THE FAR SIDE.(outsider artist Adolf Wolfli)

Adolf Wolfli, a Swiss madman, born in 1864, who spent the last thirty-five of his sixty-six years in a psychiatric hospital, is among the greatest of outsider artists. Indeed, he could serve as Exhibit A in a study of the outsider phenomenon: cases of wild, solipsistic genius that challenge the values of formal training and cultural initiation, not to mention sanity, in significant art. Spectacularly gifted outsiders, including Henry Darger, a Chicago janitor whose immense epic of a war involving little girls came to light after his death, in 1973, seem to represent an entire culture in a single person. So it is with Wolfli, whose large, incredibly dense drawings combine ...