Elka Spoerri, Who Decoded Noted Artist's Work, 77
DGH
Elka Spoerri, an art historian and curator who unlocked the riches of
the art of Adolf Wölfli, died May 17, 2020, at her home in Bern,
Switzerland, at the age of 77, from cancer. She lived in Bern,
Switzerland, and New York, New York.
Mrs. Spoerri, who sometimes jokingly referred to herself as "Mrs.
Wölfli," was a legend in the world of outsider art. She spent more than
20 years deciphering, transcribing, translating and indexing the often
densely interwoven writing, iconography and musical scores of Wölfli, a
prolific schizophrenic Swiss laborer. Consigned to Waldau, a psychiatric
hospital in Bern, from the age of 30 to his death at 66 in 1930, Wölfli
created thousands of drawings and 45 large illustrated books containing
a total of nearly 25,000 pages. He was known in Switzerland during his
lifetime but subsequently slipped into near oblivion.
Mrs. Spoerri came to Wölfli's work through her husband, Theodor, a
psychiatrist at Waldau who, at the invitation of the Swiss curator
Harald Szeemann, helped reintroduce Wölfli's work to the art world at
Documenta 5 in 1972. But Theodor, a cousin of the artist Daniel Spoerri,
died in 1973, and Mrs. Spoerri became the chief guardian and interpreter
of Wölfli's art.
In 1975 she became the founding curator of the Adolf Wölfli Foundation
at the Kunstmuseum Bern. During the next 20 years her pioneering
research broke the code of Wölfli's art and confirmed him as arguably
one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Her work contributed to
a moment of stunning harmonic convergence in the early 1970's, when the
heretofore small outsider-art field was rocked by such discoveries as
the work of Martin Ramirez and Henry Darger — like Wölfli, a
universe-forming writer-artist.
Mrs. Spoerri was born Elka Zagaroff in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1924, the
daughter of a prominent economist. Her family became refugees in 1939,
living in Berlin, southern Germany and Bern. She received most of her
education at the University of Bern. Interested in contemporary art, she
was co-writer of a lexicon of 20th-century Swiss artists, and over the
years she maintained close friendships with artists like Meret
Oppenheim, Markus Raetz, Joel Fisher and Joan Jonas.
Once diverted into Wölfli territory, Mrs. Spoerri discovered a vast
continent. At the time of her husband's death, almost nothing was known
about the contents of Wölfli's books, the bulk of his creation. Mrs.
Spoerri parsed the constituent parts of their magnificent illustrations:
the self-portraits, madonnas and animal forms and the powerful
decorative patterns in which they were enmeshed. More important (and
laborious), she also deciphered many of Wölfli's words, converting his
partly invented Swiss-German into German and English.
Unraveling Wölfli's complex autobiographical narratives and rhythmic
celebratory chants, she separated his real life's story from his
imagined one, excavating an artist of extraordinary imagination but also
sharp observations, as evidenced by his accounts of his impoverished
childhood. It helped, she said, that she had been taught in Old German
in elementary school in Bulgaria.
Mrs. Spoerri organized or worked on more than 30 exhibitions of Wölfli's
work and edited or contributed to numerous Wölfli publications,
including (with Dieter Schwarz) a two-volume version of his 2,970-page
autobiography, "From the Cradle to the Grave," and (with Max Wechsler)
"Geographical Book No. 11: Writings, 1912-1913." She retired from the
Wölfli foundation in 1996 but was a curator, with her successor, Daniel
Baumann, of the Wölfli retrospective that will open at the American
Museum of Folk Art next January.