Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de l’Hôpital Sainte-Anne (MAHHSA)

The Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de l’Hôpital Sainte-Anne (MAHHSA) obtained national recognition in 2016, with the label “Musée de France”. This was the result of a long journey. In 1996, the Musée Singer-Polignac (former name of the MAHHSA), presented its first public exhibition of masterpieces from the Sainte-Anne Collection. From this day, temporary exhibitions took place in the museum (located directly within the hospital), and the Collection has also been exhibited in other locations : for instance at the National Gallery of Jeu de Paume (Paris) in 2003, or at the Prinzhorn Collection museum (Heidelberg) in 2021.

A very important exhibition of pieces occurred during the first worldwide psychiatric congress organized at the Sainte-Anne hospital in 1950. It brought back together artworks from psychiatric institutions and from private collections. Some of these pieces were donated to the hospital after this exhibition and formed the basis of the current Collection. Famous artists belonging to the outsider art world were included, such as Aloïse Corbaz, Albino Braz or Guillaume Pujolle.

Nowadays, the aim of the museum is to consider the artists and their works rather than their illnesses. As art-therapy workshops still exist today in the hospital, we believe that the productions made by patients reveal their artistic skills, regardless of their pathologies.The museum corpus counts more than 1800 art pieces. This is regularly increased by donations from contemporary artists committed to the museum. The museum also preserves works produced in the art-therapy workshops and left by their authors, as an archive counting more than 70 000 works on paper. The MAHHSA has the ambition to protect, study and exhibit and publish this extraordinary heritage. A documentation center, learning courses, art exhibitions and a seasonal cultural program are part of the activities that pace the life of this unique museum.