Josef Karl Rädler

1844-1917 · Vienna, Austria

A medal-winning Viennese porcelain painter lost his firm and his freedom, then spent twenty years painting the asylum from the inside, signing himself the Laughing Philosopher.

The life

Rädler was born in 1844 in Falkenau in Bohemia, now Sokolov, and moved to Vienna at 23. In 1872 he co-founded the porcelain painting studio Rädler and Pilz, which won medals at the world exhibitions of Vienna and Paris. In his late forties, violent mood swings drove him into ruinous ventures and lawsuits, and in 1893 his family committed him to the asylum at Pilgerhain. He began painting watercolours there in 1897, was moved to the modern sanatorium at Mauer-Öhling in 1905, styled himself Court Painter of Austria, Italy and Siam, and worked until his death in 1917. Hundreds of his sheets were saved from the rubbish half a century later.

The work

Double-sided watercolours, worked over meticulously on both faces: on one side, unmatched documentary scenes of asylum life, patients at their routines, staff, birds and grounds; on the other, dense nested skeins of symbolic figures and words. His work is held by the Wien Museum in Vienna and Galerie St. Etienne in New York.

Why we love them

The rarest thing in art brut: a reporter on the inside. He painted the institution looking back at itself, and kept laughing.

Go deeper

• Josef Karl Radler at the Outsider Art Fair
• Josef Karl Radler on Wikipedia
• Kallir Research Institute
• 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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