Künstler - - Stift Admont

August Natterer
*Schornreute 1868–1933, Rottenmünster Mental Hospital
Pseudonym from Prinzhorn: “August Neter”
The son of a Swabian banker, Natterer was the youngest of nine siblings.
After seven years of secondary school, he trained as a mechanic and completed
apprenticeships as an electrician. His adventurous spirit led Natterer across
Europe and even America for years, where he worked at telegraph and telephone
companies and visited the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
Natterer founded a mechanist and electrical engineering company in Würzburg in
1897, trained apprentices, became deputy chair of the commission for the
examination for the master's certificate and supplied university institutes.
Beginning in 1902, demand from the university for his mechanical apparatuses
receded; he applied as a foreman to a technical school and was rejected.
Natterer began to concern himself excessively with inventions and patents in
1907, became increasingly restless and ultimately sought medical advice. In
spring of the same year – in Natterer’s words triggered by the professional
humiliation and a “deadly sin” which he committed in a brothel – he experienced
a great hallucinatory vision: The heaves revealed 10,000 images to Natterer
within half an hour. God himself appeared, the witches who created the world,
images of war, parts of the earth, portrayals of the cosmos, et cetera.
Seeing these images as “revelations of the last judgement”, clearly marked
Natterer’s artistic work. He began drawing his visions in 1912 – two of his most
outstanding works are the “Wunder-Hirthe” and “Weltachse mit Hase”.
Alongside his painterly work, Natterer also composed fantastic poems with, at
times, brilliant sound associations.
According to the medical records, Natterer suffered from severe psychosis and
paranoia: “It seems to him as though a broom is sweeping his chest and stomach;
his skin has become a pelt; his bones and throat have turned to stone; he has a
tree stump in his stomach; animals come out of his nose...he explains loud creaks
in his knee joints as telephony, where the devil continually reports to him about
his stay below...”.
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