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

Graphis, May/Jun 2004 by Rexer, Lyle

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

by Elka Spoetri, Daniel Baumann, and Edward M. Gomez

Foreword by Gerard C. Wertkin

Call it the madman's revenge: from his asylum, Wölfli conquered the world. That's one way of thinking about die reception of the work of Adolph Wölfli, the Swiss "outsider" artist, who spent much of his adult life in a mental hospital. Committed in 1895 for molesting young girls, the brawny farm worker became one of the most prolific producers of graphic art in human history. In 25,000 pages including more than 3,000 drawings and collages, Wölfli elaborated a comprehensive cosmological history and his imaginary world travels.

The largest selection we are ever likely to see at an American museum, some 100 works, was on view in three floors of die American Folk Art Museum in New York. It was accompanied by a catalogue from Princeton University Press, published under the museum's aegis. A folk art museum might seem a strange place for this work, but it was organized through the museum's Contemporary Center, which specializes in outsider art. Dr. Elka Spoerri, the foremost Wölfli expert and the motive force behind die exhibition, did not live to see its presentation.

It felt uncannily familiar.

That's because we have been looking at Wölfli for a long 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 how our graphic sensibilities have been shaped by outsider art. In Wölfli's case, the strands are complex. His work and that of other artists in European psychiatric collections had an early impact on Klee and other Bauhaus artists, perhaps reinforcing their tendency to see geometric abstraction as a more natural visual language, one somehow appropriate to a renovated, modern society. Certainly Wölfli's work is elaborately architectonic and graphically bold. At the same time, its motivic, repetitive character seems to pick up aspects of the Vienna secession, especially Klimt's flat, dense patterning. Perhaps Wölfli the shut-in was channeling but more likely, he had eyes to see what was reflected in the graphic culture around him. In any case, these approaches were resurrected in the '60s and '70s by a host of designers including Milton Glaser and Peter Max. In Max's case, especially in the animated film Yellow Submarine, characters such as the Blue Meanies seem to spring directly from Wölfli and another outsider, Friedrich Schroeder-Sonnenstern.

Yet Wölfli's greater importance may have been through Surrealism. Max Ernst saw this work as a way of reconfiguring visual space and the subjective disposition of symbolic elements. As designer Edward Gomez points out in the show's catalogue, Wölfli's astonishing collages, combining photos, ads, written script, even musical notation, amounted to an attempt to push beyond die limits of two dimensional forms to a kind of total performance or theater, a drive inherent in Surrealist collage. In a digital age, this sense of graphic space as the scene for performance is dominant. If nothing else, this exhibition certified that even without a computer, Wölfli is still able to dispense impossible permissions to a current generation of designers.

Princeton University Press in association with the American Folk Art Museum, New York. 112 pages, 76 color plates, 24 halftones, 9-1/2 x 12; ISBN: 0-691-11498-6; $29.95.