Adolf Wölfli

1864-1930 · Bern, Switzerland

From a cell in the Waldau clinic he rewrote his broken life as a 25,000-page illustrated epic in which he becomes St Adolf II, emperor of his own cosmos, complete with its own music.

The life

Orphaned into indentured farm labour as a child, Wölfli was institutionalised at the Waldau clinic near Bern in 1895 following criminal convictions, and remained there for 35 years. Around 1899 he began to draw, then to write, then to compose, producing From the Cradle to the Grave and its sequels: an autobiography rebuilt as world-spanning myth. His psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler published a landmark monograph on him in 1921, A Psychiatric Patient as Artist, years before Dubuffet coined art brut with Wölfli as the cornerstone.

The work

Pencil and coloured-pencil pages of overwhelming density: mandala geometries, marching text, portraits, invented heraldry and his own six-note musical notation, which he played on trumpets rolled from paper. The Adolf Wölfli Foundation at the Kunstmuseum Bern guards all 25,000 pages.

Why we love them

The founding document of the whole field. Confinement met imagination, and imagination annexed the universe.

Go deeper

• Adolf Wölfli Foundation, Kunstmuseum Bern
• 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

← All 46 artists in the field guide