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  • The Paris Review

    The Art of Madness

    by Cody Delistraty Feb 06, 2018 9 minutes

    Aloïse Corbaz, Le ricochet solaire.

    On July 5, 1945, the French painter Jean Dubuffet set off for Switzerland accompanied by two fellow Frenchmen, the publisher Jean Paulhan and the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. The Swiss tourism board had organized the trip with the hopes that the men would return to Paris with a new view of Switzerland. Paul Baudry, the cultural ambassador of French-Swiss tourism, had organized for them to eat at the top restaurants, take in the rolling hills and meadows, and go to the Matterhorn.

    But Dubuffet had little interest in all that. “He ran around the asylums,” Paulhan later wrote, collecting “different drawings and gouaches.” In Paris, Dubuffet had already begun purchasing art made by people who had been deemed mentally ill, but it was in Switzerland, across roughly half a dozen institutions, where he gathered the bulk of what would become his collection. 

    Heinrich Anton Müller, Hermine, c. 1917.

    He broke away from the group and went first to the Waldau Asylum, outside Bern, where he spoke with Walter Morgenthaler, a Swiss psychiatrist who had worked at Waldau as a medical assistant, collecting thousands of works made by the asylum’s patients. Dubuffet saw first the art of Adolf Wölfli, a sexually abused orphan who had been interned at Waldau after becoming an abuser himself. Wölfli’s twenty-five-thousand-page masterpiece combines texts, drawings, collages, and musical compositions that together outlined a reimagined history of his childhood and a fantastical, mythological

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