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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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 religion, sex, language, music, geography, economics, and other aspects of the artist's fantasy empire, which, for him, was more or less the universe. His achievement is a revelation in "St. Adolf-Giant-Creation,"a retrospective at the American Folk Art Museum. The works' aesthetic refinement is amazing. I had known Wolfli mainly from reproductions, which cannot convey his virtuosity. Especially in his earliest surviving pictures--from 1904 to 1907, after the staff at the Waldau Mental Asylum stopped regarding his work as "stupid stuff”--he emerges as, among other things, a master of graphic design with an exceptional talent for tonality.
"Waldorf Astoria Hotel"(1905), to take one example, is a pencil drawing on four sheets of newsprint, about ten feet long. It imagines...
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