Volume 50, Number 9 · May 29, 2003
Wölfli's Empire
By Sanford Schwartz
The Art of Adolf Wölfli: St. Adolf-Giant-Creation
Catalog of the exhibition by Elka Spoerri and Daniel Baumann, with an essay by Edward M. Gomez and a foreword by Gerard C. Werkin
an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, New York, February 25–May 18, 2003, and the Milwaukee Art Museum, October 24, 2003–January 11, 2004
American Folk Art Museum/Princeton University Press, 111 pp., $29.95
BOOKS DRAWN ON FOR THIS REVIEW
Madness and Art: The Life and Works of Adolf Wölfli
by Walter Morgenthaler, M.D., translated from the German and with an introduction and notes by Aaron H. Esman, M.D., with Elka Spoerri
University of Nebraska Press, 131 pp., $60.00
Beyond Reason: Art and Psychosis, Works from the Prinzhorn Collection
by Bettina Brand-Claussen, Inge Jádi, and Caroline Douglas
Hayward Gallery/University of California Press, 119 pp., $39.95 (paper)
The Discovery of the Art of the Insane
by John M. MacGregor
Princeton University Press,416 pp., $49.95 (paper)
The artwork of men and women who spent much of their lives in mental institutions, or living isolated and shut away at the fringes of society, has become increasingly visible in the last few decades, owing in part to the influence of conceptual art. Put most simply, conceptual art, which has conditioned so much of how we now look and think in galleries and museums, is about taking in a given artwork in two ways simultaneously: as an entity in itself and as a symbol of its maker's intentions. Suggesting that the 'real' art remains in its maker's mind, and that what we see before us is a remnant of a thought process, conceptual art is in some measure about disembodiment and ghost-liness. And it may have helped set the stage for our appreciating the drawings, paintings, or sculptural objects—whether showing worlds full of incongruously related figures, or strange patterns of words and numbers—by people whose full conscious awareness of what they were doing will remain forever mysterious.
Review, 3535 words
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