A Mental Patient as Artist

A Mental Patient as Artist is a book by Swiss psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler that provides the first monograph of an outsider artist, Adolf Wölfli. Wölfli was a long-term patient whose extensive body of work was considered by Surrealist writer André Breton to be among the best of the 20th century.1

Outsider art, or art brut ("raw art"), refers to works produced by untrained, idiosyncratic artists who are typically unconnected to the conventional art world. These artists are often socially or culturally marginalized, undereducated, and may have been diagnosed with mental illness. Despite adversity, they create substantial, high-quality artistic oeuvres out of their own impulses, rather than from artistic culture or convention. Art therapy, on the other hand, uses creative processes to aid well-being, with the process of making art being central, rather than the final product's mastery or commercial value.12