15063027Adolf Wölfli18641930Adolf Wölfli’s body of work is incredibly rich, yet every piece is unmistakably part of Wölfli’s self-mythologization, as recalls his 25,000-page, highly fictionalized autobiography. The hallucinatory mix of text and images, in which architecture, animals, geometric patterns, musical notation, maps, calculations, and ornamental borders are intricately entwined, is as lavish as an illuminated manuscript. Negative space is nonexistent. Wölfli was born in 1864 near Bern, Switzerland. He was orphaned at a young age, and his childhood was marked by abuse in foster homes and indentured labor. He served briefly in the military and worked as a farmhand before being sentenced to a series of prison terms. In 1895, he was committed to the Waldau Clinic, a psychiatric hospital outside of Bern, where he stayed until his death in 1930. His earliest known drawings date to 1904; he started his colossal autobiographical piece, chronicling his transformation into “Saint-Adolf-Giant-Creation,” in 1908. Its sprawling prose, drawings, collages, musical compositions, poetry, and phonetic-numeral systems ultimately filled forty-five hand-bound volumes. At the same time, he made individual works—“bread art,” he called it—that he sold or traded to support his acquisition of art materials. His focus was always his magnum opus, and he devoted the last two years of his life to its “Funeral March,” composed with a rhyming phonetic structure rather than musical signs and authored by his alter ego, “St. Adolf II Algebrator, Major-Commander and Music-Director, Giant-Theater-Director, Almighty-Steamship-Captain, and Dr. of Art and Science, Director of the Algebra and Geography-Books-Fabrication and Hunter-General. Inventor of 160 self-made inventions, highly valuable and patented, each of them, by the Russian Czar, and glorious victor of numerous, enormous gigantic battles.” His prolific work drew wider attention after Dr. Walter Morganthaler, a Waldau Clinic psychiatrist, published the 1921 study <em>Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler</em> (A Mental Patient as Artist), in which he observed that Wölfli “thinks with his pencil. It is often the gesture that provokes his thinking.” Wölfli was posthumously rediscovered by proponents of art brut such as Jean Dubuffet. Much of his work is now preserved at the Adolf Wölfli Foundation in Bern. Allison C. Meier, 2025 Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). AdolfWölflihttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/3172/fullAdolf Wölfli was the author of a prolific and multifaceted artistic oeuvre that he began creating in November 1899, shortly after his hospitalization at the Waldau Mental Asylum in Bern. Between 1908 and 1930, he devoted himself to his magnum opus, <i>St. Adolf-Giant-Creation</i>, an illustrated narrative of 25,000 pages, comprising forty-seven volumes and sixteen notebooks. This imaginary autobiography, accompanied by 1,620 drawings and 1,640 collages made from pieced-together magazine fragments, is divided into five sections: “From the Cradle to the Grave,” “Geographic and Algebraic Books,” “Books with Songs and Dances,” “Album Books with Dances and Marches,” and “Funeral March.” Concurrently, Wölfli created about one thousand single-sheet drawings (1912–1930), which his doctor Walter Morgenthaler defined as “Bread Art.” Wölfli would trade these works with others in exchange for paper, colored pencils, and tobacco.His pictorial compositions suggest an ideal reading from above. Flattened out like maps that he would often call “plans,” they depict endless parades. These intricate landscapes are overcrowded with conscientious curving script, musical staves, avenues, buildings, and the figure of St. Adolf II, Wölfli’s alter ego. He explained that his hand merely translated the testimony of the tireless travels dictated by his memories, claiming that he really found and visited these places. Morgenthaler wrote that “Wölfli was of the kinesthetic type: he thinks with his pencil. It is often the gesture that provokes his thinking.”Wölfli, who designated himself an “ear = musical = direct,” also composed and played music, which is a major component of his monumental narrative. Morgenthaler testified that he “makes music by blowing into horns made of thick paper bags, performing his tunes, marches, waltzes, polkas, and mazurkas. Rhythm is essential. As soon as he has developed a melody, he writes it.” In a rare archival document, Wölfli is photographed holding a roll of paper, and in another he is posed alongside two of these rudimentary instruments. His songwriting style is divided into two categories: compositions using notes and staves, and compositions displaying an alphabetical system of his own—what he called his “Algebra”—based on solmization (the attribution of syllables to notes). Since the 1970s, many composers have attempted to adapt Wölfli’s system. Some segments have been decoded, demonstrating that they were not purely decorative notations.Adapted from Valérie Rousseau, “Adolf Wölfli” in Valérie Rousseau (ed.), <i>When the Curtain Never Comes Down: Performance Art and the Alter Ego</i> (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2015).(1864–1930)BernBernBernBernBernBernAdolf WölfliAdolf Woelfli