Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern

1892-1982 · Berlin, Germany

Reform-school runaway, circus hand, quack professor and street prophet: he started drawing at 57 and scandalised Europe in coloured pencil.

The life

Schröder-Sonnenstern was born in 1892 near Tilsit in East Prussia, one of thirteen children of whom almost none survived infancy. A childhood of reform schools and asylums left him with a lifelong hatred of authority. After spells in the army and a circus he surfaced in 1919 Berlin as Professor Dr. Eliot Gnass von Sonnenstern, a self-invented healer selling palmistry and nature cures to the wealthy, with a reputation for passing the profits to the poor. He settled in Berlin for good during the war and became a well-known eccentric prophet. Around 1949 he began to draw, and the artist Hans Bellmer carried his work to the Surrealists in Paris, who exhibited him alongside their own.

The work

Coloured pencil on cardboard and paper over thin washes, drawn with a sign-painter’s polish: moons, snakes, demons, skeletons and monstrously voluptuous women locked in blasphemous, sexually charged allegories that parody church, state and respectability at once. His work is held by the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Petullo collection and the Halle Saint Pierre in Paris.

Why we love them

Every institution that tried to correct him got repaid in full, in pencil. Grotesque, hilarious and completely without permission.

Go deeper

• Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern at the Outsider Art Fair
• Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern on Wikipedia
• 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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