Johann Knopf (Knüpfer)

1866-1910 · Odenwald, Germany

A wandering baker who believed no one had suffered as he had, and answered with drawings of crucified figures ringed by script, pierced hearts and birds whose voices he understood.

The life

Knopf worked as a baker and mechanic in the Odenwald region of Germany, living with his mother and drifting through manual jobs, poverty and, from 1885, repeated arrests for vagrancy and begging. After an unhappy marriage and years of despair he injured himself in 1903 and was taken to hospital in Mannheim, then to the psychiatric clinic in Heidelberg, where he spoke of religious visions and saw himself as a Christlike martyr. He drew and wrote there with what the Prinzhorn Collection calls holy fervour from 1906 until his death in 1910. Hans Prinzhorn published him, under the name Johann Knüpfer, in Artistry of the Mentally Ill in 1922.

The work

Dense pen-and-ink drawings built on symmetry and circles: crucified figures surrounded by swirling oracular text, hearts pierced by arrows in echo of the Sacred Heart, silhouetted birds, and tender narrative scenes remembered from childhood. His surviving work is held by the Prinzhorn Collection at the University of Heidelberg.

Why we love them

Every drawing is a sermon written in circles. A century on, the fervour still comes off the paper like heat.

Go deeper

• Johann Knopf (Knüpfer) at the Outsider Art Fair
• Johann Knopf (Knüpfer) 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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