Lot 35: ALOISE CORBAZ (1886-1964)

Feerie de Fˆte titled 'Feerie de Fˆte' (lower center) colored pencil, graphite and collage on paper 25 x 119 in. (63.5 x 302 cm.) Executed circa 1952. PROVENANCE Ricco/Maresca Gallery, New York LITERATURE Ricco/Maresca Gallery, Self-Taught, Outsider, Art Brut: Masterpieces From the Robert M. Greenberg Collection, New York,1999, p. 80-81 (illustrated in color). EXHIBITION New York, Katonah Museum of Art, Private Worlds: Classic Outsider Art from Europe, December 1998-February 1999, p. 14 (illustrated in color). NOTES Alo‹se Corbaz's extant works date from 1936, about 16 years after she was first institutionalized. In her youth, she was unable to realize her dream of becoming an opera singer, nor was she able to marry the man with whom she had fallen in love. These tragedies would inform her all of her work--the collage elements of Feerie de Fˆte are filled with images of the romance and happiness that would never be hers. "Alo‹se's world is filled with flowers, kings, queens, popes, charming princes, voluptuous princesses. A sensual erotic world, a disembodied world. A gallery of phantomatic portraits, vacuous masks, powerless masks, simple coverups for a broken love, for unattainable desires revealed by the desperately empty blue eyes of her characters" ( ABCD, Paris, 2001, p. 1).