Psy-Knowledge and Avant-Garde in Brazil (1928–1948)

This paper aims to trace how the art produced in Brazilian psychiatric hospitals gained a new identity from the interwar period onwards, becoming recognized as modern art amid a substantial circulation of psychoanalysis by artists and psychiatrists. For this purpose, I first examine early 20th-century Brazilian psychiatric and aesthetic texts on psychoanalysis and art. Then, I use the discourse of these actors as a framework to indicate how the cross-fertilization between psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and avant-garde art movements led to the fusion of madness and sanity in the arts. To develop the argument, I focus on Dr. Osório Thaumaturgo Cesar, a psychiatrist at the Juquery Hospital in São Paulo, Brazil, and his studies of artistic expression.