Art Brut

Special stamps Art brut

Swiss Post is turning the spotlight on Outsider Art as it continues the art series it launched in March 2006 with two special postage stamps dedicated to the "Modern Style" movement. This time, the public is being given the chance to appreciate Outsider Art (or Art brut as it is known in French): visual creation at its purest, whose uninhibited forms, inspired by primitive, instinctive awareness, are continually rediscovered by the artist throughout the creative process.

Art Brut in Lausanne

The Collection Art Brut in Lausanne shows works by self-taught artists who, for various reasons, have avoided cultural conditioning and social conformity. To date, this collection has amassed 30,000 works and is becoming more and more popular. Every year, around 30,000 visitors from Europe, the United States and Japan discover these original and subversive works of art.

Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930)

Andre Breton, the French Surrealist artist, termed the work of Adolf Wölfli "one of the three or four most important oeuvres of the twentieth century". Wölfli was admitted to the Waldau Psychiatric Hospital in 1895 and began writing and painting in 1899. In 1908, he set about writing the history of his life. After just a few pages, this developed into an epic journey, in which an elaborate world was created. Using texts, drawings, poems, collages and musical compositions, Adolf Wölfli describes and celebrates the birth of the future "Skt. Adolf-Riesen-Schöpfung" (Saint Adolf-Giant-Creation). Over a thirty-year period and some 25,000 pages, Adolf Wölfli re-imagined his childhood and created a magnificent future for himself embedded within a unique world of fantasy. The postage stamp motif "Saint Adolf - Throne - Rock Face – Flower", dating from 1917, comes from the "Saint Adolf-Giant-Creation".

Carlo Zinelli (1916-1974)

Carlo Zinelli was born near Verona in Italy and lost his mother at the age of two. Seven years later, his father sent him to work on a farm where Zinelli spent his youth before being apprenticed to a butcher. That was when he began to draw and discovered his passion for music. During the Second World War, Carlo Zinelli served in the mountain fusiliers, but it was not long before he developed the first symptoms of mental illness - persecution mania and hallucinations. At the age of 31, he was admitted to the San Giacomo Hospital in Verona. Ten years later, the hospital management allowed him to attend the painting studio opened in 1957, and in fourteen years, Carlo Zinelli completed nearly three thousand drawings, painting with gouache on the front and back of the sheets. His graphic language is characterized by the repetition of certain motifs, and collages and inscriptions supplemented some of his compositions. Carlo Zinelli died in 1974.

Postage stamps in detail

Issue: Switzerland, 27 April 2007
Printing: offset, 4-color by Joh. Enschedé, Haarlem, Netherlands
Stamp sizes: 28x33 mm, Sheetlet: 95 x 192 mm (5 rows of 2 stamps)
Perforation: 13.25:13.5
Design: Swiss Post, Bern

More information

Leonhard Euler