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| Aloïse is eleven years old when her mother dies. She continues her studies and graduates from high school in 1906. She falls in love with a student; her sister, however, seems to have played some role in destroying this relationship. Aloïse dreams of becoming a singer. In 1911, she moves to Germany where she works first as a teacher, then as a governess for the Chaplain of William II in Potsdam. It is at this time that she develops an imaginary passion for the Emperor. The outbreak of the war forces her to go back home to Lausanne. Her first psychological problems appear when she is twenty-seven years old. Aloïse is hospitalized first in 1918 at the mental hospital in Cery-sur-Lausanne, then from 1920 until her death at the hospital of La Rosière. During the first years of her institutionalization, she isolates herself completely and has occasional attacks of violence. She begins to adjust to her life at the hospital and is put in charge of ironing the linen. It is probably around 1920 that she begins to write and draw in secret. Her pictorial production of this period has been almost completely destroyed. It is only after 1936 that Professor Hans Steck, then director of the hospital, and Dr. Jacqueline Porret-Forel, general practitioner, become interested in her work. Aloïse draws most often with colored pencils and crayons, sometimes in addition to petal and leaf juice or toothpaste. Occasionally, she creates collages by adding magazine cutouts, chocolate wrapping papers or colored stickers. Her preferred support for her works is Kraft paper retrieved from packages. She most often paints on both sides of the paper; in order to obtain larger formats, she stitches several sheets of paper together with yarn; some of them are more than thirty feet long. | ||
| Aloïse’s world is filled with flowers, kings, queens, popes, charming princes, voluptuous princesses, pastries, amazing parties, circuses, dream cities (Venice, Nice, and New York). Love stories of famous people: Mary Stuart, Cleopatra, Napoleon, the Pope, Queen Elizabeth, Paolo and Francesca, Marie-Antoinette, Juliet, La Traviata or Manon Lescault. Characters in “love dresses”, carried by gondolas, flower covered chariots supported by almost invisible elephants loaded with flower baskets and birds’ nests: “The Theatre of the Universe”. | ||
| Aloïse’s story is one of death and rebirth. Jacqueline Porret-Forel makes an observation: “While she seemed to become sicker and sicker, a secret gestation was taking place in her mind. Her own cosmogony, while creating a rupture with her past life (to her “monde naturel ancien d’autrefois”, “the ancient natural world of the past”), allowed her to begin a resurrection. Her paintings are the repository of her recreated world (…) She is no longer Aloïse, this woman of flesh, “black mud” definitely dead, but she is all the protean elements of this new world for which she has named herself the Creator.” Aloïse’s world is a metaphysical one, a world that is no longer human, an immaterial world for which she is both the creator and the source of creation. A sensual erotic world, a disembodied world. A gallery of phantomatic portraits, vacuous masks, powerless masks, simple cover-ups for a broken love, for unattainable desires revealed by the desperately empty blue eyes of her characters. | ||
| SEE ALSO: PORRET-FOREL (Jacqueline). Aloïse
et le théâtre de l’univers, Albert Skira, Geneva, 1993. Publications de la Compagnie de l’Art Brut, fascicule 7, text of Jacqueline Porret-Forel, Paris, 1966. |
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