“Tosquelles upholds the need for an open, lively, expanded institution, which inserts itself in its community and is transformed continuously through constant work and movement,” wrote the museum directors Judith Carrera and Manuel Borja-Ville when this exhibition was presented at the Reina Sofía in 2022–23. Subtitled “Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut,” the show connects illness, the unconscious, and creativity. After fleeing Franco’s government during the Spanish Civil War, the Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles, in 1940, created “institutional psychotherapy” at the Saint-Alban Psychiatric Hospital, in Southern France. Promoting non-hierarchical ties between patients, doctors, and outsiders, his method used art as a way to help patients. During the German occupation of France, Tosquelles welcomed intellectuals and artists associated with the avant-garde. In 1945, Jean Dubuffet coined the term art brut, a response to the unconventional work made by the patients at Saint-Alban. —Jeanne Malle