"Funeral March" 1928-1930

16 unnumbered Books

In the illustrations of the Funeral March, Wölfli works almost exclusively with collages. He usually attaches the images at the lower or the upper left edge of the page, but occasionally he places an image in the center as a medallion, and sometimes he supplements it with drawings of birds. As picture material Wölfli uses mostly reproductions cut from illustrated magazines, often from the „Illustrated London News“. In spite of his isolated life in the asylum, he shows great acuity in picking out the most relevent topics and events in arenas such as sports, film, politics, city life, and advertising. All the pictorial motifs of his previous work are paraded once again in concentrated form: female beauty, mother love, domestic bliss, comfortable living (in contrast to his life of poverty), political and financial power, mountains and glaciers, catastrophes and idylls, and so on.

Wölfli's lapidary procedure of adding unchanged reproductions to illustrate the text allows us to understand which aspects of these motifs, detached from his own individual drama, had acquired an independent meaning for him. The reproductions he chooses document his rediscovery of the private world he has imagined and created, which he is then able to find in the world outside. His method of quoting his own narrative and visual themes by means of the found pictures creates a connection between his private life and public life at large. Through his use of magazine reproductions and his ability to locate his motifs in these pictures, Wölfli seems to open himself to the world. Nevertheless, he lifts these motifs out of the pictures only to take them, as it were, back into the "cradle."

(Elka Spoerri)