Adolf Wölfli: Creator of the Universe

Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) was a lifelong outsider, orphan, day laborer, and unskilled worker who, during his thirty-year internment in a mental institution, transformed his miserable life into a gigantic synthetic work comprising 25,000 pages of texts, drawings, collages, and musical and numerical records. The monograph on the author, who is now considered the most important creator of art brut and the creator of one of the most remarkable works of the 20th century in general, covers all periods of his artistic and literary expression. The pictorial part of the book emphasizes details from drawings and collages, which allow for a better insight into the labyrinth of Wölfli's universe built on his personal mythology. After the introductory texts and Adolf Wölfli's biography, compiled from autobiographical excerpts from his writings and medical records, the reader is first introduced to Wölfli's real Short Biography, which he wrote after his admission to the Waldau psychiatric hospital. After the first black-and-white drawings, the book presents pictorial and written excerpts from the epic From the Cradle to the Grave, in which the author describes his fictionalized wonderful childhood in the form of a travel diary, discovers the world, and creates its inventory. In the following Geography and Arithmetic Notebooks, he conquers the entire Earth and expands into space. His "Giant Creation of Saint Adolph" is then celebrated in the Song and Dance Notebooks, where music is translated into abstract sounds interspersed with numbers, culminating in his personal requiem - the Funeral March. The book also includes examples of art. The final part of the monograph contains texts by leading experts on Wölfli's work, who decipher individual aspects of his oeuvre, a list of reproduced works, a list of exhibitions, and a bibliography.