The Art of Adolf Wölfli: St. Adolf-Giant-Creation

In his day (1864-1930) and after, the Swiss mental patient and self-taught artist Adolf Wolfli inspired some heavy-hitter patrons: Andre Breton, Jean Dubuffet, Meret Oppenheim, Jonathan Borovsky. But most esthetes encountering him today will do so with the later, now more-famous outsider artist Henry Darger in mind. Like Darger, Wolfli sought to tame his pedophilic madness by organizing it into an incredibly elaborate art exploring what Darger called "the realms of the unreal," where a mind incapable of coping with the real world could construct and rigidly control a world of infinite beauty and sights denied all ordinary mortals.

Wolfli was technically superior to Darger, though his collages clipped from magazines (often the Illustrated London News) were not so central to his imagination as the clip-and-trace fantasy battles of little girls that obsessed Darger. In fact, Wolfli was strikingly diverse in his imagery, echoing by turns San Francisco psychedelia, Northwest Coast native-American art, folk art from all over the planet, Bauhaus or Constructivist typographical experiments, and William Blake visions. What windstorms were to Darger, waterfalls were to Wolfli: symbols of the uncontrollable passions that drove through him.

Wolfli conceived of himself as a multimedia artist in a way only a schizophrenic could imagine: his drawings were also musical compositions, images and letters imbued with sounds, and time reconceived as a unit of space. I find Wolfli's imagination less vast than Darger's, and less numbingly repetitive. His narratives are slightly more intelligible: it's all about a Wolfli character's epic journey from poverty and brutal oppression (no fantasy) to apotheosis in the "St. Adolf-Giant-Creation," a realm so immense he ran out of numbers to describe it and was forced to invent 23 new numerals beyond quadrillion, ending with the biggest number of all, Zorn (German for "rage"). This eye-opening book could make Wolfli all the rage, but it can't hope to contain his imagination. --Tim Appelo