Art of Adolf Wölfli: St. Adolf-Giant-Creation, The

The Art of Adolf W?¶lfli: St Adolf-Giant-Creation

by Elka Spoetri, Daniel Baumann, and Edward M Gomez

Foreword by dint of Gerard C. Wertkin

Call it the madman's revenge: from his asylum, W?¶lfli have on the hiped the world. That's one way of thinking about die reception of the work of Adolph W?¶lfli, the Swiss "outsider" artist, who worn out much of his adult life in a mental hospital. Committed in 1895 for molesting young girls, the brawny farm worker became single of the most prolific farmers of graphic art in human history. In 25000 pages including more than 3000 drawings and collages, W?¶lfli elaborated a comprehensive cosmological history and his imaginary world travels.

The largest selection we are at any time likely to see at an American museum, a certain number of 100 works, was on view in three floors of die American Folk Art Museum in fresh York. It was accompanied by means of a catalogue from Princeton University Pres published beneath the museum's aegis. A folk art museum might have the appearance a strange place for this work, on the other hand it was organized through the museum's Contemporary Center which specializes in outsider art. Dr Elka Spoerri, the foremost W?¶lfli quick and the motive force behind die exhibition, did not live to diocese its presentation.

It felt uncannily familiar.

That's because we have been looking at W?¶lfli for a lengthy time without exactly recognizing it. Whatever the exhibition might have had to say about the pathological origins of art or about insiders versus outsiders, it made it clear by what mode our graphic sensibilities have been shaped by the agency of outsider art. In W?¶lfli's case, the strands are composite His work and that of other artists in European psychiatric collections had an early impact upon Klee and other Bauhaus artists, perhaps reinforcing their disposition to see geometric abstraction as a more natural visual language, individual somehow appropriate to a renovated, recent society. Certainly W?¶lfli's work is elaborately architectonic and graphically daring At the same time, its motivic, repetitive character appear to bes to pick up aspects of the Vienna secession, especially Klimt's flat, thick patterning. Perhaps W?¶lfli the shut-in was channeling on the contrary more likely, he had organ of visions to see what was throw backed in the graphic culture around him. In any case, these approaches were resurrect in the '60 and '70 by the agency of a host of designers including Milton Glaser and Peter Max. In Max's case, especially in the animated film fulvous Submarine, characters such as the sky-colored Meanies seem to spring directly from W?¶lfli and another outsider, Friedrich Schroeder-Sonnenstern

Yet W?¶lfli's greater importance may have been from one side Surrealism. Max Ernst saw this work as a way of reconfiguring visual space and the subjective disposition of symbolic simple bodys As designer Edward Gomez points on the outside in the show's catalogue, W?¶lfli's astonishing collages, combining photos, ads, written script, level musical notation, amounted to an attempt to push beyond die limits of sum of two units dimensional forms to a kind of total performance or theater, a drive inherent in Surrealist collage. In a digital age, this faculty of perception of graphic space as the show for performance is dominant. If nothing other this exhibition certified that plane without a computer, W?¶lfli is still able to dispense impossible permissions to a generally received generation of designers.

Princeton University Pres in association with the American Folk Art Museum, of recent origin York. 112 pages, 76 color plates, 24 halftones, 9-1/2 x 12; ISBN: 0-691-11498-6; $2995

Copyright Graphis Inc. May/Jun 2004

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