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Lot Essay
A troubled young man, Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930) was diagnosed with psychosis after being orphaned at the age of 10 and experiencing almost constant suffering as a result of state failures. In 1895, he was institutionalized at the Waldau Clinic in Bern, Switzerland, where he stayed for the remainder of his life. Shortly after his admission, Wölfli began to draw. As seen in the present work, his drawings are characterized by his trademark dense, color-filled compositions supported by text, and at times, musical compositions. His magnum opus, a multi-volume, 25,000-page epic illustrated text chronicles his imagined life as a knight, an emperor and a saint. While many of Wölfli’s drawings were created in book format, he also made single-sheet drawings he called portraits. The present drawing is exceptionally large in scale and its reverse is covered in text, which translates to:
Croesuses,/talismen, governmental. Small, big, and big-big-governmental regencies, peddlers/and businessmen, clergymen, judges, hoteliers and bankers, etcetera, etcetera: Again awakened by death/the tremendous rubbish and rubble mass in a trice! Letting them vanish without a trace/and then round: a responsible hour, calculation-start, 33 wrath hours high/gigantic grand palace, with his word, ice-turning, brand new, recreated:/to wit, in a trice. The latter had 200,000, two-horn cubic-hour, contents, with round, pong:/a trillion two-horns, souls: from where the above number, ever, maintaining factory workers male and female./The enormous misfortune-catastrophe led to a dreadful war. Almost/on all gigantic town-streets, ditto, grand plazas—he sudden! On the promenade, gardens and church-yards, etcetera: lay nearly countless killed, shot, stabbed, or otherwise/maimed, dead or wounded warriors all around. All those who belonged to the local, giant-town population. Yours truly, St. Adolph II, bomber general and generalissimo/the great God the Father-avant-garde, with his own tremendous,/war-army, put a crisp end to the whole, entire misery, and was now the glorious victor of the gigantic battle of St. Mary star-hall. The image is the gigantic and beautiful Vereena star. But no sooner had I again, my impeccably gathered and instructed my own war army than we heard all sorts of storm and night signals. The enemies of Plevan were at the eastern border of the gigantic town, searing, killing, and branding everywhere, and they invaded the latter and now, once again, off: to the mutual struggle. Almost all around the whole, eastern parts of the gigantic town, they mounted, in the gigantically countless places, terrible attacks, skirmishes, duels, fights, as well as minor, major or gigantic battles./The thorough and correct decision of the latter in the dreadful gigantic -
Dr. Walter Morgenthaler, a psychiatrist at the clinic, took interest in Wölfli’s output and in 1921 published the seminal text Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (Madness and Art), a full-length study of Wölfli’s life and art. This was one of the first major publications in the field that would later become Outsider Art. Several decades later, in the 1940s, artist Jean Dubuffet advanced the conversation around asylum art beyond the study of psychosis and into the realm of formal analysis. He and André Breton became active advocates for Wölfli’s work, even visiting the Waldau Clinic in the mid-1950s. In a 1965 exhibition catalogue for the eleventh Exposition international du surréalisme, Breton wrote that Wölfli’s “vivid creations…as an ensemble represent one of the three or four most important oeuvres of the twentieth century.” (Daniel Baumann, “Calculation of Interest: The Response to Adolf Wölfli’s work, 1921-2002,” in Elka Spoerri and Daniel Baumann, The Art of Adolf Wölfli (New York, 2003), p.33).
Croesuses,/talismen, governmental. Small, big, and big-big-governmental regencies, peddlers/and businessmen, clergymen, judges, hoteliers and bankers, etcetera, etcetera: Again awakened by death/the tremendous rubbish and rubble mass in a trice! Letting them vanish without a trace/and then round: a responsible hour, calculation-start, 33 wrath hours high/gigantic grand palace, with his word, ice-turning, brand new, recreated:/to wit, in a trice. The latter had 200,000, two-horn cubic-hour, contents, with round, pong:/a trillion two-horns, souls: from where the above number, ever, maintaining factory workers male and female./The enormous misfortune-catastrophe led to a dreadful war. Almost/on all gigantic town-streets, ditto, grand plazas—he sudden! On the promenade, gardens and church-yards, etcetera: lay nearly countless killed, shot, stabbed, or otherwise/maimed, dead or wounded warriors all around. All those who belonged to the local, giant-town population. Yours truly, St. Adolph II, bomber general and generalissimo/the great God the Father-avant-garde, with his own tremendous,/war-army, put a crisp end to the whole, entire misery, and was now the glorious victor of the gigantic battle of St. Mary star-hall. The image is the gigantic and beautiful Vereena star. But no sooner had I again, my impeccably gathered and instructed my own war army than we heard all sorts of storm and night signals. The enemies of Plevan were at the eastern border of the gigantic town, searing, killing, and branding everywhere, and they invaded the latter and now, once again, off: to the mutual struggle. Almost all around the whole, eastern parts of the gigantic town, they mounted, in the gigantically countless places, terrible attacks, skirmishes, duels, fights, as well as minor, major or gigantic battles./The thorough and correct decision of the latter in the dreadful gigantic -
Dr. Walter Morgenthaler, a psychiatrist at the clinic, took interest in Wölfli’s output and in 1921 published the seminal text Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (Madness and Art), a full-length study of Wölfli’s life and art. This was one of the first major publications in the field that would later become Outsider Art. Several decades later, in the 1940s, artist Jean Dubuffet advanced the conversation around asylum art beyond the study of psychosis and into the realm of formal analysis. He and André Breton became active advocates for Wölfli’s work, even visiting the Waldau Clinic in the mid-1950s. In a 1965 exhibition catalogue for the eleventh Exposition international du surréalisme, Breton wrote that Wölfli’s “vivid creations…as an ensemble represent one of the three or four most important oeuvres of the twentieth century.” (Daniel Baumann, “Calculation of Interest: The Response to Adolf Wölfli’s work, 1921-2002,” in Elka Spoerri and Daniel Baumann, The Art of Adolf Wölfli (New York, 2003), p.33).