Two early drawings by Adolf Wölfli (1904 and 1905)

The two large-scale pencil drawings from the years 1904 and 1905 are early works by the patient artist Adolf Wöfli (1865-1930). He was a patient of the Waldau asylum near Bern from 1893 until his death. He became well-known when his psychiatrist, Walter Morgenthaler, wrote the monograph “A Mental Patient as Artist” in 1921. After Wölfli’s work was exhibited in Paris by Jean Dubuffet as part of the “Compagnie de l’art brut”, and Harald Szeemann recreated his hospital room for the documenta 5, he became the most famous patient artist in Europe, a “classic” of art brut, or Outsider Art.

“Ramonion=Snake and Vigger” (1904) and “Bride Ring” (1905)
These large-scale drawings (75 x 100 cm) belong to Wölfli’s first body of works. The artist filled 53 sheets of waste paper to the edges with his lead pencil drawings. The compositions contain nearly all of the artist’s signature elements: figures, ornamentation, texts, and rows of 6 note lines – staves– which do not, however, contain the notation of marches and minuets that would later be common. Wölfli described these drawings as «musical compositions».

Wölfli’s Works in the Prinzhorn Collection
Wölfli’s main body of work is comprised of a number of handmade books with hundreds of illustrations, nearly all of which belong to the Adolf Wölfli Stiftung in the Museum of Fine Arts Bern. In addition, there are numerous colored works, most of which are smaller formats, which Wölfli called his “Brotkunst” (“breadwinner” art, i.e. the art to earn a living with), which he would exchange for painting supplies or chewing tobacco. In 1919, Hans Prinzhorn obtained five of these works, which are still in the collection today. One of the little “breadwinner” works was featured in Hans Prinzhorn’s book, “Artistry of the Mentally Ill” (1922). These two large-scale works were on loan from the Fraenger Institute in Potsdam from 2004 on, and were exhibited here and elsewhere. One of these was purchased by the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation and was made available to the collection as a permanent loan. The other drawing was acquired in 2012 with support from the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States, the City of Heidelberg and other private donations. The pencil drawings had once belonged to Prinzhorn himself. Later, he gave them to his friend Wilhelm Fraenger (1890-1964), an art historian and folklorist in Heidelberg. In these original wooden frames, the drawings hung for decades in Fraenger’s office, where they were discolored by light and cigarette smoke. Soon after becoming part of the Prinzhorn Collection, an extensive restoration managed to roughly restore the original appearance.

Images: Adolf Wölfli, “Bride Ring” (1905), Inv. No. D 4863/1 (2004) © Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg University Hospital

Adolf Wölfli, “Ramonion=Snake and Vigger” (1904), Inv.Nr. D 4863/2 (2004) © Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg University Hospital

The work is on loan from the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung