A creative life that blossomed in the asylum

Visual escape: "Cleopatra's Bed Flowers" by Aloise Corbaz, one of the inspirations for the Art Brut movement. STECK COLLECTION, SWITZERLAND; WATARIUM MUSEUM OF ART

A creative life that blossomed in the asylum After going from Switzerland to the periphery of the German court, Aloise Corbaz's artist talent was discovered in a sanitarium
By JEFF MICHAEL HAMMOND
Special to The Japan Times

(Source Japan Times) To view the pictures of Aloise Corbaz is to enter a fantastic, colorful world of a beautiful young woman with her handsome suitor, filled with carriages and crowns, roses and nights at the opera. The belle is Aloise herself, or, perhaps more precisely, Aloise's ideal self, center stage in a theatrical production far from her routine existence in a Swiss home for the mentally ill.
A new exhibition of more than 80 pictures by this remarkable artist is on show at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art (aka Watarium), in a new exhibition simply titled "Aloise," which is being held in Japan only. One of many striking features of her work is its vibrant coloring. Leaving the black and brown pencils virtually untouched in their box, Aloise structured her pictures around flaming reds and soft pinks, supported by hues of yellow, orange, green and blue.

Since her death in 1964, Aloise has become one of the most celebrated artists in the field of Art Brut, a term coined by French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-85), who found in the untutored and unrefined artistic output of the mentally ill an immediacy and power he thought lacking in academic art. Dubuffet collected Aloise's works, visiting her from time to time and encouraging her creativity.

Aloise was born in 1886 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her mother died when she was 11 years old, leaving Aloise in the care of her eldest sister, whose tyrannical control left an indelible mark on Aloise's psyche and on the family. This sister, discovering Aloise's love for a priest who lived nearby, put an early and cruel end to the affair by sending her off to work as a governess in Germany in 1911, when Aloise was about 25. At first, Aloise worked for a family in Leipzig and then for a chaplain in the service of Emperor Wilhelm II in Potsdam. How involved Aloise was in court life is unclear, but coaches, thrones and jewels were recurring motifs in her vibrant pictures.

In 1913 Aloise returned to Switzerland, but her mental health soon deteriorated. She spent the rest of her life in institutions, at first with no opportunities for her creative inclinations, but from 1920 she started secretly drawing on scraps of paper with toothpaste and juice squeezed from leaves. When her activities were discovered, they were encouraged and, given colored pencils, she would draw on larger pieces of paper or in notebooks, often ripping out the pages and sewing them together into large sheets or scrolls. With similar resourcefulness, Aloise frequently used both sides of the paper she worked on and when no clean sheets of paper were available, used newspaper or pages ripped from magazines or books, including one on display in the exhibition drawn over a page from an art book on Japonisme.
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Visual escape: "Cleopatra's Bed Flowers" by Aloise Corbaz, one of the inspirations for the Art Brut movement. STECK COLLECTION, SWITZERLAND; WATARIUM MUSEUM OF ART

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