Adolf Wölfli on the bitter path of life

Born in 1864, Adolf Wölfli lost both his parents at an early age. His father had left the family when Wölfli was five years old and his mother died when he was only eight. During the next few years Wölfli suffered a life of poverty, beatings, and deprivations.

In 1880, he fell in love with the daughter of a wealthy farmer, but her father strictly forbade her of seeing Wölfli after finding out his intentions. He was inconsolable and left to Bern soon after.
Wölfli led a lonely life in Bern and his mental health deteriorated gradually. One day in 1980 he tried to seduce a fourteen-year-old girl, and after her friends came to her rescue, he managed to escape. A week later he again tried, this time with a seven-year-old girl. Wölfli was arrested, sentenced, and spent two years in prison.
In 1895, he once again tried to seduce a young girl — this time three and a half years old. He was sent to Waldau Mental Asylum, where he tried to justify himself by saying he had been forced to such extremes after being denied his true love — the farmer’s daughter back in 1980.
He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent the next 35 years in Waldau, until his death in 1930.

During the first years in Waldau, Wölfli was often agitated and violent, but after starting drawing his mental health improved considerably. Drawing kept him calm and concentrated, but after other patients tried to destroy his paintings he reacted violently and was kept in isolation from then on.
The years of 1904–1906 forms the first defined period of his artistic career. It was during these years that he developed his personal artistic language, drawing almost entirely in lead pencil on newspaper pages. Only 50 drawings survived.

After the initial artistic period, Wölfli began his narrative work, mixing poetry, prose, music and illustration in a coherent whole. This period lasted from 1908 until his death in 1930 and is divided in 5 major works:

- From the Cradle to the Grave (1908–1912)
- Geographic and Allgebraic Books (1912–1916)
- Books with Songs and Dances (1917–1922)
- Album Books with Dances and Marches (1924–1928)
- Funeral March (1928–1930)

Here Wölfli wrote his imaginary autobiography, with stories of travels and adventures spanning the entire world and forming an almost mythological journey.
These works are divided in books and everything is meticulously dated, numbered and signed. The entire oeuvre spans 45 volumes, containing a total of over 25,000 pages and 1,600 illustrations.

Worth mentioning are the ‘Bread Art’ works. These were drawings Wölfli did purely for profit, as a way of having money to buy color pencils, paper, tobacco, etc. He did become famous because of this works, and some of them were included in Morgenthaler’s monograph in 1921.

If today Wölfli is a relatively famous artist is mostly due to the work of Jean Dubuffet, who coined the term Art Brut and collected works of Wölfli and other artists.

And a propos,

Where was it that misfortune overtook me?
On the bitter path of life
On the hard barrier I was broken
That is why I cannot make a clean start
Since I was spared nothing
And so was darkened and deadened
Because I could not fail in with the good
From the high steeple the iron cockerel sings.

A. Wölfli, Geographisches Heft №11, 738