In 1921, a Swiss psychiatrist published a book with a title that sounded like a contradiction: one of his inmates, a mentally ill patient, was an artist. And from that oxymoron an entire discipline was founded. The man in question, Adolf Wölfli, never knew it: he had been locked up in the Waldau asylum for more than two decades when he was labeled, and he would die there without knowing that André Breton would place his work among the three or four most important of the 20th century.
Who was it? Wölfli was born on February 29, 1864 near Bern and died on November 6, 1930 in the aforementioned Waldau psychiatric clinic, where he entered in 1895 after being convicted of sexual assault on minors. There he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and he also remained there for thirty-five years, without ever going out on the street again. He almost always worked in a cell of just seven square meters: the result There were 1,460 drawings, 1,560 collages and some 25,000 pages of writings with all kinds of creations, from texts to invented music, and all often bound by himself.
The obrón The autobiographical fantasy that started his legend, ‘Von der Wiege bis zum Graab’ (‘From the cradle to the grave’), takes up just over 3,000 of those pages and was created between 1908 and 1912. Then came the geographical and algebraic notebooks (1912-1916), the song and dance notebooks (1917-1922, about 7,000 pages) and the dance and march album notebooks (1924-1928). He even created a funeral march that he left unfinished when he died.
To the heavens In that narrative he promoted himself in stages: first he was the boy Doufi, then the Knight Adolf, then the Emperor Adolf and finally, Saint Adolf II. Each drawing also incorporated its own musical notation, with a staff of six lines instead of five, which Wölfli interpreted by rolling up a sheet of paper. He did not simply improvise: he also made small pieces that he called “bread art”, expressly designed to sell to doctors and visitors.
The good doctor. None of this would have come out of Waldau without Walter Morgenthaler. The doctor arrived at the hospital in 1907 and, unlike his colleagues, did not treat Wölfli’s graphic impulse as a symptom that had to be contained, but as a production that would give free rein to many aspects of his illness. In 1921 he published ‘Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler’ (‘A mentally ill person as an artist’), a monograph that took Wölfli out of clinical anonymity and turned his work into an object of interest for two very different circles of thinkers: psychiatry and the artistic avant-garde.
Brute art. Jean Dubuffet discovered Wölfli’s work in 1945 and called him “the great Wölfli”, according to herself. foundation that manages his legacy. Three years later, Dubuffet and Breton founded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut, thus creating the label that would bring together artists with no academic training or intention to exhibit. In 1965, in the catalog for a surrealist exhibition in Paris, Breton described Wölfli’s work as one of the three or four most important of the century. The definitive accolade came in 1972: the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann brought his drawings and writings to the influential art exhibition Document 5 of Kassel, along with a reconstruction of his cell.
There are those who compare today the whole of his work with ‘In the Realms of the Unreal’, the equally excessive manuscript by the American Henry Darger. Both Wölfli and Darger unintentionally earned a space in history: someone outside of them decided, after their death or imprisonment, that it deserved to be contemplated as an artistic work. Since then, there have been exhibitions about Wölfli, some huge, like the one in Japan in 2017, which included the collective efforts of three museums.
Where is. A good part of Wölfli’s 25,000 pages are still distributed among archives and private collections, as well as in partial catalogs published since the 1970s. The foundation maintains an open inventory and continues to incorporate pieces that reappear at auctions or donations. He also continues to receive inquiries from private collectors who locate loose sheets and want to confirm their provenance within the original notebooks. With no expected closing date for this documentation work, each piece that appears forces us to rewrite, even if just a little, the map of what Wölfli managed to produce in those seven square meters. A whole world.
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