Opus – Page 97 – Encyclopædia of the sublime

Joe Dallesandro

Raised by foster parents in Brooklyn and Long Island, the young Dallesandro was expelled from school for punching the principal, which was followed by a spate of petty gangland crime. He had a successful escape from a rehabilitation center for boys in New York's Catskill Mountains, where he had been held for a year after crashing a stolen car. A pioneering figure in the sexual revolution, he was a teenage tearaway turned icon of rebellious youth and sexuality. Perhaps now best known as the torso on The Smiths' debut album or as that bulge on the cover of The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers.

Adolf Wölfli

Adolf Wölfli was a Swiss outsider artist. He was abused both physically and sexually as a child, and was orphaned at the age of 10. He thereafter grew up in a series of state-run foster homes. He was later convicted of attempted child molestation, for which he served prison time. After being freed, he was re-arrested for a similar offense and in 1895 was admitted to the Waldau Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in Bern where he spent the rest of his adult life. He was very disturbed and sometimes violent on admission, leading to him being kept in isolation for his early time at hospital. He suffered from psychosis, which led to intense hallucinations.

Hoopoe

The hoopoe is a colourful bird found across Afro-Eurasia, notable for its distinctive crown of feathers.

Yoshiro Nakamatsu

Yoshiro Nakamatsu is a Japanese inventor claiming to hold the world record for number of inventions with over 3,000, including "PyonPyon" spring shoes and the basic technology for the floppy disk, the CD, the DVD, the digital watch, CinemaScope, armchair "Cerebrex", sauce pump, and the taxicab meter.

Klerksdorp sphere

Klerksdorp spheres are small objects, often spherical to disc-shaped, that have been collected by miners and rockhounds from 3-billion-year-old pyrophyllite deposits. Geologists agree that the Klerksdorp spheres originated as concretions, which formed in volcanic sediments, ash, or both, after they accumulated 3 billion years ago.

Robert Walser

Robert Walser, a German-Swiss prose writer and novelist, enjoyed high repute among a select group of authors and critics in Berlin early in his career, only to become nearly forgotten by the time he committed himself to the Waldau mental clinic in Bern in January 1929.

Nicolas Sperling

Nicolas Sperling is an artist who illustrated the book Hellenic National Costumes. Limited to three hundred copies only, this exquisite undertaking issued by Athens' Benaki Museum features fifty-five full page color illustrations housed in its original full tan linen over boards portfolio with ties. It was the first of two independent volumes (the second was published in 1954) and a supplement that totaled one hundred and eleven reproductions in all. Divided into the categories of "Gala Dresses and Town Dresses", "Dresses of Continental Greece", and "Dresses of Peloponnesus, Thessaly, the Island of Euboea, Epirus, and Macedonia", it artfully surveys traditional Greek folk costume of the early twentieth century.

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt was a German-Austrian sculptor most famous for his "character heads", a collection of busts with faces contorted in extreme facial expressions.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

Lewis Gordon Pugh was the first person to complete a long distance swim at the North Pole. He was also the first person to complete a long distance swim in all five oceans of the world (Atlantic, Indian, Pacific, Arctic and Southern).

Margay

Margay is a small cat native to Central and South America.