Art and madness?

on Flavia Corpas

Dates: September 9, 16, 23, 30, October 07, 14, 21 and 28, 2026
Wednesdays
Hour: 19h to 21h
Duration: 8 meetings
Audience: general interested parties
Investment: R$ 640,00 + fees

Online course
Live, via video conferencing platform
Recorded classes available for a limited time only
Includes certificate at the end
For Libras interpreter, request by email cursos@mam.org.br with 7 business days' notice.

Art and madness? That's the question that will guide the eight sessions of this course. 

Reflecting on this relationship is, above all, an ethical choice in the face of the complex conversations between the world of art and the experience of madness. Without resorting to stereotypes or ready-made answers, the course offers a space for investigation that encompasses art history, psychoanalysis, and social ways of understanding madness.

In each meeting, a new question will guide the reading of texts and the analysis of works by artists who, in different ways, approach this central theme. The goal is to create reflections that unite theory and practice.

If, on the one hand, the history and the art system demonstrate a recurring interest in the languages ​​and productions originating from madness, on the other hand, it becomes necessary to ask: what are the consequences of this interest for the field of art itself? And, furthermore, what effects does this movement produce on subjects historically designated as mad and on the clinic and other forms of social agency of madness?

Amidst displacements, tensions, and inventions, the course invites us to see art and madness not as rigid categories, but as territories in permanent dispute, fertile ground for new ways of seeing, interpreting, and creating.

Agenda

Class 1 - Is there a history of art and madness?

• A historical overview of the relationship between art and madness.
• Raw art, virgin art, images from the unconscious.

Lesson 2 – Hysteria and surrealism: who was the “delightful Augustine”?

• The surrealist approach to hysteria
• The invention of hysteria: how Jean-Martin Charcot used photography to represent the diseased body.
• The hysteria and feminist critique of art history

Lesson 3 – Madness = absence of work?

• History of madness in the Classical Age
• Madness, absence of work, the text of Foucault

Lesson 4 – Are we all delusional?

• Art, psychoanalysis and madness

Lesson 5 – Arthur Bispo do Rosário: artist or madman?

• Bishop of the Rosary: ​​work of life
• The Bispo do Rosário effect on contemporary art.

Lesson 6 – Does madness have a gender?

• Aurora Cursino, Stela do Patrocínio, Margueritte Duras, Maura Lopes Cansado, Leonora Carrington, Nellie Bly and Eugênia Álvaro Moreyra

Lesson 7 – Driving the museum crazy?

• Exhibitions on art and madness in Brazil

Lesson 8 – Art and clinical practice: how to think about mental health today?

• The Brazilian Psychiatric Reform: the anti-asylum struggle, the re-signification of madness, and experiences with art therapy.
• Mental health and intersectionality

Flavia Corpas

Flavia Corpas is a psychoanalyst working in private practice, a researcher, an independent curator of visual arts, and an artist. She holds a post-doctoral degree in Literature from UFRJ (2018) and a doctorate in Clinical Psychology from PUC/RJ (2014), both with research on Arthur Bispo do Rosario. She is the organizer of the catalogue raisonné of Arthur Bispo do Rosario and other publications about the artist, such as the book by critic Frederico Morais (2013). Among her curatorial work, the exhibitions “Walter Firmo: a look at Bispo de Rosario”, “Almost Here” by Daniel Senise, and “Reflexivos” by Iran do Espírito Santo stand out. She is the creator and curator of the project Cartographies of Creation – mapping artistic production in the field of mental health (FUNARTE/2009). She has been a lecturer in the Art and Psychoanalysis course at MAM/SP since 2016. Co-founder of the P_A_F collective (Psychoanalysis, Art and Feminism). In her research, she explores the relationships between art and psychoanalysis, intersected by issues that question her in her clinical practice, such as madness, gender, the feminine, and feminisms. As an artist, she worked as a contemporary dancer, resuming her work in 2025 with the performance-installation "Augustine-Zizi-Felismina," where she recovers the history of women considered insane based on photographs of inmates from the first asylum in Brazil, found in old medical records during her doctoral research.

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Students, teachers and retirees have a 10% discount
Doubts:
cursos@mam.org.br
WhatsApp: 11 99774 3987

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credits

Image: Flávio de Carvalho, Women, 1968. MAM São Paulo Collection. Photo: Romulo Fialdini