Paintings of the psyche: an innovative hospital program and museum in Rio has nurtured highly acclaimed artists while revealing the healing power of art.

• Author: Holston, Mark

For half a century, the environment that has nurtured some of Brazil's most celebrated artists has not been the customary setting of an exclusive art school or Bohemian enclave, but the cloistered surroundings of an aging psychiatric hospital. Isolated behind fortress-like walls in a nondescript residential neighborhood hi the vast working-class region of Rio de Janeiro's Zona Norte, the Pedro II Psychiatric Hospital has, since 1946, been a pioneer in using artistic expression as therapy for patients suffering from schizophrenia. The hospital's occupational-therapy unit has proven to be a breeding ground for top-flight creativity in the plastic arts. And, since its founding in 1952, the institution's Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente (Museum of Images of the Unconscious) has, through regular exhibitions and advocacy of their work, elevated the creative endeavors of mental patients in Brazil to a stature not found in many other nation.

The significance in Brazil of "Images of the Unconscious," as the movement is known, was underscored when the country's top art experts tackled the daunting task of identifying Brazil's most representative and outstanding artwork. Their charge was to create an all-encompassing exhibition to commemorate in 2000 the five-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of Brazil and document its rich art history. By the time the Rediscovery exhibition traveled in 2001 to Buenos Aires, Argentina, its first stop on a tour to the Guggenheim Museum in New York and may other major museums of the world, the show had been edited down to four broad thematic areas--baroque, popular, contemporary, and art of the unconscious.

"The answer to the question of why there is a special section of images of the unconscious," explains Nelson Aguilar, the exhibition's chief curator, "certainly involves insight into just what it means to be Brazilian, since an institution like the Museum of Images of the Unconscious does not exist in Germany, the United States, Japan, or any other country."

In the mid 1940s, a young staff psychiatrist, Dr. Nise da Silveira, was troubled by the overly violent methods used at that time to treat the mentally disturbed. Rather than lobotomics and electric shock, she believed occupational therapy, particularly art, might produce better results.

"The inmates of psychiatric hospitals who have recourse to use the language of the visual arts as a means of expression, the raw artists, the artists on the fringe of various genres and various arts, constitute an enormous family," she wrote years later. "There are surely great distances and differences between them, but a strong affinity draws them together. If we look for this common denominator, we find that they all possess, to varying degrees, a peculiar contract with the unconscious psyche, rare in people who are well adapted to the social norms. They are driven by the tendency to empathize with the objects of the outside world, finding in them pleasure and inspiration, contrary to the members of the other family, who turn inward toward inner representations, no matter how unsettling these may be."

In defining the value of art as therapy, Dr. da Silveira was quick to dismiss the traditional approach to art instruction in a hospital setting. "A painting studio in a psychiatric hospital," she wrote, conjures up two meanings. "It could be part of an occupational therapy ward where the patients make copies of hackneyed pictures, try to reproduce objects placed in front of them, decorate...