Künstler - - Stift Admont

August Klett
*Heilbronn 1866–1928, Weinsberg Clinic
Pseudonym from Prinzhorn: “August Klotz”
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The son of a hot-tempered Heilbronn merchant, Klett had a difficult youth. After
completing secondary school and until a one-year merchant apprenticeship and
military service, Klett worked for his father’s colonial goods agency abroad
(Antwerp, Brussels, London) and then as a wine and champagne salesman.
He was a freemason, is purported to have had numerous romantic interludes with
women and went to wine tastings with duchesses.
After a failed love affair and severe influenza, his suffered from increased
depression, feelings of guilt and necrophobia, causing him to cut himself in the
stomach during a hallucination. He was admitted to the Göppingen Clinic in
1903, feeling as though he was being followed and suffering the crucifixion as
"Christ".
He was transferred to Weinsberg in 1905, “unimproved”. Here, he warded off
the devils and deaths heads that he saw on the wallpaper with freemason symbols
made from fat. He invented a “colour alphabet” (a=red, et cetera) and a
cabalistic combined number-colour-letter system.
He was extraordinarily productive as a word and visual artist. He learned his
large-scale, high-contrast painting style from poster art. He poured humour into
the fireworks of his visual and linguistic inspirations and configurations,
unsystematically yet calculatedly at the same time.
Everyday life in the clinic, things remembered, business occasions, conversations,
education theory and sexual desires were disassembled, recombined and tightly
linked. Normative image and linguistic characters are rendered unrecognisable: a
rhetoric of madness, which was called, perplexedly and disrespectfully, "language
salad", "disjointed" or "futuristic".
The silver-tongued strategy of the “sprachlöchersterne” remained silent regarding
real traumas.
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