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Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern
Lithuanian nationality
Born in Kaukehmen in 1892
Dies in West Berlin in 1982
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| Schröder-Sonnenstern is the second of thirteen children.
His father is an alcoholic. As an adolescent, he spends time in several
institutions for young delinquents. In 1910, accused of theft while working
on a farm, he threatens the police with a knife. He is sent to the psychiatric
hospital of Allenberg in Prussia. There he is diagnosed with "dementia praecox".
When he leaves the hospital, he publishes poems, in which he criticizes
social injustice and national corruption. He talks about psychiatrists as
the "biggest scientific criminals of the world". |
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| During the First World War, he works for the post,
but is arrested for passing illegal merchandise and has to be hospitalized
again. After the war, he declares himself an astrologist, clairvoyant, and
says he can cure people with magnets. He calls himself "Professor Dr. Eliot
Gnas von Sonnenstern, psychologist from the University of Science" and decides
to transform the world and to create a new religion. He wants to help people
and animals. He uses part of his wages to buy and distribute sandwiches
to the victims of inflation, and earns the nickname of "King of the sandwiches".
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| In 1930, he is arrested for debts and illegal medical
practice, and once again hospitalized at Neustadt. There he begins to draw.
After the Second World War, he moves in with his girl friend, "Aunt Martha",
and earns a living by selling wood. For a while he cannot walk, and at the
age of fifty-seven, he starts drawing. His imaginary characters, posing
in the most acrobatic positions, represent his personal mythology. His work
is admired at the "Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme" (EROS) in 1959
at the Gallery of Daniel Cordier in Paris. "Aunt Martha's" death in 1964
affects him deeply and he begins to drink; he will never recover. Friedrich
Schröder-Sonnenstern's work has its own place in Art Brut. His drawings,
charged with symbols, appear somewhat surrealistic, as if this movement
had influenced him. His work has two phases: the "before" 1959, more creative
and inventive and the "after" 1959, more repetitive. |
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| SEE ALSO: Kunst & Wahn, Kunstforum Wien,
Dumont, Vienna, 1997. |
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