ADOLF WÖLFLI

Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler
- The Mad Artist

Due to this artistic activity, as the years went by Wölfli became calmer and gained more self-control. Often, one could carry on a normal conversation with him, and on these occasions he was simply Adolf Wölfli, an inmate of Waldau. At other times he was other personalities, but increasingly 'Saint Adolf'.

In his later years people began to commission drawings and paintings, so that his work began to bring in an income. He achieved a certain degree of fame even in his lifetime, not least due to his biographer, Dr. Walter Morgenthaler, the doctor who had treated him for many years, and who wrote a book about Wölfli's life and work as an artist. This book, entitled Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (The Mad Artist), was published in 1921, nine years before Wölfli died of cancer in 1930.

On the brink

This book suited the intellectual mood of the time very well: criticism of bourgeois society, lack of belief in the future, expressionism, an interest in the unconscious and a revival of the 'noble savage' idea - such trends fomented an interest in art produced by the mentally ill, a category which Wölfli of course pre-eminently represented. Wölfli was as far removed from acceptable (sexual) mores as could be, and yet he remained an unspoiled, imaginative child.

He stands for the power exercised by the unconscious over the individual psyche, and at the same time for an extraordinary gift of intense concentration. He was driven by madness, and yet by a productive urge to create which went way beyond the normal; indeed - in terms of the sheer quantity of his production - way beyond the scale of what a normal, healthy person has either the desire or the energy to produce.

He appeals to sides of our own personalities which (probably for all sorts of good reasons) are repressed, but which even so tend to surface in our dreams: to be ruthless and without scruples, to be tied to our work and thereby free, to live intensely on the brink all the time.

Saint Adolf

What did Wölfli write about in these thousands of pages? In the first place, he wrote his own imaginary biography, full of descriptions of fantastical journeys to all those remote and mysterious countries and cities, all those strange planets and other destinations composing the empire over which he, Saint Adolf, was the lord and master. Often he took along as a travelling companion a little child, Doufi, whose mother was none other than the Virgin Mary. All these narratives together form a monstrous work composed of notebooks measuring 40 x 50 cm, which even ten years before Wöfli's death made a pile more than two metres high.

© Adolf-Wölfli-Stiftung, Bern Art Gallery, Switzerland

Many of these accounts describe the fall, a totally abrupt drop from the pinnacle of being to the depths of death and Hell - only to be brought back to life again so that the celebrations, and the fall, could begin all over again:

Wihr wahren noch keine 10 Minutten lang Oben: Dah erkletertte ich an einer ge-eignetten Stelle Deren massiive, im höchsten Graade luxuriöse Brustwehr, wurde schwindlig und, fiel aus einer Altitude von zirka 723 Stund, in raasender Schnelle senkrecht hinunttÕr: und fiel und fiel, bis dass ich entlich untten af dem riesenhaften und, im höchsten Graade luxuriösen, Santa-Maria-Steern-Riesen-Doom-Riesen-Grand-Platz radikal und total zerquetschte und, zerspritzte. Ebjä!! Höhrndli ab u. Toot: Mause-Toot.

Wölfli had his own way of spelling, and his mania for the gigantesque is everywhere in evidence: everything is stressed or magnified to the point of absurdity. At the same time, these stories are not purely imaginative: biographical elements such as the attempted rapes and the longing for his mother are frequently repeated themes. They are, of course, clothed in the usual monstrous garb, but anyone with a knowledge of Wölfli's life can trace these biographical elements everywhere. In the last analysis, Wölfli was, through his art, his own therapist. And indeed, though he remained incurably schizophrenic to his death, he did become calmer as the years went by.