Aloïse

Aloïse Corbaz, the seventh child of a postal worker, was born in Lausanne in 1886, into a modest, uneducated family marked by alcoholism. In 1911, after falling madly in love with a defrocked priest, she was sent to Germany, where she worked as a teacher and later as the governess of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s chaplain in Potsdam. Remaining single, she then developed a delusional passion for the emperor, whom she glimpsed momentarily. It was on the eve of the war that she exhibited the first symptoms of schizophrenia. She was interned five years later, in 1918, first at the Cery Hospital, then in 1920 at the Rosière asylum in Gimel, where she remained until her death.

Aloïse’s entire body of work is a romantic idealization of the couple. Created with colored pencils on large pieces of recycled paper sewn together and often used on both sides. Her characters are easily recognizable by their empty gaze, generally drawn in blue, like a theater mask, or by the sensual makeup of their thick lips above abundant breasts depicted as bouquets of roses. After 1949, her works, with more complex compositions, became a series of theatrical scenes. The largest of these can reach 14 meters, sometimes double-sided.

It wasn’t until 1936 that people began to recognize the exceptional work of this patient, which later caught the interest of Jacqueline Porret-Forel, a doctor who dedicated her thesis to her. Aloïse continued to create until she died in 1964.

In May 2024, the biopic dedicated to Aloïse Corbaz (made in 1975) by Liliane de Kermadec and André Téchiné, with Isabelle Huppert and Delphine Seyrig in the roles of young and adult Aloïse, and Michael Lonsdale as the doctor, was re-released in theaters in a restored version.

In 2024, her works are presented at the Venice Biennale under the curatorship of Adriano Pedrosa.