Artist: Adolf Wölfli
After a traumatic childhood, Adolf Wölfli was arrested in 1890 for the attempted sexual assault of two young girls and sentenced to two years in the St. Johannsen prison in Berne. In 1895 he was arrested once again for the attempted molestation of a very young girl. At this point he was committed to the Waldau Mental Asylum for evaluation, and diagnosed as schizophrenic. He would remain a "patient" there until his death in 1930. During his institutionalization, he was reportedly often violent and uncontrollable, and was frequently placed in solitary confinement.
Some years after his admission to the Asylum, in 1908, he began to draw. At first he was allowed only one pencil per week, which he always quickly wore down to a nub. However, staff soon realized that drawing and writing helped to subdue his temper, and so they provided him with more supplies. Wölfli soon began work on his 25,000-page illustrated narrative life story which, upon his death, measured six feet high when stacked up. In this work, he constructed a new history of his childhood and a described a glorious future with its own uniquely personal mythology.
The first book of Wölfli's imaginary autobiography, comprised of 3000 pages, is titled From the Cradle to the Grave (1908-1912). The image pictured here comes from this first book, in which Wölfli re-narrates his tragic childhood into a magnificent travelog, which recounts how a child named Doufi traveled "more or less around the entire world." The narrative is ornately and densely illustrated with intricate drawings of geometric shapes, fictitious maps, portraits, palaces, churches, kings, queens, animals, and speaking plants, and also incorporates text and musical notation. In the second book, titled the Geographic and Algebraic Books (1912-1917), Wölfli describes how to build in the future "Saint Adolf-Giant-Creation", a huge "capital fortune" that will allow for the purchase, renaming and urbanization of the planet, and eventually the entire universe. In this narrative, Wölfli renames himself St. Adolf II. The third and fourth books, Books with Songs and Dances (1917-1922) and Album Books with Dances and Marches (1924-1928), celebrate his "Saint Adolf-Giant-Creation" not only through drawings, but also sound poetry, songs, musical scales, and collages. Finally, from 1928 until his death in 1930, he worked on the fifth and final book, the Funeral March. In this substantial volume, totaling over 8,000 pages, he (as the website www.AdolfWoelfli.ch writes, with information collated by the Museum of Fine Art in Bern, Switzerland) "recapitulates central motifs of his world system in the reduced form of keywords and collages, weaving them into a infinite tapestry of sounds and pictures", creating "a fascinating requiem."