1. Aloïse
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"Aloïse was born Aloïse Corbaz in Lausanne in 1886 and never showed any interest in pictorial art before her confinement for schizophrenia in 1918. … She successfully finished her schooling at the age of 18 and then trained in a dressmaking school. In 1911, after a passionate love affair had been broken up by her elder sister Margueritte, she left for Germany. William II’s chaplain engaged her as his children’s governess in Potsdam. There she conceived a violent passion for the Kaiser himself. The outbreak of war in 1914 and her return home to Switzerland had catastrophic effects on her mental health.

"Four troubled years later, in 1918, she was diagnosed as schizophrenic and confined to the Cery Psychiatric Hospital near Lausanne. At Cery, she began an elaborate cosmogonic system which, paradoxically, changed the world she had fled in madness, into a metaphysical theater, the Theater of the Universe. Here, neither time, nor space, nor dimension exists; forms are metamorphosed and matter becomes essentially unstable.

………

"The world as recreated by Aloïse is cosmic and insubstantial, free of physical contingencies, in opposition to the old natural world she knew before her ‘death,’ that is before her illness. It is a supernatural world, theater of the Universe, thronged with immutable, hieratic actors whose deeds and feelings are expressed by the tiny hieroglyphic figures around them. Furthermore, their very essence is uncertain. They may be themselves and yet simultaneously represent something else. A woman may be herself and at the same time her icon … or a living lantern … or an allegory.

………

"Around 1920, Aloise began to draw in secret. However, from 1941 onwards, she experienced an outburst of artistic freedom which led her to cover rolls upon rolls of large sheets of paper with dazzling paintings, thus giving life to her cosmogonic theater. She pursued her work [after] 1953 with gradually decreasing intensity, until her death in 1964. She had been confined to hospital for 46 years."

— Jacqueline Porret-Forel (translated into English by Patricia Forel-Thrussell)

[The following are excerpts of texts embedded in a 1941 sketchbook, as transcribed by Jacqueline Porret-Forel. They can be read here as small poems or as markers of the range of interests in the larger works. The visual images presented on ubuweb are, however, from distinctively different pieces.]

+ Belgian star Stretching Rome

See also the entry "Adolf Wölfli & Outsider Poetry," for an overview of the subject & the work of the other great figure from the classical period of outsider poetry & art.