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| Wölfli has a difficult childhood: his father, an alcoholic, abandons him when he is seven years old, and dies several years later following a crisis of delirium tremens. His mother also dies soon thereafter. He lives with several farming families and works as a shepherd or as a farmhand. He is often hungry and suffers from different illnesses (typhus in particular). | ||
| At the age of eighteen, he falls in love with a young neighbor. Her parents are opposed to this relationship and Wölfli is shattered. He suffers several other unfulfilled loves. He spends few days in jail for minor theft. In 1890, during a walk near the Castle of Bremgarten, he tries to embrace a young girl and is chased away by three men. A similar event occurs the same year, this time with a five-year-old child; he is arrested and sentenced to two years in prison. When he is freed, he tries unsuccessfully to readjust to life. In May 1895, he repeats the same offense, abusing this time a three-year-old girl. He is once again arrested and institutionalized at Waldau, where he will remain the rest of his life. | ||
| He is thirty-one years old when the second part of his life begins. His condition worsens during the first five years of hospitalization; he suffers from multiple bouts of hallucinations. He is often violent and passes long periods in isolation. In 1899, he breaks the door and the window of the cell. Does he want to escape? He "could" but he does not. | ||
| Around 1900, he starts drawing, writing and composing music on newspapers. He is first given one new pencil a week. In December 1908, a young assistant arrives at the hospital: Walter Morgenthaler. He is very interested in Wölfli, in his work and treats him as a full-fledged artist. Wölfli's body of work is huge: it covers a period of thirty years and includes hundreds of drawings, writings, musical scores and collages. Twenty-five thousand pages of an imaginary biography entitled: From the cradle to the tomb or prayer against the curse through labor and sweat, suffering and agony. | ||
| Wölfli sets forth all this new knowledge, almost an encyclopedia. He reinvents everything: history, geography, religion, music, etc. He finds our metrical system too limited, and invents the "Regonif", "Sunif", "Teratif", which exceed our milliards of milliards. He intends to dominate Creation, space, but also eternity. He excels in artistic creativity. He plays by juxtaposing opposite perspectives; different points of view reveal intricate networks; ornamental elements have a decorative function but also a rhythmic one. | ||
| A production at different levels, where paintings can be read horizontally or vertically, so that we can no longer speak of one point of view, one meaning or one direction. All our optical, aesthetic, ideological and cultural ideas, which make the core of our perception, change. Wölfli's musical scores have an artistic aspect to them as well as a musical one. One could say that drawing becomes music, the note that is drawn is as much a musical symbol, as it is a decorative shape. Rivers and roads, often represented by musical scores, can be heard. He plays with shapes and themes as he does with words. Wölfli "rejected", victim of a "harsh accident", because of a "well rhymed but horrible curse" calls himself "Saint" and "Great-Great-God", "genius", "God Creator of the sky and earth", but also "Saint Adolf", "Adolf II", "God the King", "His Excellency", "Duke", "His Majesty", "Emperor", "Great-Great Emperor" or simply "Adolf Wölfli, reformed Catastrophe". In his own world, he miraculously escapes "accidents", "mortal falls", "executions" and "attacks by monsters". If he happens to die, he always revives... Then he has parties and feasts. He also calls himself "Doufi", the little Wölfli, little sickly man, lost amidst this scary world, locked up in a spiral, lying on his deathbed, in his coffin, in the middle of a labyrinth. Adolf Wölfli starts composing his Funeral March in 1928. | ||
| SEE ALSO: Publications de la Compagnie de
l'Art Brut, fascicule 2, text of Prof. W. Morgenthaler, Paris, 1964.
SPOERRI (Elka) and GLAESEMER (Jürgen). Adolf Wölfli, Rudolf Plüss, Basel, 1976. SPOERRI (Elka), STREIFF (Peter) and KELLER (Kjell), S.WEISS (Allen), THÉVOZ (Michel), STENZL (Jürg), Wölfli dessinateur-compositeur, Lausanne, L'Age d'Homme, 1991. SPOERRI (Elka) and BAUMANN (Daniel). Adolf Wölfli, Draftsman, Writer, Poet, Composer, Ithaca University Press, London, 1997. |
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