Born as the youngest of a poor Swiss farming family’s seven children, Adolf Dietrich (1877-1957) supplemented arduous farm work and various jobs in a textile mill, as a woodcutter, and railway worker, with art. Gaining increasing recognition in Germany and Switzerland, his participation in the exhibition Les maitres populaires de la realite in Paris, Zurich, and New York in 1937-38 marked his breakthrough internationally. Until today, Dietrich’s work is regarded by some as a prime example of 20th-century naive painting, while other scholars place him closer to the post-expressionist movement of New Objectivity. For the first time in nearly sixty years, Dietrich’s work has been shown in a vast retrospective at Kunstmuseum Olten in Switzerland, in summer 2015 in which his pictures were accompanied by paintings of artists such as Cuno Amiet, Otto Dix, Giovanni Giacometti, Ferdinand Hodler, Henri Rousseau, or Felix Vallotton. This coinciding new monograph is richly illustrated in colour throughout, featuring some 160 works by Dietrich and the other artists. The essays contextualise his art and highlight Dietrichs’ lasting significance.
