Edmund Monsiel

1897-1962 · Wożuczyn, Poland

Hidden in a Polish attic from the Nazi occupation until his death twenty years later, he covered small scraps of paper with thousands of tiny faces, and the faces grew faces.

The life

Monsiel was born in 1897 in Wożuczyn, Poland, and kept a small shop until the occupying German forces seized it in 1942. Fearing arrest, he took refuge in his brother’s attic, and when the war ended he simply stayed, refusing almost all contact for the rest of his life. He died of influenza in 1962, and only then were his roughly five hundred pencil drawings discovered in the loft. He is now regarded as one of the classic European outsider artists, working in near-total isolation.

The work

Small drawings in lead pencil of astounding minuteness, in which a single line generates a moustached, Christ-like face, which generates another, and another, in a continuous web with no beginning and no end. Around and behind the faces run professions of faith, exhortations to piety and moral maxims. His work is held in the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, the abcd collection in Montreuil and the Museum of Everything in London.

Why we love them

Fear turned into faces and faith into pattern, five hundred sheets at a time. Nobody before or since has drawn a crowd like Monsiel’s.

Go deeper

• Edmund Monsiel at the Outsider Art Fair
• Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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