Mysterious, enigmatic, painful, powerful, and always fascinating are the words that come to mind when describing the psychodramatic imagery that Soutter created in the black-and-white finger paintings of his last creative phase. They seem to turn Soutter's vulnerable innermost thoughts inside out, to spread his fears and fantasies out before us in an almost intoxicating manner. This deep, intimate, painterly insight into the soul is disturbing and captivating. According to Michel Thévoz, the phase of large-format finger paintings can be narrowed down to 1937 to 1942, the year of Soutter's death. Before that, in the solitude of his room at the Swiss boarding school Ballaigues, he first created pencil and pen-and-ink drawings with fine lines in a floral-ornamental style and then in a Mannerist style, with which he filled exercise books all over. Soutter's great cousin, the famous architect Le Corbusier, visited him for the first time in Ballaigues in 1927 and, in the following years, campaigned intensively for his work to be recognized. It is also thanks to Le Corbusier that Soutter's works were exhibited in America during his lifetime and that his cousin was henceforth able to obtain suitable drawing materials. Soutter's oeuvre, which piled up after his death in 1942 in the small room of his home that had been his whole world for the last nineteen years, shows not only stylistically progressive creativity but also a technically equally significant step: With the finger paintings that he started creating in 1937, including the present double-sided composition, Soutter anticipated a progressive achievement of later action art, thereby lending his works a uniquely direct aura.
These captivating works impressively document Soutter's escape into an artistic parallel world. His revolutionary work, which negates all traditions, is now considered an early form of Art Brut and is internationally coveted. However, his work was forgotten for a long time until his major one-person show at the Lenbachhaus in Munich and the Kunstmuseum in Bonn (1985). Art historians only rediscovered and celebrated it after the significant Soutter show at the Kunstmuseum Basel (2002). How revolutionary and disturbing must Soutter's black shadow figures from his last creative phase have seemed to contemporary viewers, for whom the work of Penck, Dubuffet, or even Basquiat was still an unknown distance? Never diagnosed as mentally ill, Soutter seems to us today much more as an almost tragically unrecognized genius. He got fired from the symphony orchestra for frequently contradicting superiors and generally misbehaving misbehavior. Once, he ordered 20 silk ties and sent the bill to his brother. These amusing anecdotes could have been told about later artists who got into society's face with their personalities and unconventional art, such as Martin Kippenberger, Jonathan Meese, or Andy Warhol. Soutter's tragic life story is ultimately the story of a failure in a bourgeois society. This maverick and visionary spirit ultimately withdrew himself and his art from any desire to conform. But despite all its tragedy, precisely these painful experiences of failure and exclusion were needed to create such a dense work imbued with the spirit of pain. [JS]