Amazon.com Review
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
Review
Wölfli was an obsessive artist par excellence. He spent the last 35 years of his life locked up . . . and in that time he produced thousands of pages of intricate drawings and novelistic narratives. . . . [He] was recognized as a creative power before his death. . . . After his death in 1930, Wölfli's popularity grew among adherents of Surrealism and those stressing the importance of buried, asocial consciousness. -- Carly Berwick, ArtNews
With the stunning retrospective of the work of the artist-composer-poet Adolf Wölfli at the American Folk Art Museum, the distinction between insider and outsider art should finally be declared null and void. . . . [He] created an enormous body of ornate, densely patterned drawings whose incantatory power, formal scope and cultural richness defy category. . . . Wölfli's creations treat the eye to a roller-coaster ride through a terrain bounded by Piranesi, biblical myth, illuminated manuscripts, tantric mandalas and Swiss cuckoo clocks--in other words, a dizzying multi-cultural universe. -- Roberta Smith, The New York Times
Wölfli's lyrical, evocative compositions of his well-ordered, elegantly constructed universe explore the relationship between mental illness and art. Mandala-like pieces highlight the artist's high-quality draftsmanship and artistic vision. . . . The introductory essay . . . provides an excellent overview of the artist's life within a Swiss mental asylum and the extraordinary drawings and collages of transformation and rebirth that he produced until his death. -- Library Journal
Adolf Wölfli . . . is among the greatest of outsider artists. Indeed, he could serve as Exhibit A in a study of the outsider phenomenon. . . . [His] large, incredibly dense drawings combine religion, sex, language, music, geography, economics, and other aspects of the artist's fantasy empire. . . . Besides having an immensely complicated and subtle technique, Wölfli is scary. . . . To do Wölfli justice--that is, fully to honor our spontaneous pleasure in his work--requires a bravely open mind. -- Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker
Freakish, hallucinatory, amusing, ingenious, sensuously soft in touch, and overwhelmingly rich in their detailing, Wölfli's lead and colored-pencil drawings can at first resemble overelaborate, geometric folk-art decorations. Looked at more intently, they can seem like fiendishly complex game boards. . . . Ultimately, these pictures . . . all blended into a web of flowing, arching, interconnecting shapes, defy categorization. -- Sanford Schwartz, New York Review of Books
A significant and elegant contribution to the history of the Swiss artist most closely associated with the artistic practices labeled variously as art brut, outsider art, or self-taught art. -- Choice
An excellent account of [Wölfli's] art and life. -- Sue Taylor, Art in America
