1886, Lausanne (Switzerland) - 1964, Gimel-sur-Morges (Switzerland)
Aloïse was eleven years old when her mother died. In 1906 she graduated from high school and fell in love with a student. Her sister, however, destroyed that relationship.
Even if Aloïse dreamt of becoming a singer, she moved to Germany in 1911 to work first as a teacher, then as a governess for the Chaplain of William II in Potsdam. It is at that time that she developed an imaginary passion for the Emperor.
Her first psychological problems appeared when she was twenty-seven years old. Hospitalized first in 1918 at the mental hospital in Cery-sur-Lausanne, from 1920 until her death she would live at the hospital of La Rosière.
During the first years of her institutionalization, she isolated herself completely and had occasional attacks of violence. Later she started to adjust to her life at the hospital and was put in charge of ironing the linen.
It was probably around 1920 that she began writing and drawing in secret. Her production of this period was almost completely destroyed. It was only after 1936 that Professor Hans Steck, then director of the hospital, and Dr. Jacqueline Porret-Forel, general practitioner, became interested in her work.
Aloïse drew most often with colored pencils and crayons, sometimes in addition to petal and leaf juice or toothpaste. Occasionally, she created collages by adding magazine cutouts, chocolate wrapping papers or colored stickers. Her preferred support for her works was Kraft paper retrieved from packages. She most often painted on both sides of the paper ; in order to obtain larger formats, she stitched several sheets of paper together with yarn ; some of them are more than thirty feet long.
Aloïse’s story is one of death and rebirth. While creating rupture with her past life (to her "monde naturel ancien d’autrefois", "the ancient natural world of the past"), she was no more the woman of flesh, "black mud" definitely dead, but became the grand Creator of works full of flowers, kings, queens, charming princes, voluptuous princesses, pastries and circuses, of famous love stories. A paradoxical gallery filled with a range of magnificent and at the same time ghostly portraits, vacuous and powerless masks, perhaps testifying to the impossible or broken love, revealed by the desperately empty blue eyes of her characters.
SEE ALSO : PORRET-FOREL (Jacqueline). Aloïse et le théâtre de l’univers, Albert Skira, Geneva, 1993.
Publications de la Compagnie de l’Art Brut, fascicule 7, text of Jacqueline Porret-Forel, Paris, 1966.
CHEMAMA STEINER (Béatrice). Aloïse ou l’infirmament du regard, in, Le schizophrène : la vue, le regard, published by Bates Healthwdorld for Laboratoires Sanofi Synthélabo.
