Aloise corbaz biography married

Aloise was eleven when her mother died. In she graduated from high school, fell in love with a student — a relationship which her sister ended violently — and dreamt of becoming a singer. An expatriate in Germany in , she worked as a teacher, then as a governess, especially in Potsdam at the court of Emperor Wilhelm II, for whom she developed an imaginary passion.

Aloise corbaz biography married: Aloïse Corbaz, known as Aloïse

Her first psychological problems appeared when she was twenty-seven and the declaration of war forced her to return to Switzerland. During the first years of institutionalization she isolated herself and suffered from occasional violent outbursts; with time, she gradually adapted to hospital life. It was only in that the director of the hospital and her general practitioner became interested in her work.

Aloise drew on the front and back of each sheet of paper, usually with colored pencils and crayons, but sometimes also with leaf juice or toothpaste, a torrent of characters with blue eyes. For larger formats some are over ten meters , she stitched several sheets together with yarn. A great gallery of portraits at once sumptuous and ghostly, of abundant yet expressionless masks.