Solitary Beings

By Lena U Carlsson

Above: "Solitude Aluminee" by Jean Dubuffet.

Last spring the exhibition "Solitary beings - art by odd persons from the collection of Eternod-Mermod, Lausanne" was shown at Prince Eugen´s Waldermarsudde in Stockholm, Sweden. (The Swedish title of the exhibition was "Solitärer - särlingskonst från samling Eternod-Mermod, Lausanne".) The artists are all odd persons, who creates in solitude. Some of them suffer from psychical disturbances, for instance schizophrenia. This exhibition was a moving and staggering but also elevating experience. There was a strange contrast between the often hard life stories of the artists and the pictures´ reflexion of intensive creative joy. Evidently, it is possible to make art during the most unhuman conditions and after the most disgusting experiences. Such circumstances even seem to promote creativity.

All of the exhibitors have not had a hard life but they are all outsiders, and many of them have gone through traumatic life events during the two world wars. All of them have left a great number of pictures, which are marked by obsession and wilfulness. Almost all of the artists are autodidacts. These characteristics are typical of l'Art Brut, that is crude or original art.

Jean Dubuffet

Philippe Eternod and Jean-David Mermod, both from Switzerland, began to collect art together ten years ago. The French artist Jean Dubuffet, who constructed the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, served as a model. Dubuffet looked for a genuine and original art that did not try to adjust to the demands of the environment, an art that was as unaffected by the cultural life as possible. Dubuffet himself had great problems in combining his artistry with the rules and conventions of the commercial art life, which paralyzed his creative work for a long time.

"Smiling Face" by Jean Dubuffet"

Dubuffet had positive ideas about madness, which he regarded as the driving force of fantasy. He tried to find an art that was created from extasy and an inner necessity. He found it among poor people, illiterates, women and old persons, and among deprived people, criminals and mentally disturbed individuals. Dubuffet started his collecting in 1945. However, after 1959 the situation changed. L'Art Brut, the crude art, suddenly petered out at the mental hospitals. The new antipsychotic drugs, which in many ways revolutionized the care of schizophrenic patients, had made their appearance. But these medicines have one great disadvantage, among others. They inhibit human creativity. Certainly a lot of art is produced within the hospitals' therapeutical activities. But these creations are not of the same character as those that were made before the entrance of the psychopharmacological drugs.

"Site Avec Trois Personnages" by Jean Dubuffet.

Dubuffet still succeeded in finding solitary people who created the kind of art that he wanted, even after 1959. More than 20 000 works of art are now collected at the castle of Beaulieu in Lausanne, where the collection of Dubuffet was opened in 1976.

The Exhibition at Waldemarsudde

Some of the 34 artists that were represented at the exhibition at Waldemarsudde are Aloïse Corbaz , Carlo , Rosemarie Koczÿ , Edmund Monseil and Adolf Wölfli .

Literature:

Michel Thévoz and Jean Dubuffet: Art Brut. Academy
Editions, London 1976
Jean-Louis Ferrier: Outsider Art. 1998

Aloïse

Aloïse, with the surname Corbaz, has been called the queen of l'Art Brut. She was born in Lausanne in 1886 and worked as a governess at the court of the emperor, William II, for some time. She fell unhappily in love with the emperor and contracted schizophrenia. In 1918 Aloïse is taken to a mental hospital, where she starts to draw. She creates a world of her own, a Theatre of the Universe, where the woman has a dominant position. On paper rolls Aloïse produces an infinite number of colourful drawings of a fantasy world populated by ample female figures. Aloïse spends fortysix years in mental hospital and dies in 1964.

Carlo

Carlo was born in an Italian village in 1916. He spent his childhood and youth at a farm. At the age of nineteen Carlo got a job at a slaughter-house in Verona, where he began to make drawings. After his military service in 1936 Carlo is sent to the front. His experiences there become too much for him. He is taken ill in schizophrenia in 1947 and is confined to a mental hospital. With a piece of brick Carlo starts to create graffiti on the wall behind his bed. He is then allowed to visit the workshop for graphic design at the hospital. There he paints for eight hours a day in twelve years. Carlo produces silhouettes of men and childdren, often in profile and in groups of four. The pictures are made with an ever increasing skilfulness. The background is covered with numerals and later with words, which towards the end of Carlos life as an artist become more important than the drawings. During his last years Carlo lives with one of his brothers. Carlo dies in 1974.

Edmund Monsiel

Edmund Monsiel was born in Poland in 1897. After leaving nine-year school he works as a shop manager in a small town in the country. In 1942 the Germans confiscate his shop. Edmund then hides himself in the attic of his brother's house, for fear of being arrested. He stays in the attic for twenty years until his death in 1967. He never goes out and nobody is permitted to enter. At Easter 1943, while the world outside is on fire, Edmund starts drawing. After his death about 500 small and conscientiously made drawings were found. The motive is always the same and consists of myriads of human faces where the eyes are particularly conspicuous. The faces, which are often parts of religious themes, cover the whole area and are of a varying size. The smallest are hardly visible. Sometimes as many as 3000 faces occur in the same drawing.

Rosmarie Koczÿ

Rosmarie Koczÿ was born in Germany in 1939. She was deported together with her family in 1942 and spent three years in two concentration camps. Not until four years after the end of the war is Rosmarie Koczÿ reunited with those who are left of her family. However, her mother dies shortly thereafter, and she is still looking for her father. Rosemarie Koczÿ spends the rest of her childhood and adolescence at orphanages, where she must work hard and nobody visits her. When Rosemarie tries to tell other people about her experiences from the war she is called a liar. In 1959 she goes to Switzerland to train herself to become an artist.

Rosmarie Koczÿ's pictures are, like her destiny, deeply shocking. She remembers in detail the deportation and the life at the concentration camps. With black pen-and-ink drawings she mediates impressions from these painful experiences. The author Allen S Weiss has said that Rosmarie Koczÿ has created "an esthetic method whose conclusions are ethic, a horrible vision of the ghostly beauty and the forbidden truth".

Adolf Wölfli

Adolf Wölfli was born in 1864 in a Swiss village. When Adolf was eight years old his mother died, whereupon followed a hard life with work at various farms with wicked farmers. As a teenager Adolf Wölfli falls unhappily in love and he starts to lead a wandering life. After several rape attempts he is imprisoned. In 1895 Adolf is brought to the mental hospital in Waldau, and he is later diagnosed as schizophrenic. He is so violent that he has to spend more than twenty years in a solitary confinement cell. After some years in hospital Adolf Wölfli begins to draw, write and compose. He tests his compositions by rolling the score to a flute or a trumpet. He writes his biography on large sheets of paper which form a pile that is nearly two meters high. The biography contains words and pictures as well as music. It is written in calligraphy in different languages and decorated with richly symbolized and ornamented images. Adolf Wölfli, just like Aloïse Corbaz, creates his own cosmos, where he describes the hero Saint Adolf II and his strange adventures. Adolf commits no more crimes but he remains at the hospital for the rest of his life. He is occupied by his biography from 1908 and until his death in 1930. Parts of it have been published in the latest decade. Adolf Wölfli is one of the most wellknown of the artists of l'Art Brut, and his works fascinate many of the painters, poets and musicians of today.

Other columns by Lena U Carlsson

The exhiibition at Waldemarsudde also woke up thoughts within Lena, about a good friend and her journey in psychiatric care. Lena have collected these thoughts in the text Thoughts about a Friend, which can be found in HUBIN's department with information to the public.