Let Them Err, If They Like

'What I've painted is painted,
What I've written is written
It's of good use to young and old,
Even if some of it is destroyed-
Hooray!
I belong to the guild of thinkers and artists,
I am a man!'


He was in his late forties and a celebrated Vienna porcelain painter when his family decided there was something wrong with him and he needed to be admitted to a psychiatric institution. That was in 1893. The opinion of a single doctor sufficed to justify the measure. An unsuspecting Rädler was taken away, and soon the gates closed behind him-for some 24 years, until his death.
Robbed of his successful past, his career, and his family, Rädler struggled with meaninglessness, being forgotten, and loneliness. He began painting his surroundings, and the smallest of things took on new meaning. He complemented his watercolors with writings that laid out his worldview and called for world peace. These 'art letters', as he called them, contained a wealth of biographical details and were intended to one day clear his name among his 'descendants'.
The State Collections of Lower Austria hold more than 500 of the artist's paintings, which capture everyday life at the institution, the patients around him, and their state of mind. These hundreds of watercolors are accompanied by over a thousand pages of text, as Rädler not only worked on every inch of the front of his paintings, but on their backs as well. The analysis of these works has made it possible, for the first time, to chronicle his life in great detail, including his successes as a businessman, the circumstances leading to his institutionalization, and daily life at the asylum. The moving life story of the artist, who had to reinvent himself to endure his fate, is illustrated by the over 250 plates presented in this book.