A troubled young man, Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930) was diagnosed with psychosis after being orphaned at the age of 10 and experiencing almost constant suffering as a result of state failures. In 1895, he was institutionalized at the Waldau Clinic in Bern, Switzerland, where he stayed for the remainder of his life. Shortly after his admission, Wölfli began to draw. As seen in the present work, his drawings are characterized by his trademark dense, color-filled compositions supported by text, and at times, musical compositions. His magnum opus, a multi-volume, 25,000-page epic illustrated text chronicles his imagined life as a knight, an emperor and a saint. While many of Wölfli’s drawings were created in book format, he also made single-sheet drawings he called portraits. This work belongs to Wölfli’s so-called “bread art,” a body of smaller, decorative drawings he produced to generate income for art supplies.

Titled Vile Milliarden Stund (Many Billion Hours), the reverse bears a dense inscription that addresses a series of unconnected, repetitive, and at times incomprehensible topics, consistent with Wölfli’s expansive narrative imagination. The text remains largely illegible, though several phrases can be identified, including references to “many millions of hours,” a pine forest on the west coast repeatedly described, trees said to be “many millions of hours high,” as well as lakes, rivers, and steamboats on the ocean. A dramatic episode recounts a forty-meter-long poisonous snake, threatening the artist’s mother before being killed with a pocket knife, saving her life. The final line appears to reference “200 Francs” and is signed “Adolf II., Bern, Switzerland, 1920,” invoking Wölfli’s mythic alter ego, St. Adolf II.