ADOLF WÖLFLI
Wölfli's life
Adolf Wölfli was born in 1864 in Bern, the son of a
bricklayer. His father was an alcoholic and left his wife and their seven children when
Adolf was a few years' old. His mother had to go out to work. The poverty-stricken family
was soon taken into care by the authorities, and Adolf was separated from his mother and
his brothers and sisters when he was only eight. He was forced into service on a farm,
where he was beaten and badly treated. This downtrodden and miserably neglected child was
confronted with his own puberty and a consuming desire for love - a love, however, which
was never to be requited.
In the grip of an overpowering sexual drive, and acquainted only with the language of
violence, he became aggressive towards little girls. After attempting to rape both a
seven-year-old and a fourteen-year-old girl he was sentenced to two years of corrective
detention. On his release, however, he was not able to control himself and was arrested
for gross indecency towards a three-year old girl. At this point he was sent to the Waldau
lunatic asylum in Bern, where his schizophrenia was diagnosed, and where he remained from
his admission in 1892 until his death in 1930.
Waldau
A 'human accident', indeed. And what about the king,
'Saint Adolf', as he himself called one of the multiple personalities in his schizophrenic
existence?
© Adolf-Wölfli-Stiftung,
Bern Art Gallery, Switzerland
Adolf Wölfli became 'king', as it were, in the lunatic
asylum, as the institution was officially called at the time - king of his own home-made
universe. He began his artistic career in the cell which he inhabited alone, as he was
aggressive towards other people and was only satisfied when drawing, writing, painting or
making music, which in fact he continued to do more or less without a break for
the rest of his life. Driven by a manic productive energy, he wrote, drew, painted and
composed on all the paper he could get his hands on: his literary oeuvre alone fills more
than 20,000 written pages, some of them the size of newspaper pages, and in addition there
is his artistic production, comprising many thousands of drawings in colour and black and
white.
'Manic creativity' is a term well suited to Wölfli: one of his manic traits was to fill
the page completely, so that no trace of white remained. Emptiness terrified him;
his pictures are full of ornamentation and symbols, reproduced with few variations in
picture after picture.
He collected his works in 'books'. His largest, and final work, the uncompleted
'Trauermarsch', contains more than 8,000 numbered pages, filled with poems written mostly
in a fantasy, dialect language, with musical compositions jotted down in a six-line system
of notes (as yet undeciphered), and of course with ornamental pictures and collages made
from clippings from newspapers and magazines.
