/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/PAINTING-BRAZIL: Mental Patients-Cum- Artists Win Acclaim

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 1 2000 (IPS) - Paintings by patients from Rio de Janeiro’s psychiatric hospitals form an important part of the extensive “Brazil 500 Years” exhibit, a panorama of the plastic arts created throughout the nation’s history.

The show, promoted by the Biennial Foundation in Sao Paulo, begins in April as a celebration of the 500-years since the Portuguese arrived in Brazil.

Its “Images of the Unconscious” section brings together the creations of psychiatric patients from Rio hospitals, works that have been collected over many decades and preserved in two local museums.

Arthur Bispo do Rosario, the best known of these artists, initially began painting as therapy. Today his work is recognised by art critics for its aesthetic value.

Going beyond traditional artistic genres, Bispo do Rosario painted clothing, mantles and a wide variety of objects. He made embroideries using vivid colours, often incorporating long texts.

Among his 842 works held by the Nise da Silveira Museum, which is located at the psychiatric centre where Bispo do Rosario lived for 50 years, his sculpture “21 Sailboats” stands out. It is a wooden canoe stood upright, with wheels and coloured cloth sails, strewn with painted words.

Another is a colourful military pea jacket, with small penants representing military medals. He considered it a sacred cloak and wore it on serious occasions.

Bispo do Rosario was born in the 1910s in Sergipe, a small, poor state in Brazil’s northeast. He was a sailor, a boxer, car cleaner and domestic employee until, in 1938, already living in Rio, he began saying that he had seen Christ accompanied by seven blue angels.

He was institutionalised in the Juliano Moreira hospital as a paranoid-schizophrenic and there began to work on his mission from God: “Reconstruct the world” through paintings and sculptures.

The artist always asked his visitors to tell him the colour of his “aura,” and only paid attention to those who guessed or knew that it was blue, one of his favourite colours.

Bispo do Rosario died in 1989 of pneumonia, lauded as a symbol of art’s role in overcoming psychiatric problems, the creative abilities of people considered “crazy,” and the mistakes made in using traditional treatments, such as electro-shock therapy.

The tenth anniversary of his death was commemorated last year with a theatre production about his life, and the publication of the book “The Universe According to Arthur Bispo do Rosario,” by Patricia Burrowes, who chose the artist’s life and work for her masters thesis in Communication and Culture.

Bispo do Rosario was able to “extract poetry from a tragic world,” concludes Burrowes.

Fernando Diniz and Emygdio de Barros also produced their numerous paintings while in a psychiatric hospital, and are also to be represented in “Brazil 500 Years.”

Barros, who died in 1986 at age 90, is “Brazil’s best painter,” declared the poet and art critic Ferreira Gullar, who recently finished writing a history of the country’s art.

The ascension and recognition of these artists is the result of Nise da Silveira’s labour of love. He revolutionised psychiatry in Brazil, substituting the traditional – and often violent approach – with the plastic arts.

Throughout his decades of work at the Don Pedro II Hospital in Rio de Janeiro, he accumulated more than 300,000 of patients’ designs and paintings, which today are found on display, and precariously preserved, in the Museum of Unconscious Images, which he founded in 1952.

The museum has sent parts of its collection for shows throughout Europe. And in April some of its works will be part of the most important exhibition for Brazilian artists, alongside Bispo do Rosario’s creations, which belong to another museum named after the inspiring artist.

Nise da Silveira died last Octuber at age 94. He never permitted the works of the museum he created to be sold.

Befitting of the artists he admired and encouraged, as well as his own achievements, his life is documented in a film, also titled “Images of the Unconscious,” by Leon Hirszman, one of Brazil’s greatest cinematographers.