This is an example of “bread art,” the single-sheet drawings that Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli made between 1916 and 1930 for sale outside the confines of the Waldau Mental Asylum or for barter within the walls of the institution he had entered at the age of thirty-one. Abandoned by his father and orphaned by the age of eight, Wölfli tragically lived in a series of abusive foster homes, working as a farmhand from childhood through early adulthood. After three aborted attempts to sexually abuse young girls, he was committed in 1895 to the Waldau psychiatric facility, in Bern. There he began to draw, write, and compose, in essence reinventing his own history. But altering his personal story occasioned the need to change the entire world and thus began the artist’s epoch creative journey. From the earliest surviving works of 1908 until his death, in 1930, Wölfli manifested a new universe combining musical composition, poetry, geography, and 25,000 pages of illustrated text hand bound in forty-five large volumes and sixteen school notebooks. These comprise five autobiographical narratives, beginning with the adventures of the child “Doufi,” in From the Cradle to the Grave, continuing with the transformation of the known world into the new universe St. Adolf-Giant-Creation, and concluding with Funeral March.

Stacy C. Hollander, "The Kander Valley in the Bernese Oberland," exhibition label for Jubilation|Rumination: Life, Real and Imagined. Stacy C. Hollander, curator. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2012.