A Creative Lunatic: Adolf Wölfli in 5 Artworks

Who Was Adolf Wölfli?

Born in 1864 in Bern, Switzerland, Wölfli was orphaned at the age of ten and grew up enduring consistent sexual and physical abuse in the state foster care system. He was a child farmhand before becoming a traveling laborer for a decade. After multiple charges of child molestation, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 1895, he was admitted to the Waldau Clinic in Bern, where he stayed until his death in 1930.

1. Felsenau Bern

Adolf Wölfli found inspiration in his traumatic childhood and his struggles with illness and alcoholism. He began creating art in 1899, but his more notable works, including Felsenau, did not come out until 1907, under the guidance of psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler. And in 1908, Wölfli started his “autobiography,” a series of narratives, compositions, and illustrations. Morgenthaler’s Madness and Art: The Life and Works of Adolf Wölfli, published in 1921, brought Wölfli wider recognition.

2. Mental Asylum Band-Copse

Wölfli divided his work into five sections. These encompass prose, poetry, drawings, and music. The entire project consists of 25,000 pages and over 1,600 drawings. It spreads across 45 self-bound volumes and 16 notebooks. This extensive project was completed upon Wölfli’s death.

The first book, titled From Cradle to Grave, features nine parts created between 1908 and 1912. The illustrations, with Mental Asylum Band-Copse being one of them, were made with colored pencils. In this section, Wölfli transforms his troubled childhood into a captivating story filled with wondrous adventures, discoveries, and long-forgotten dangers.

3. Saint Adolf and His Beloved Wife

In the next book, Geographic and Algebraic Books (1913–1916), the artist celebrates his mythical alter ego. Wölfli envisions a glorious future as a planetary ruler. The artworks from this part, such as Saint Adolf and His Beloved Wife, engages with the entire globe and contemplates the cosmos. This glorious future peaks when Wölfli declares himself Saint Adolf II.

4. Almighty Tube

The third book, titled Booklets with Songs and Dances, exceeds 7,000 pages. Wölfli expands on his Giant Creation of St. Adolf through march music, polkas, and mazurkas. The works of this section, such as Almighty Tube, feature musical compositions, illustrations, and collages made from magazine clippings. These together form a panorama of Wölfli’s new creation, his desires, and the world from which he felt excluded.

The two books that follow, Album Books with Dances and Marches (eight books, 1924–1928), and Funeral March (16 books, 1928–1930, unfinished) feature a combination of musical compositions and poetry.

Wölfli was particularly meticulous with his creations. His works contained patterns such as masked faces, flowers, snakes, geometric and floral motifs, and more. He used colored pencils on newsprint, and he was adamant on working in solitude.

5. Bread Art

Alongside his narrative works, Wölfli also created individual drawings. Starting in 1916, he regularly produced on single sheets of paper to meet with growing demands. He would exchange these works for colored pencils and tobacco or sell them to collectors. His patron, Walter Morgenthaler, referred to this collection as Bread Art. Of the more than 1,000 drawings he created, approximately 760 have survived.

These colored pencil drawings, sometimes collages, feature explanations on the back that connect to the Saint Adolf Giant Creation. While related to Wölfli’s writings, they have a simpler design that caters to customer preferences and enhances sales appeal.

Adolf Wölfli created masterpieces at a time of radical artistic movements. However, his art reflected a raw originality that sets him apart from the deconstructivist approaches of his contemporaries. While Wölfli could still be closely associated with Cubism, he was also a precursor of Outsider Art. His works were exhibited by Jean Dubuffet in 1949 and are now held in several museums, including the Waldau Clinic Museum and MoMA.