MORE
BY ERIC GELBER
St. Adolf-Giant-Creation:
The Art of Adolf Wölfli
February 25 - May 18, 2003
The American Folk Art Museum
45 West 53rd St, New York
Tuesday to Sunday 10-6 (Friday til 8)
www.folkartmuseum.org
By ERIC
GELBER
Adolf Wölfli
(1864-1930) The Herdsman/Rose of Australia 1911
Pencil and colored pencil on newsprint, 19½ x 14 7/8 inches
Museum of Fine Arts, Bern, Switzerland
The products of Adolf Wolfli's
horror vacui are daunting. His maniacal doodles are imaginative
but his need to fill the entire page limited the impact of many of his
compositions. With each drawing he created an entire world from scratch.
His drawings are incredibly busy. They are a combination of private
symbols, pure design elements, words and numbers. They can be compared
to the doodles people make on notepads when they are on the phone, medieval
illuminated manuscripts, Persian rugs, and Tibetan sand mandalas.
Wolfli spent over thirty years of his life in the Waldau Mental Asylum
and was accused on three separate occasions of molesting children. It
is hard to avoid psychological necrophilia when considering Wolfli's
huge corpus of work. One wonders how many people living out their adult
lives in prisons or psychiatric wards would make interesting art if
the televisions were removed from the institutions and they were provided
with art supplies. Wolfli emptied his entire being through the tip of
a pencil.
Wolfli couldn't draw the human figure to save his life, and the only
way to differentiate between his male and female figures is to look
for the dress and high heels. He places perfectly round heads amid Byzantine
patterning; usually surrounded by a tear drop or archway, or at the
center of the composition. These heads are round as marbles, have penis-like
noses and raccoon eyes, and remind me of Uncle Fester from the Addams
Family. Sometimes they serve as a strange stand-in for Wolfli and at
other times they are just part of the design.
Repetition and subtle variation are at the heart of Wolfli's artwork.
The rhythmic patterns that predominate each of his drawings, include
musical notations for nonexistent scores, brickwork, words and numbers,
dots and dashes, leaf shapes, and a variety of geometric forms. The
flowing patterns create dissonance and his compositions tend to vacillate
between order and confusion. After staring at them for a while internal
rhythms are fleshed out. Although the trained eye could differentiate
between the early and late work, Wolfli's subject matter and drawing
style changed very little, and it is pointless to break his work up
into periods. His drawings are busy, there are many layers. One is overwhelmed
by the intricacy of the design. Text and image are inextricably entwined.
The viewer's eyes tend to focus in on separate sections. Every square
inch demands close scrutiny. There are really only two types of pictures
in this exhibit: the drawings which are essentially intricate patterns
studded with private symbols, and sheets covered in Wolfli's handwriting
or rows of numbers, with collage elements and drawing added to some
of them.
One marvels at Wolfli's ability to draw straight and curved lines freehand
with such precision. My favorite pieces in this extensive exhibit are
on the fourth floor of the museum. They were done by Wolfli before 1910.
There is a rich variety of gray tones in these pictures, and black and
white are used very effectively. Since Wolfli had no formal training
he used, stippling, cross hatching, and outlining to create coherency
and variation. I find these early works to be more clearly articulated
and balanced than most of the later drawings. The bars of white with
crisp ruled lines drawn within them in such drawings as Assizes of
the Middle-Land, 1904, Juno, Goddess of the Negroes, 1904,
and The Divine Almighty and Wisdom at the Zenith, 1905, are a
welcome relief for the eyes, and energize the composition by creating
a strong push and pull effect. These drawings hold together when viewed
close up and at a distance. The inventiveness of Wolfli's designs in
Sunring, 1905 are mind-blowing.
Felsenau, Bern, 1907, the closest Wolfli ever came to drawing a specific
locale, is a visionary landscape. A road and a fence run through the
center of the composition, and there are brick walls and houses spread
about. There is an interesting tension between the flatness of the forms
and the suggestion of depth. There is a beautifully shaded smokestack
in the foreground, which mars the landscape the same way a real smokestack
would. Forms are clearly articulated and there is a dynamic interplay
of straight lines and curved forms (which you will find in a number
of other works).
Wolfli was a weak colorist but this might be due to the fact that he
had limited supplies at his disposal. His approach to color often does
not go beyond coloring book techniques. He filled in outlined forms.
He definitely got better at blending colors in the later work. His drawings
are so meticulous that you can sense the tremendous amount of energy
Wolfli was suppressing. The San Salvador, 1926, is perhaps the
largest drawing in the exhibit and I think it is the only one that indicates
Wolfli had any talent as a colorist. The subtle gradations of color
call to mind the work of Wilfredo Lam. After looking at this fanciful
exploration of the oval and the right angle I tried to imagine what
Wolfli would have done if he had used oils and brushes, if he had incorporated
more empty spaces into his work. The interlocking shapes resonate and
do not cancel each other out in a wall of busyness. There is a frame
within a frame and concentric oval shapes in the inner frame. The layers
of detail are contained in simple geometric shapes and the whole composition
resonates towards the center and back to the edges of the frame in a
mesmerizing way, without becoming a confused mass of disparate parts.
I don't think the pages and pages of Wolfli's handwriting and rows of
numbers, some of which have magazine clippings added to them, have much
artistic value. The fact that Wolfli generated thousands of pages of
this nonsense, instead of just hundreds, doesn't make it more meaningful.
I think we are being asked to buy into a false myth. Unlike Breton and
Dubuffet, who romanticized mental illness, I don't think every utterance
from a mentally ill person is profound. Wolfli's writing definitely
reveals his obsessions and fantasies in raw form, but not much else
is communicated. Would anyone really enjoy reading thousands of pages
of Wolfli's writing? I doubt it. Like Van Gogh, Wolfli transcended his
limitations. But unlike the Dutch master, Wolfli's art is an acquired
taste. His drawings are explorations of psychic facts rather than physical
facts, a melding of rational impulse, clarity of purpose, and a perpetual
longing for real and unreal places outside the asylum walls.
