Soutter's imagery, which he presents in the black-and-white finger paintings from his last creative phase, is mysterious, painful, and fascinating. They seem to turn his deepest feelings inside out, revealing his fears and fantasies ecstatically. According to Michel Thévoz, the period of large-format finger paintings can be narrowed down to the years between 1937 and 1942, the year of Soutter's death. Before this, Soutter worked in the solitude of his room at the Swiss mental hospital in Ballaigues, initially producing pencil and pen-and-ink drawings in fine lines. Thanks to Soutter's grand cousin, the architect Le Corbusier, who also supplied him with drawing materials, his works were exhibited in the USA during his lifetime. Soutter's creative output, which piled up in his room at the asylum after his death, a place that had been his entire world for the last 19 years, reveals a work that is not only stylistically but also technically progressive: With the finger paintings he created from 1937 onwards, of which the present composition, with its rare use of color, is a prime example, Soutter not only gave his works an aura of immediacy, but also anticipated later Action Painting. In the present work, this effect is intensified by the highly emotional motif of the crucifixion, a poignant expression of his own artistic suffering. Soutter's work, which transcends all art historical definitions, is considered an early form of Art Brut. However, his work initially fell into oblivion and was only rediscovered following a solo exhibition at the Lenbachhaus in Munich (1985) and a major Soutter exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel (2002). How disturbing Soutter's contemporary viewers, for whom the work of Penck or Basquiat was still unknown, must have felt about his shadow figures! Never diagnosed as mentally ill, Soutter appears to us today as a tragically misunderstood genius. His frequent objections led to his expulsion from the symphony orchestra, and there was an instance when he ordered twenty silk ties, sending the bill to his brother. Amusing anecdotes that could just as easily have been told about artists such as Martin Kippenberger or Andy Warhol. Soutter's life story is ultimately also the story of bourgeois society's failure to cope with a non-conformist artistic personality. But despite all its tragedy, it was precisely this painful experience of exclusion that allowed such a dense work to emerge. [JS]