Heinrich Anton Müller

1869-1930 · Münsingen, Switzerland

A Swiss winegrower invented a vine-trimming machine, lost the patent, lost everything, and spent his last twenty years building perpetual motion machines out of rags and branches.

The life

Müller was born in Versailles in 1869 and worked as a winegrower in the Swiss canton of Vaud, where he invented and patented an ingenious machine for trimming vines. When the patent slipped from his grasp and competitors copied the design, he broke down, and around the age of forty he was admitted to the psychiatric hospital at Münsingen near Bern. He stayed until his death in 1930, building machines on the hospital grounds. Prinzhorn published his drawings in 1922, and Dubuffet later made him a founding figure of art brut.

The work

Contraptions of twigs, wire and knotted cloth strips, wheels turning inside cage-like frames in pursuit of perpetual motion, all long since destroyed. What survives are the drawings on wrapping paper and cardboard stitched together: huge distorted heads and figures in a line that swings from lyrical to jagged. His work is held in the Prinzhorn Collection, Kunstmuseum Bern and the Collection de l’Art Brut, and his machines echo in Tinguely’s kinetic sculpture.

Why we love them

The world took his machine, so he built machines the world could not take: they ran on nothing and produced nothing, perfectly.

Go deeper

• Heinrich Anton Müller at the Outsider Art Fair
• Heinrich Anton Müller 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

← Back to the field guide