[Chance meeting of psychiatry and art on the "dissecting table"]

This paper shows one of many aspects of the history of the Hungarian psychiatry between the two world wars. The data were collected from the "Hungarian Museum of Mind" opened for the public in 1931. It focuses on the collecting policy and the research topics of Hungarian psychiatrists working in the asylums in those days. In 2007 Lipotmezo (the Hungarian Psychiatric and Neurological Institution the biggest Hungarian asylum since its foundations in 1868) was closed. Its art collection was rescued by the Hungarian Academy of Science. From 2007 this collection has been named The Psychiatric Art Collection of the HAS, maintained by The Research Centre for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Science. The artistic objects and documents are properly stored and available for research. Two art historians are in charge of curating the exhibitions and leading the research on the psychiatric art in the context of history, psychiatric history and contemporary culture. This work follows the well established practice of the eighties and nineties when the art historian Edit Plesznivy expert in this subject listed the pieces of this historical collection, and through the context of outsider art and art therapy she channeled it into the field of art institutions. Leaving the hospital environment and having been introduced to the academic world the research is looking toward the collection has been changed and new perspectives have been opened. Beside the art works of the patients living as inmates in mental hospitals, the collecting work and therapeutic practices of the mental physicians became a significant research topic also. Arpad Selig as an assistant physician at the Mental and Neurological Clinic in Lipotmezo started to collect the patients' works of art in the first decade of twentieth century. During the 1920s he was appointed the director of Angyalfold Asylum found in 1883. Selig died in 1929 and the Museum of Mind named after its enthusiastic founder Selig was registered in the official list of museums in 1932. In the 1930s Istvan Zsako the physician director of Angyalfold Asylum took care of the collection. He enriched it with further historical documents on the institution, bibliographies, press cuts, tableaux and photographic albums referring to the institution and the research practiceses of the physicians. After Zsako was appointed the director of Lipotmezo the collections of Lipotmezo and Angyalfold were joined. The collection suffered during the World War II and this period is can be viewed as a caesura in the practice of collecting. Later, from the late fifties, the physician Fekete Janos, head of the nurse training in Lipotmezo was in charge of the collection. He focused on sorting and installation of the remnants and also collected new works of the inpatients. During the seventies the psychotherapy was inaugurated and in the eighties the art therapy exercises began. However, through the reconstruction of the therapeutical and collecting practices show that these evolving art therapy practices partly rooted in the work of psychiatric treatment in the twenties and thirties. Psychiatrists, who lived in the asylums too, supported the so called "noble entertainments" - including artistic drawing, painting, reading and playing musical instruments - and as a part of the daily routines of these mental institutions they formed a locally particular modus operandi of therapy. The inmates of the asylums, the physicians and patients cooperated to enrich the collection which was a venue to represent the life of the institution and to demonstrate the research of the physicians. Despite of the significant differences between the pre- and postwar periods concerning the sociocultural and political structures there is a well defined connection between "curing and curating".