FERDIERE - …du beau dans les productions des ... Lot n° 1047

French Mental Hygiene League Discovery of beauty in the productions of the spiritually ill Lot 47 is the typed text of a lecture given by Gaston Ferdière on Tuesday, February 26, 1962 at the French League of Mental Hygiene: "Discovery of beauty in the productions of the mentally ill". This is an unpublished document and rare enough to appear nowhere and to be properly impossible to obtain. It is complete except for part of pages 26 and 27 which have been torn out. This lecture is introduced by the President Dr Minkowski; its quick introduction is touching; it shows the quality of the fraternal relations between the two scholars. Ferdière takes Minkowski's postulate: "Art is Art, whatever its origin, or is not", as the starting point for his lecture. Then, paying tribute to Françoise Minkowska, he adds "Van Gogh was a lunatic. He was a real lunatic, and journalists who want to minimize certain things will try in vain to conceal him. He was a madman! And his madness was (to use Rimbaud's word) one of those we lock up. "Further on, after having developed, "In front of Van Gogh, Greco, Goya, a thousand others if we were to move on to writers? If we were to move on to poets, I could take Holberlin as an example. "Again..." Is this expression of "psycho-pathological art" legitimate? " This conference is prodigiously fascinating. Ferdière handles the concepts with the severity of the renowned scientist but dares to use humour and chase away the gloom of the universe, which is strictly psycho-pathological. He is still (see lot 45) eroding Dracoulidès' book... And despite his admiration and respect for Henri Ey, he opposes him on the creative character of the magnificent madness! And always "But then, why, this famous freedom that in a general way is said to be indispensable to the work of Art, this freedom without which Art cannot be Art, why would we come to refuse it and systematically