Art in Switzerland
Art Exhibitions in Switzerland
Art Galleries in Switzerland
Famous Swiss Artists...
Hans Burkhardt
One of the most crucial aspects of Hans Burkhardt's achievement as a painter was his decisively, even obstinately humanistic and poetic content. Whether or not a given work was lyrical or epic, whether it was about a perennial subject or tied to events of the day, Burkhardt approached the task of painting from the point of view of a deeply ingrained humanity. Not surprisingly, he choose a primarily figurative, symbolic and expressionist mode to convey his sentiments, thoughts and feelings. It is true that the multiple styles of expressionism he worked within pushed the limits of recognizability to an almost abstract level, but Burkhardt never let the paint become so abstract as to just be about itself. It was in part self-referential (and there are marvelous textures and mixtures to attest to his exhilaration with paint), but that painterly transport was coextensive with positing a heartfelt position about subject matter placed in a life, in a time, and in a place.
The commitment of Hans Burkhardt to painting as a means of diaristically recording, in the residue of paint on canvas comments about our existence in the world and our emotional reaction to it, has left us with a very extensive legacy of works. Quite a few are reactions to the ongoing wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Burkhardt began painting about the ravages of war in the late thirties with works about the Spanish Civil War, and the theme continued through every conflict that followed right up until 1991’s Desert Storm and world events occurring around the time of his death in 1994. His mute testimony is persistently anguished, severe, haunting. Burkhardt most often worked with the edges of death wreaked by war, using landscapes and multi-tiered symbols to address its horrors and its associated "collateral damage." His figurative glyphs show up again and again as the process of war strips them down to bloodied bones. Burkhardt wasn't afraid to name names or specify accusations in his titles, and rather than bogging images down in topicality, his titles lend images even greater poignancy. Although he stated repeatedly in interviews that he was fundamentally an agnostic painter, a strong and enriching undercurrent of spirituality complements any overt political content.
Jean Dunand
Jean Dunand was the preeminent interior designer during France’s Art Deco period. The Swiss-born artist turned craftsman trained under Jean Dampt and began producing his own work in Paris from 1896. Although he enjoyed international fame during his working life and completed commissions for work in both Europe and America, he is one of the lesser known artists of the Art Deco period. This all changed in 1998, however, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York housed the small exhibition, ‘Jean Dunand: Master of Art Deco’ which has inspired a great deal more interest in this prolific artist.
Dunand’s early innovations were in metalware, based on the techniques he had learned from Dampt. In the early 1920s he worked and perfected ‘dinanderie’ – a technique for hammering objects out of a sheet of copper laid over a shaped mold. With this medium he produced a wide range of vases and sculptures. He later began to experiment with lacquerware, after studying under the Japanese craftsman, Seizo Sugawara. He adapted the Oriental technique for his own vases made with geometric lines and Modernist shapes and today his lacquer vases are some of the most collectible of all his work and fetch staggering prices. In December 2000 Christie’s sold a 1925 large lacquered metal vase for $171,000.
As well as ornaments, Dunand produced a range of furniture, often incorporating his love of lacquer. Individual pieces of Dunand furniture can also attract some high prices. At the same 2000 sale Christie’s sold a set of three nested lacquered wood and eggshell tables for $204,000. One of his most unusual works was the result of a commission from the American tycoon, Templeton Crocker. In 1928 Dunand was asked to decorate the breakfast room in Crocker’s San Francisco penthouse. Supervised by the world-renowned designer, Jean-Michel Frank, he covered the square room in black lacquered panels, polychromed in silver with Japanese goldfish and bubbles. This is considered by many to be the most important interior design project of the Art Deco period and central to any study of interior design in America. In 1999 the room was carefully removed from its original placement and sold in pieces for over $150,000.
Paul Klee
Swiss painter, watercolorist, and etcher, who was one of the most original masters of modern art. Belonging to no specific art movement, he created works known for their fantastic dream images, wit, and imagination.
A German citizen, Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, near Bern, Switzerland, on December 18, 1879, and in 1898 moved to Munich, where he studied art at a private school and at the Munich Academy. He grew up in a musical family and was himself a violinist. After much hesitation he chose to study art, not music, and he attended the Munich Academy in 1900. In 1906 he married the pianist Lili Stumpf and settled in Munich, then an important center for avant-garde art. He join Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an expressionist group that contributed much to the development of abstract art. After World War I he taught at the Bauhaus school . In 1931 he began teaching at Dusseldorf Academy, but he was dismissed by the Nazis, who termed his work "degenerate." In 1933, Klee went to Switzerland. There he came down with the crippling collagen disease scleroderma, which forced him to develop a simpler style and eventually killed him.
The paintings of Klee is difficult to classify. His earliest works were pencil landscape studies that showed the influence of impressionism. Until 1912 he also produced many black-and-white etchings; the overtones of fantasy and satire in these works showed the influence of 20th-century expressionism as well as of such master printmakers as Francisco Goya and William Blake. Klee often incorporated letters and numerals into his paintings, but he also produced series of works that explore mosaic and other effects. His late works, characterized by heavy black lines, are often reflections on death and war, but his last painting, Still Life is a serene summation of his life's concerns as a creator. Klee was a teacher at the Bauhaus, Germany's most advanced art school, from 1920 to 1931.
A trip to North Africa in 1914 stimulated Klee strongly toward using color and marked the beginning of his fully mature style, in which he declared himself possessed by color. His paintings and watercolors for the next 20 years showed a mastery of delicate, dreamlike color harmonies, which he usually used to create flat, semiabstract compositions or even effects resembling mosaic, as in Pastoral. Klee was also a master draftsman, and many of his works are elaborated line drawings with subject matter that grew out of fantasy or dream imagery; he described his technique in these drawings as taking a line for a walk. Twittering Machine, for instance, with its fluid, wiry, birdlike motifs, is a composition of interconnected lines and circular shapes, with an evocative effect that is much greater than its spare means.
After 1935, afflicted by a progressive skin and muscular disease, Klee adopted a broad, flat style characterized by thick, crayonlike lines and large areas of subdued color. His subject matter during this period grew increasingly brooding and gloomy, as in the nightmarish Death and Fire.
Klee died in Muralto, Switzerland, on June 29, 1940. His work influenced all later 20th-century surrealist and nonobjective artists and was a prime source for the budding abstract expressionist movement.
Le Corbusier
(b. La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland 1887; d. Cap Martin, France 1965)
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris was born in La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland, 1887. Trained as an artist, he travelled extensively through Germany and the East. In Paris he studied under Auguste Perret and absorbed the cultural and artistic life of the city. During this period he developed a keen interest in the synthesis of the various arts. Jeanneret-Gris adopted the name Le Corbusier in the early 1920s.
Le Corbusier's early work was related to nature, but as his ideas matured, he developed the Maison-Domino, a basic building prototype for mass production with free-standing pillars and rigid floors. In 1917 he settled in Paris where he issued his book Vers une architecture [Towards a New Architecture], based on his earlier articles in L'Esprit Nouveau.
From 1922 Le Corbusier worked with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. During this time, Le Corbusier's ideas began to take physical form, mainly as houses which he created as "a machine for living in" and which incorporated his trademark five points of architecture.
During World War II, Le Corbusier produced little beyond some theories on his utopian ideals and on his modular building scale. In 1947, he started his Unite d'habitation. Although relieved with sculptural roof-lines and highly colored walls, these massive post-war dwelling blocks received justifiable criticism.
Le Corbusier's post-war buildings rejected his earlier industrial forms and utilized vernacular materials, brute concrete and articulated structure. Near the end of his career he worked on several projects in India, which utilized brutal materials and sculptural forms. In these buildings he readopted the recessed structural column, the expressive staircase, and the flat undecorated plane of his celebrated five points of architecture.
Le Corbusier did not fare well in international competition, but he produced town-planning schemes for many parts of the world, often as an adjunct to a lecture tour. In these schemes the vehicular and pedestrian zones and the functional zones of the settlements were always emphasized.
Arnold Böcklin
Arnold Böcklin was a Swiss painter whose allegorical and fantastical paintings, many based on mythical creatures, anticipated 20th-century surrealism. His early style consisted of idealized classical landscapes. In the 1870s, he turned to fantastic scenes from German legends, paralleling the use by Richard Wagner of similar subjects in opera. His later works, such as The Island of the Dead (in five versions, from 1880, one in the Metropolitan Museum, New York City), became increasingly dreamlike and nightmarish.