Adolf Wölfli

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Wölfli (around 1920)

Adolf Wölfli (born February 29, 1864 in Bowil near Bern ; † November 6, 1930 in Waldau ) was a Swiss visual artist , composer and writer .

Life

The Skt Wandanna Cathedral in Band Wall , 1910
Heilanstalt Waldau , painting by Adolf Wölfli, 1921
Schähring = Hall and Schährer = Skt. Adolf = Ring , 1926
Campbell's Tomato Soup , collage, 1929

Wölfli was born the youngest of seven children. The alcoholic father left the family in 1870, the mother died in 1873. As a half-orphan , Adolf Wölfli had to earn his living under difficult, loveless conditions as a hired boy for various farming families in Schangnau , later as a servant or handyman. In 1890 he was sentenced to two years in prison for attempted rape on a 5 and a 14 year old girl . When he relapsed three years after his release, an investigation into his mental health problems was ordered . The diagnosis of schizophrenia was made in the Waldau Psychiatric Clinic near Bern .

Wölfli lived in the Waldau mental hospital from 1895 until his death. During his 35-year stay, he created a comprehensive work of around 1460 drawings , around 1560 collages and 25,000 pages with stories, poems and musical compositions bound in notebooks . The productive work was mainly created in a 7-square-meter chamber with colored pencils and pencils on thin, wood-containing waste paper. Impressions from Schangnau, Bern, Waldau and Emmental, the only places that Wölfli had got to know, were described. He is considered one of the most important representatives of the brut or outsider art.

His psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler dedicated the book A Mentally Ill as an Artist to him in 1921 , which for the first time took a patient suffering from schizophrenia seriously as an artist. It was only long after his death that his pictorial and poetic work, which defies common aesthetic categories, became known to a wider audience. In 1948 the French painter Jean Dubuffet exhibited 120 drawings by Wölfli in the Compagnie de l'Art Brut in Paris; At Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, the field of sculpture for the mentally ill was dedicated to him.

Wölfli's estate has been kept in the Adolf Wölfli Foundation in the Kunstmuseum Bern since 1975 , scientifically processed and exhibited by the curator Elka Spoerri. The collection includes a collage from 1929 that shows the can of Campbell's Tomato Soup long before Andy Warhol's famous work from 1962 . Further groups of works by Adolf Wölfli can be found in the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, in the Psychiatry Museum in Bern , in the Kunstmuseum Basel , in the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen , in the Kunsthaus Zug , in the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau and in the Museum im Lagerhaus in St Gallen.

Wölfli's grave in Bern's Schosshaldenfriedhof has now been lifted.

Published works

  • From the cradle to the grave , 2 volumes, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986
  • Geographical booklet No. 11 , Schriften 1912–1913, Hatje, Stuttgart, 1991

Settings

His own compositions have proven to be performable, although the way of his notation differs from the conventional one. Based on a photograph of Wölfli with a paper trumpet made by himself, it is also known that he tried to play his compositions. He also called himself a composer in one of his identities .

In addition, his poetry material has meanwhile inspired numerous composers to further settings, including:

  • Wolfgang Rihm : Wölfli songbook for bass baritone and piano (1980); Orchestra version 1981
  • Georg Friedrich Haas : Short opera Adolf Wölfli (1981)
  • Per Nørgård : Opera The Divine Tivoli (1983)
  • Graeme Revell : Nurse With Wound And Déficit Des Années Antérieures - Necropolis, Amphibians & Reptiles - The Music Of Adolf Wölfli (1986)
  • Karlheinz Essl : Sound / Video / Performance ALLgebrah. Eine Kopfwelt (2001) - together with the video artist Michaela Grill
  • Bernhard Gál : Out: Into the, forest. (Sound installation, 2001); (CD version, 2004)
  • Georges Aperghis : Wölfli-Kantata (2005); CD 2014 with the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart.

Further settings can be found on the website of the Adolf Wölfli Foundation.

literature

  • Daniel Baumann: Adolf Wölfli. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . November 21, 2013 .
  • Adolf Wölfli - writer, poet, draftsman, composer , with contributions by Daniel Baumann, Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet, Josef Helfenstein, Louis A. Sass, Elka Spoerri, Harald Szeemann, Max Wechsler and Allen S. Weiss, ed. Adolf Wölfli Foundation. Wiese-Verlag, Basel / Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern 1996, ISBN 3-909164-52-8 .
  • Daniel Baumann, Berno Odo Polzer (eds.): Kopfwelten. ADOLF WÖLFLI: writer, poet, draftsman, composer . Waspennest, Graz 2001, ISBN 3-85458-306-0 .
  • Reto Caluori: Adolf Wölfli . In: Andreas Kotte (Ed.): Theater Lexikon der Schweiz . Volume 3, Chronos, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-0340-0715-9 , p. 2119 f.
  • Eva Demski : Adolf Wölfli: A whole universe , in: Eva Demski: On the way . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1988.
  • Walter Morgenthaler: A mentally ill artist: Adolf Wölfli . Bern 1921. Reprint: Medusa-Verlag, Vienna 1985, ISBN 3-85446-115-1 .
  • Portrait of a productive accident: Adolf Wölfli , Documents and Research, ed. and with contributions by Bettina Hunger, Hubert Thüring ... [et al.], Basel [etc.], Stroemfeld / Nexus 1993, ISBN 3-86109-105-4 .
  • Pete Smith: From a poor man's rich art . In: Ärzte Zeitung of July 4, 2011.
  • Elka Spoerri: The Art of Adolf Wölfli . American Folk Art Museum, New York 2003, ISBN 0-691-11498-6 .
  • Gerd Presler : Adolf Wölfli, The total denial. In: L'Art brut - art between genius and madness . dumont Tb 111, Cologne 1981, pp. 38-50, ISBN 3-7701-1307-1 .

Web links

Commons : Adolf Wölfli  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual references, comments

  1. ↑ cf. Eva Demski, p. 82f
  2. ↑ cf. Eva Demski, p. 86f
personal data
SURNAME Wölfli, Adolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss painter
DATE OF BIRTH February 29, 1864
PLACE OF BIRTH Bowil near Bern
DATE OF DEATH November 6, 1930
Place of death Waldau