Aloïse Corbaz

1886-1964 · Lausanne, Switzerland

A Swiss governess who once worked at the Kaiser’s court, spent 46 years in an asylum, and filled it with the most romantic pictures in art brut.

The life

Corbaz worked as a governess, including a spell at the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II in Potsdam, for whom she nursed a grand imaginary passion. Brought home by the outbreak of war, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1918 and institutionalised near Lausanne for the rest of her life. She drew in secret at first, on wrapping paper and the backs of calendars, until a sympathetic doctor began saving everything. Dubuffet visited her, collected her, and made her a cornerstone of art brut.

The work

Vast coloured-pencil pageants of lovers, opera heroines, popes and emperors, the women with unmistakable empty blue eyes, the colour packed edge to edge and often pressed into the paper with flower petals. Some works run across sewn-together sheets many metres long, a private opera with no interval.

Why we love them

Locked away for half a century, she answered with romance on an imperial scale. Defiance can look like a love story.

Go deeper

• 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