding of a shared source of creativity among the sane and insane came to the fore with the exhibition and collection of patients’ work in both France and Brazil in the 1940s. The visual evidence of a common creativity was often underwritten by discussions of artistic quality and how the patients’ work looked “futurist” or “surrealist.” This chapter turns to 9 Artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro, an exhibition of the creative work of nine of Dr. Nise da Silveira’s patients. The exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art São Paulo in 1949, one year after the museum’s founding. The chapter examines how the patients’ work became key to the discourse of modernist abstraction and its institutionalization in Brazil, just as it was regularly exhibited in the very spaces of Brazil’s first modern museums. Such circumstances differ notably from French artist Jean Dubuffet’s contemporaneous theorization of art brut, which is also addressed in this chapter.
Keywords: common creativity, art brut, Jean Dubuffet, psychopathological art, Nise da Silveira, art therapy, Collection de l’art brut, Lausanne, 9 Artistas de Engenho de Dentro do Rio de Janeiro, museum of modern art
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