August Natterer

1868-1933 · Ravensburg, Germany

On 1 April 1907 an unemployed electrician saw ten thousand images flash across the sky in half an hour. He spent the rest of his life drawing what he had been shown.

The life

Natterer was born in Ravensburg in 1868 and worked successfully as an electrician and mechanic until unemployment and hardship broke his health. After his vision of the Last Judgment in 1907 and a suicide attempt, he spent his remaining 26 years in asylums, where he drew his hallucinations with unnerving precision. His psychiatrist published him under the name Neter to protect his family from stigma, and Hans Prinzhorn made him one of the ten so-called schizophrenic masters of his 1922 book Artistry of the Mentally Ill. He died in 1933.

The work

Small, meticulous drawings and watercolours on paper and card, recording the visions image by image: the Witch’s Head landscape, the Axle of the World with Rabbit, shape-shifting figures rendered with the cool exactness of a technical diagram. Most of the surviving work is in the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg, and Max Ernst’s Oedipus Rex drew directly on Natterer’s Miraculous Shepherd.

Why we love them

He drew visions the way an engineer draws a wiring diagram. The Surrealists spent decades catching up with him.

Go deeper

• August Natterer at the Outsider Art Fair
• August Natterer on Wikipedia
• Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg
• 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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