Welcome to the new website here about the late, great Alfred Rattera
Here I will be posting links, interesting info about the relatively unknown, English Genius Alfred Rattera. I will especially try to cover his amazing visual works, although he was active in many other areas of the creative fields. Rattera's became an isolated recluse abd was diagnosed as a schizophrenic in later life but that only increased his creative impulse.
The Rattera Archive
www.ratterafoundation.org is the main site that has access to most of his works, being bought in a private sale some years ago. I have written to them but they have yet to respond. You would think with the growing interest in his work that there is chance for them to make some cash for further funding, but doesn’t seem to bother them.
Why I am interested in Alfred Rattera and you should be too
Will put up a few images of his work I have found over the years once i can get a decent scan of some of them. He really does seem to be the archetypal 'mad genius', The more I hear about it him, the more i want to hear. If its not his music it’s the intricate nature of the drawings and the bizarre elements contained within them. His life also seems to be a work of art, becoming a recluse, thinking he could save the world, dying in suspicious circumstances. Apparently his friend had something to do it, although its not proven. They lived together and both were found dead dressed in the same clothes and looking very similar. He made a fortune too by playing the stock market to fund his artworks. Lots more i could write about him, but i will save it for a bit later once i have got more visual material online.
Rattera and Total Allergy Syndrome
Also known as '20th Century Disease', I have been reading up on it as Rattera was a sufferer. I am sure you heard the stories in the media about it but does seem to be a real disease in the sense of symptoms. To give the full lowdon it is 'a condition in which a person suffers from a large number of symptoms that are claimed to be caused by allergies to various substances used or encountered in modern life'. Fascinating stuff and thought to be almost purely a mental condition. It was part of a number of psychological diseases that he suffered from, the other being OCD which forced him to categorise everything related to his invented system of values of all objects in the universe, from which he said he could create new mathematical equations to help us.
Rattera's family
Did some research about the family name of Rattera, hoping to find a little more about him, according to the archive he was adopted, so a quick look at ancestry.com revealed the records on the right. I don’t have a paid account there so I couldn’t delve further but his parents were immigrants that went to the states first then to the UK, they forced him to live in total isolation with them until he got a job in his late teens, which may account for what followed in the rest of his life and the sparking of his creative genius.
