“From the Cradle to the Grave” 1908-1912

Books 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 1A, 17

Wölfli quite clearly assumed that his Book would be printed as a facsimile edition, and therefore, he treated each page as a graphic unit. Even the pages without illustrations are articulated in graphic terms. Their most important element is the even rhythmic flow of the continuous penmanship. The letters are formed and joined in a ponderous yet energetic manner. Single letters or words are made to stand out by enlargement or by the use of color. From 1910 on, the script becomes larger and, occasionally, passages or single lines are executed in color. Sometimes by stretching out individual words over a whole page through syllable repetition and letter serialization, Wölfli produces strong visual accents. The fascination of the illustrations in Wölfli's narrative work does not arise only from the individual drawings; as one leafs through the Books, one is captivated by the eccentric interweaving of text and imagery. The illustrations in the Books are intrinsic formal and narrative constituents of the continuous text, inseparable from the whole, and interwoven with the text in many ways: as ornamental borders, vignettes, margin decorations, small self-sufficient compositions, and even whole-page illustrations.

The eight Books of “From the Cradle to the Grave” contain a total of 752 illustrations drawn on newsprint in lead or colored pencil or oil crayon. They are not evenly distributed over the 2,970 pages of the Books. The largest portion of the drawings, done in 1910 and 1911, are bound in a tight sequence into Book 4. Wölfli drew many of the whole-page illustrations on large sheets, of approximately 100 x 75 cm and occasionally on even larger sheets, which he folded several times and inserted into the Book; these were similar to the panorama pictures popular at the time.

From 1908 on, Wölfli developed the most important motif of his formal vocabulary, the little bird (Vögeli), into its definitive form. The bodies of the birds are longish tubular shapes, with two feet in front. On the head is a point and an elongated oval mark shaped like a semicolon; the first could be an eye, the second, an ear (or mouth). These primal shapes with an eye, an ear, and a mouth can be read as hallucinatory emblems. They are also building blocks, fillers or symbols and serial elements that can be used to form larger figures. From 1908 till 1930, they occur in every one of Wölfli's pictures. They serve as a counterweight to the faces in Wölfli's work, which are marked by the impassivity and gravity of graven images. Drawn only in outline or filled with color, the bird appears coy and animated, standing still or flying, seemingly protective--never threatening--expressing excitation and sometimes danger. Very often the bird's body is filled with musical notes or interlocking bricks thus animating the brick wall and at the same time deanimalizing the bird by materializing the building.
The whole-page illustrations with figurative compositions, labyrinthine buildings, eccentric landscapes, and city maps or mandala compositions refer to the content of the story. In the figurative pictures, Wölfli portrays his relatives and friends, as well as princesses, princes, and kings whom he meets on his travels, while consistently representing himself as the child Doufi. The figures are shown in individual and group portraits, in their daily life, dancing at festivities, in love embraces, and in scenes of sexual intercourse.

In spite of Wölfli's frequent descriptions of automatic clocks or mechanical objects, we find no representations of human figures composed of machine components (frequent in drawings by schizohrenics). There are, however many illustrations of anthropomorphic changes in vegetable beings, which are shown as "intelligent," "laughing," "flying," or "talking" flowers and fruits. For Wölfli, the flower motif is generally an image of female beauty. Flowers have girls' faces, and, for the most part, portray princesses. This simultaneous occurrence of "a catastrophe and an idyll" can be seen, for instance, in "Herdsman's Rose of Australia: Organs of Speech," in which the aura around the face (--the mezza-luna) of the Rose Princess is a knife. The petals of the flower around her head are arched windows in the first row and are transformed into barred prison windows in the second and third rows.

Architectural depictions--churches, towers, farmhouses, castles, monuments--become more prevalent as the story continues. Sometimes they are large and decorated with fantastic details. Whereas Wölfli, on the one hand, depicts windows very naturalistically, with curtains and wooden frames, at the same time, from the very beginning in l904, he can schematizes them in a very impressive way: rows of windows in long facades are drawn merely as short vertical lines.
As already mentioned, Wölfli's ideas of foreign places were clearly patterned on Bern. The topography of its Old Town outlined in the shape of a whale by the meanders of the river around it, the city's construction on two levels, the arches of the huge bridges, the street arcades and fountain sculptures, the cathedral, the clock towers, the bell towers--all serve as elements of Wölfli's renderings of faraway places and views. In one illustration in Book 4 he depicts a mental asylum, the Mental-Asylum Band-Hain in Greenland; yet he draws a bird's-eye view of the plan of Waldau. He must have seen the postcard of Waldau which was made from a photograph taken in 1907 from a balloon. This is one of the two instances known so far in which Wölfli followed a visual model. Usually he worked from memory or from the imagination.

The topographical drawings reverberate with echoes from Wölfli's childhood in the Alps. In 1908 he wrote about a panoramic view ("Feern-Sicht"), which is mirrored in his illustrations. Wölfli clearly enjoyed combining into a single drawing differing landscapes and topography that might come into view from changing positions in the course of a walk. He certainly knew the panoramic views and engravings of Swiss towns which were extremely popular at that time. Thus in the “Vue general de Berne. Vue prise de la Tour Goliath ou St. Christophe,” we find a combination of a bird's-eye view and a side view which recalls similar compositions by Wölfli. In the topographical maps and city plans Wölfli partly follows the school atlas he owned and used. But for the meanderings of rivers, the turns and twists of local streets and regional boundaries, he combines other entities: bodies of water swell into thick bands of blue and branch out like the boughs of a tree; portions of the landscape turn into objects, and fantastic conglomerations sometimes assume anthropomorphic features.
(Elka Spoerri)