Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) remains a fascinating artist to this day. His paintings and prints, as well as his work as an illustrator and press cartoonist, are characterised by detached and critical observation, satirical sharpness, and a strong desire for independence. A century after his death, film director and screenwriter Lionel Baier, art historians Dario Gamboni and Choghakate Kazarian, literary scholar and writer Daniel Maggetti, and curators Catherine Lepdor and Katia Poletti share their views on Vallotton's work and their passion for him and his art.
The French-language Vallotton Forever is published to coincide with a major retrospective at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts (MCBA) in Vallotton's native city of Lausanne, which is home to the world's most comprehensive collection of his works. The volume celebrates an extraordinary artist who is considered one of the greats of art history in both his native Switzerland and his adopted home of France. It brings together key works from all periods of Vallotton's career, from the early years and the icons of the Nabis period in the 1890s to his sophisticated dialogue with tradition in the modern era that marks his later years.
Studies the evocative work of French artist Françoise Pétrovitch through the lens of absence.
Françoise Pétrovitch, born in 1964, is among the most distinguished contemporary artists in France. Her art reveals ambiguous, often transgressive worlds that play with conventional boundaries and defy interpretation. The intimate, the fragment, the disappearance, as well as themes such as doppelgängers, transition, and cruelty, run through her works, which are populated by animals, flowers, and creatures and whose atmosphere, alternately bright or nocturnal, rarely leaves a viewer untouched.
Framed by the topic of absence, this volume features new and recent drawings, prints, and video art by Françoise Pétrovitch. Absence can be agonizing, a tragedy. As a counterpart to presence, it is characterized by longing and projection; it describes the passing of time, distance, and lack. Richly illustrated and with essays on Pétrovitch's art and the various techniques she uses, the book offers a deep look into the worlds she creates.
Ce livre présente une remarquable collection de près de 2000 estampes japonaises polychromes (Ukiyo-e) léguées au Musée Jenisch Vevey en 2015, dont environ 200 uvres datées de la moitié du XIXe siècle au début du XXe siècle. Beaucoup proviennent des ateliers prestigieux de lécole Utagawa (1765-1930), rarement représentée dans les collections européennes. Ces uvres se distinguent par leur finesse dimpression, lutilisation de matériaux précieux, des couleurs vives et un excellent état de conservation. Le livre inclut également plus de 350 esquisses préparatoires appelées « blockfertige Zeichnungen » (dessins prêts pour la gravure), qui offrent un aperçu unique du processus créatif, car ces dessins sont généralement détruits lors de la fabrication des estampes. Les uvres illustrent des thèmes variés : théâtre Kabuki, arts textiles, plaisirs de la société japonaise, contes célèbres, voyages et paysages du Japon. Des textes experts et un appendice sur les techniques de gravure, les types de papier et lart de limpression au Japon complètent cet ouvrage.
Ce catalogue en français accompagne une grande exposition annoncée au MACBA de Lausanne à l'occasion des 100 ans de la publication du Manifeste du Surréalisme par André Breton. Cette exposition rend hommage au mouvement international et aux publications qu'il a générées. Son titre fait notamment référence à la revue Le Grand Jeu, qui a apporté de grandes innovations dans le domaine de la mise en page éditoriale. L'exposition Le Grand Jeu comporte deux volets. Le volet historique est structuré en trois séquences autour du jeu d'échecs, du jeu de Tarot et du jeu de dés à l'intérieur desquelles sont développées des notions structurantes du mouvement comme l'ésotérisme ou le hasard. Mais les vertiges suscités par cette libération de l'imaginaire ne cessent d'influencer notre manière d'envisager le corps, le langage et les objets dans leur capacité à se métamorphoser. Dans son second volet, l'exposition est donc également l'occasion pour des artistes contemporain.e.s de poursuivre l'élan de cet esprit libertaire, à la manière d'un grand cadavre exquis.
La main humaine, flexible, mobile et sensible, est un élément fascinant et unique de la nature. Sa forme et sa fonction pratique et sociale ont inspiré d'innombrables artistes à travers l'histoire. Ce livre explore les représentations de la main humaine et du gant comme accessoire de prédilection, dans l'art allant du XVIIe siècle à nos jours. Richement illustré, il offre un panorama de périodes et de médias tels que le dessin, la gravure, la peinture, la vidéo et la sculpture qui démontre le pouvoir créatif et métaphorique de la main humaine en tant que motif dans l'art. Les essais explorent la symbolique riche et variée entourant les mains et les gants et jettent en particulier un nouvel éclairage sur l'oeuvre du peintre expressionniste autrichien Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980).
King Stag is a play originally written in 1762 by Italian playwright and champion of Commedia dell'arte Carlo Gozzi (1720- 1806). It is about love and conspiracy at the court of King Deramo. In search of a bride, Deramo falls victim to the intrigues of his adversary Tartaglia and is temporarily transformed into a stag.
In 1918, on the occasion of a major art exhibition staged in Zurich by the modernist association Swiss Werkbund, Swiss dramatist René Morax (1873- 1963) and director Werner Wolff (1886- 1972) produced a modern adaption of Gozzi's fairy-tale play that turned it into an amusing parody of Sigmund Freud's and Carl Gustav Jung's psychoanalysis, which had caused much controversy in Zurich at the time. The production was conceived as a puppetry, for which avant-garde artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889- 1943) designed the stage sets and created an ensemble of 17 radically abstracted marionettes that broke with every tradition of the genre.
This book offers the first English translation of Morax and Wolff's adaption of King Stag. The text is supplemented with photographs of a restaging of the puppetry, produced especially for this volume, featuring Taeuber-Arp's striking marionettes. Essays by distinguished scholars explore the genesis of the original 1918 production and place it in historical context, shed new light on the play and its model, the Commedia dell'arte, and highlight its significance for Switzerland's avant-garde.
A selection of Werner Bischof's restored early color images.
Swiss photographer Werner Bischof (1916-54) is best known for his impressive black-and-white images. Far too little is known of Bischof's early color photographs, comprising studio work in fashion and advertising photography as well as reportage from war-damaged European cities. For these, Bischof used various types of cameras, including a Devin Tricolor, an elaborate one-shot color separation device. Some 200 of Bischof's Devin Tricolor negatives have been restored and a selection of them published in this book for the first time.
The beautifully illustrated volume is fascinating not only from a photo-historical perspective; even these early color images reveal Bischof's outstanding, sensitive aesthetic that characterizes his entire oeuvre. Over one hundred color plates are supplemented with texts by Clara Bouveresse, Peter Pfrunder, and Luc Debraine.
First book outside the former Soviet Union and Russia showcasing the art of designer Anna Andreeva and later Soviet fabric design in general
Examines the collective artistic work of women who shaped the material culture of actually-existing socialism
Links the textile designs by women of 1920s Soviet avant-garde with the work of woman artists in the post-war period
Contributes to the expansion and diversification of the definition of art to include also material culture and highlight the work of women and other historically marginalised maker
Ce livre explore pour la première fois de manière exhaustive la fascination de Hannah Hoch (1889-1978) pour le cinéma et la culture visuelle de l'ère industrielle moderne. Couvrant l'ensemble de sa carrière, il démontre comment son travail a évolué dans un champ de tension entre expérimentation artistique, créations commerciales et appropriation politique. Un texte sur le photomontage de l'artiste, écrit en 1948, et un texte-collage sur l'histoire du montage, dans lequel s'expriment des figures de renom du modernisme et de l'avant-garde, complètent ce volume.
Swiss surrealist artist HR Giger (1940-2014) achieved international fame in 1979 for designing the fantastic creatures and eerie environments that terrified moviegoers in Ridley Scott's science fiction film Alien. Yet before these iconic creations made him a celebrity and won him an Oscar for visual effects, Giger was already highly regarded in the international art world for his unique freehand painting style and biomechanical dreamscapes.
HR Giger: The Oeuvre Before Alien 1961-1976, first published in 2007 and now becoming available again in a new edition, is the only book to date to document the artist's lesser known, but no less impressive, early work. This lavishly illustrated volume traces Giger's career from his education as an architect and industrial designer at the Zurich College of Art to the development of his ink drawing and oil painting technique and his eventual breakthrough as one of the foremost artists of the fantastic realism school. Featuring many unpublished or rarely available early paintings and drawings, and accompanied by an essay by noted art historian Beat Stutzer, this volume juxtaposes Giger's paintings with works by his predecessors, including Ensor, Fuseli, Goya, and Piranesi.
HR Giger: The Oeuvre Before Alien illuminates the mind of a visual genius whose first artistic experiments were decades ahead of their time.
Le Corbusier's chapel Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp is arguably the most famous modern religious building and a UNESCO world heritage site. It has been photographed by millions of people, including some of the most distinguished architectural photographers. Austrian artist Siegrun Appelt took an entirely new approach to look at the iconic structure, distinct from all her famous predecessors. Appelt focuses with utter concentration on details, creating compositions of highest sensitivity and precision. Her images highlight the place's spatial structure and lines, Le Corbusier's ingenious direction of light, as well as surfaces and passages. They can be read as hints to these details and at the same time invite a conclusion from detail to the whole.
This publication includes a dialogue between Claudia Kromrei and Otto Kapfinger, in which they investigate the potential of photography to show Le Corbusier's means of expression and discuss the visualisation and perception of material and immaterial elements of this icon of 20th-century architecture.
Aenne Biermann (1898-1933) was one of the leading figures of photography in the 1920s and 1930s. Today, she is considered one of the most important avant-garde photographers of the 20th century. In just a few years of practice, the self-taught artist became a well-known representative of German photography, participating in almost all the important exhibitions of her time. She captured plants, objects, people, and everyday situations in pictures that have to this day lost none of their allure and poignancy. By means of clear structures, precise compositions of light and contrast, as well as narrow framing, she drew a special kind of poetry out of the motifs of her personal environment and developed her own, distinctly modern pictorial style.
This is the first substantial new book in English on this exceptional artist since the 1930s, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in fall 2021. The large-format volume features some 100 of Aenne Biermann's photographs in colour and duotone reproduction, several of them published here for the first time ever. This impressive selection is complemented by essays on Biremann's photography in art-historical context and on selected aspects of her oeuvre.
Text in English and Hebrew.
An exhibition featuring the work of Aenne Biermann is taking place at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art from 5 August 2021.
Ce livre en français présente un dialogue entre le célèbre architecte Peter Zumthor et l'historienne de l'architecture Mari Lending, qui porte sur la signification du temps, de l'espace, de l'Histoire et du souvenir dans le contexte du paysage et de l'architecture, entre présent et passé. Il est accompagné d'une sélection de photographies de Hélène Binet, qui appuie ce propos en s'inspirant des abords de l'Acropole à Athènes.
Italian-born American artist Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) was one of the most prolific, innovative artists of the post-war period. Trained at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he met future colleagues and collaborators Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, and Eero Saarinen, he went on to make one-of-a kind jewellery, design iconic chairs, create thousands of unique sculptures including large-scale commissions for significant buildings, and advance the use of sound as sculptural material. His work speaks to the confluence of numerous fields of endeavour, but is united throughout by a sculptural approach to making and an experimental embrace of metal.
Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life accompanies the first U.S. museum retrospective of the artist's career to examine the full scope of his broad, interdisciplinary practice, and feature important examples of his furniture, jewellery, monotypes, and diverse sculptural output. Lavishly illustrated, the book offers new scholarly essays as well as a catalogue of the artists numerous large-scale commissions. It questions how and why we distinguish between a chair, a necklace, a screen, and a freestanding sculpture and what Bertoia's sculptural things, when taken together, say about the fluidity of visual language across culture, both at mid-century and now.
Situated at around 3,300 ft above sea level in the mountains of the Swiss Jura region, the town of La Chaux-de-Fonds experienced significant economic development towards the end of the 19th century, which went hand in hand with much building activity. There are few other places in Switzerland in which the influence of art nouveau is so clearly visible. Significantly inspired by the painter and architect Charles L'Eplattenier (1874-1946), and his art and decoration course at the local school of applied arts in 1905, a local variant of art nouveau developed, the so-called Style sapin or "fir style." Protagonists of this movement accorded special importance in their works to the use of symbolic motifs that reflect the nature of the Jura landscape and especially its fir forests.
Ce catalogue en français accompagne une exposition consacrée à la sculpture de Matisse. D'abord présentée à Zurich puis au musée Matisse à Nice au printemps 2020, cette rétrospective est axée sur la méthode qu'utilisait Matisse pour réaliser presque toutes ses sculptures les plus importantes : il commençait par un modelage d'aspect naturaliste pour abstraire de plus en plus ses figures jusqu'à une stylisation radicale. Mais il conservait les états décisifs comme sculptures autonomes, dévoilant ainsi les étapes du processus de création. Les différentes sources d'inspiration de Matisse - nus photographiques, modèles antiques et africains - ainsi que des photographies montrant l'artiste travaillant la sculpture complètent cette étude.
Après un premier volet en 2016 consacré aux chefs-d'oeuvre dessinés des collections, le Cabinet cantonal des estampes au musée Jenisch à Vevey (Suisse) dévoile ses pièces maîtresses, signées Dürer, Goltzius, Callot, Rembrandt, Castiglione, van Ostade, Edelinck, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Goya, Corot, Bresdin, Carrière, Bonnard, Vuillard, Picasso, van Velde, Yersin, Lichtenstein, Raetz et bien d'autres. Articulée selon les techniques de l'estampe, la présentation des plus belles feuilles conservées à Vevey revisite d'une manière subjective l'histoire de cette technique de gravure.
Artiste de renommée internationale, célèbre pour ses films et ses installations, UIla von Brandenburg pratique intensément le dessin. Ce livre constitue la première monographie sur ce pan moins connu et néanmoins fondateur de son travail.
Le photographe Tomas Wüthrich a grandi dans une ferme à Kerzers, dans le canton de Fribourg. Lorsque la ferme a cessé d'être exploitée, il a immortalisé avec son appareil les douze derniers mois de labeur quotidien de ses parents et toute la phase d'arrêt de la ferme : signature du contrat avec le nouveau gérant, enlèvement des vaches, dernier grand nettoyage dans la grange vide. Ces images témoignent d'une proximité que l'on ne voit que rarement ainsi. Ce sont des photographies en noir et blanc qui montrent un destin individuel représentatif de l'extinction collective des zones rurales et des bouleversements qui chamboulent l'agriculture suisse depuis de nombreuses années. 73 photographies ont été ici minutieusement sélectionnées et agencées. Peter Pfrunder, directeur de la Fotostiftung Schweiz, inscrit historiquement cette série dans le domaine de la photographie rurale. Le journaliste Balz Theus quant à lui éclaire les changements structurels dans l'agriculture et donne un aperçu intime de la vie des parents de Wüthrich à travers des extraits de leur entretien.
Un aperçu global des quelque 600 oeuvres sur papier de Ferdinand Hodler données par le collectionneur Rudolf Schindler au Musée Jenisch de Vevey. Du rapide croquis à l'étude d'après modèle, l'ensemble permet d'appréhender les processus créatifs de l'artiste et témoigne du rôle capital que le dessin joue dans son art.
Ce catalogue publié à l'occasion d'une exposition au Musée des Beaux-Arts de Winterthur présente 130 dessins du maître suisse, dont de nombreux inédits. Qu'il s'agisse d'études pour des peintures ou de dessins indépendants, ces travaux témoignent de l'évolution de l'artiste et de ses grands thèmes : paysages, natures mortes et nus y occupent une grande place.
Open House discusses the topic of temporary housing in architecture, art, design and humanitarian aid. The phenomenon of tiny houses fascinates and is currently trending in various media. In times of large migratory movements from poor to rich countries there is also an urgent demand for temporary housing in many places.
Eighteen international authors explore the intentions behind such constructions, their underlying principles and the lifestyle they convey. Their contributions reveal how these concepts relate to the very notion of habitat, to space, to pragmatic criteria, as well as to the time in which they are elaborated. Moreover, addresses various issues of individual housing through the featured original installations, and spatial experiments.
Open House is published in conjunction with a two-year research project and an open-air exhibition of the same title in Geneva in summer 2022. Book and exhibition comprise around 40 designs by artists, architects, designers, architecture schools and research institutions, as well as humanitarian organisations, such as Andrea Zittel, EPFL Laboratoire ALICE, Global Shelter Cluster, Gramazio Kohler Research at ETH Zurich, Jean Prouve, John Armleder, Kengo Kuma, Kerim Seiler, Matti Suuronen, Maurizio Cattelan and Philippe Parreno, the UNHCR, and others.
