Swiss Art Archives – Daily Art Fixx

Paul Klee: 1879-1940

December 18, 2019 By Wendy Campbell

Born on December 18, 1879, in Münchenbuchsee, Paul Klee was a German-Swiss painter, draftsman, printmaker, teacher and writer. He is regarded as a major theoretician among modern artists, a master of humour and mystery, and a major contributor to 20th century art.

Klee was born into a family of musicians and his childhood love of music would remain very important in his life and work. From 1898 to 1901, he studied in Munich under Heinrich Knirr, and then at the Kunstakademie under Franz von Stuck. In 1901, Klee traveled to Italy with the sculptor Hermann Haller and then settled in Bern in 1902.

A series of his satirical etchings called The Inventions were exhibited at the Munich Secession in 1906. That same year Klee married pianist Lily Stumpf and moved to Munich. In 1907, the couple had a son, Felix. For the next five years, Klee worked to define his own style through the manipulation of light and dark in his pen and ink drawings and watercolour wash. He also painted on glass, applying a white line to a blackened surface. During this time Klee paid close attention to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting and became interested in the work of van Gogh, Cézanne, and Matisse.

In 1911, Klee met Alexej Jawlensky, Vasily Kandinsky, August Macke, Franz Marc, and other avant-garde figures. He participated in art shows including the second Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) exhibition at Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich, in 1912, and the Erste deutsche Herbstsalon at the Der Sturm Gallery, Berlin, in 1913. Klee shared with Kandinsky and Marc a deep belief in the spiritual nature of artistic activity. He valued the authentic creative expression found in popular and tribal culture and in the art of children and the insane.

Klee’s main concentration on graphic work changed in 1914, after he spent two weeks in Tunisia with the painters August Macke and Louis Moilliet. He produced a number of stunning watercolours, and colour became central to his art for the remainder of his life.

During World War I, Klee worked as an accounting clerk in the military and was able to continue drawing and painting at his desk. His work during this period had an Expressionist feel, both in their brightness and in motifs of enchanted gardens and mysterious forests.

In 1918, Klee moved back to Munich and worked extensively in oil for the first time, painting intensely coloured, mysterious landscapes. During this time, he also became interested in the theory of art and published his ideas on the nature of graphic art in the ‘Schöpferische Konfession’ in 1920. Klee also became interested in politics and joined the Action Committee of Revolutionary Artists, an association that supported the Bavarian Socialist Republic. Like other artists at the time, Klee had envisioned a more central role for the artist in a socialist community.

In 1920, Klee was appointed to the faculty of the Bauhaus in Weimar where he taught from 1921 to 1926, and in Dessau from 1926 to 1931. During this time Klee developed many unique methods of creating art. The most well-known is the oil transfer drawing which involves tracing a pencil drawing placed over a page coated with black ink or oil, onto a third sheet. That sheet receives the outline of the drawing in black, in addition to random smudges of excess oil from the middle sheet.

During his years in Weimar, Klee achieved international fame. However, his final years at the Dessau Bauhaus were marked by major political problems. In 1931, Klee ended his contract shortly before the Nazis closed the Bauhaus. He began to teach at the Düsseldorf art academy, commuting there from his home in Dessau.

In Düsseldorf, Klee developed a divisionist painting technique that was related to Seurat’s pointillist paintings. These works consisted of layers of colour applied over a surface in patterns of small spots. His time in Düsseldorf however, was affected by the rise of the Nazis. In 1933, he became a target of a campaign against Entartete Kunst. The Nazis took control of the academy, and in April Klee was dismissed from his post. In December, he and his wife left Germany and returned to Berne.

In 1935, Klee developed the first symptoms of scleroderma, a skin disease that he suffered with until his death. Despite his personal and physical challenges, Klee’s final years were some of his most productive times. Several hundred paintings and 1,583 drawings were recorded between 1937 and May 1940. Many of these works depicted the subject of death and his famous painting, Death and Fire, is considered his personal requiem.

Paul Klee died in Muralto, Locarno, Switzerland, on June 29, 1940. He was buried at Schosshalde Friedhof, Bern, Switzerland. A museum dedicated to Klee was built in Bern, Switzerland, by Italian architect Renzo Piano. Zentrum Paul Klee opened in June 2005 and holds a collection of about 4,000 works.

Sources: MoMA, Guggenheim Museum, Wikipedia,

Alberto Giacometti: 1901 – 1966

October 10, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on October 10, 1901 in Borgonovo, Switzerland, Alberto Giacometti was a sculptor, painter, draughtsman and printmaker. His father, Giovanni Giacometti, was a Post-Impressionist painter. From 1919 to 1920, Giacometti studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and sculpture and drawing at the Ecole des Arts et Métiers in Geneva. Between 1922 and 1927, he studied sculpture off and on in Paris under Emile-Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1927, Giacometti and his brother Diego, his lifelong companion and assistant, moved into a studio in Montparnasse, returning annually to Switzerland to visit family.

Giacometti made few noteworthy sculptures before 1925 when he turned to Cubism and was influenced by the works of Jacques Lipchitz and Henri Laurens. He was also influenced by African art which resulted in his first important sculptures, Man and Woman and Spoon Woman. “These totemic sculptures consist of radically simplified forms; their rigid frontality and use of male and female nudes as sexual types or symbols were to have long-lasting implications for Giacometti’s later work.”

Giacometti’s first period of significant creativity began in 1927 and over the next seven years, he created sculptures in a wide variety of styles. During this year, he exhibited his sculptures for the first time at the Salon des Tuileries in Paris and in Switzerland at the Galerie Aktuaryus in Zurich. In 1928, Giacometti met André Masson and from 1930 to 1935, he was a participant in the Surrealist circle. His first solo show took place in 1932 at the Galerie Pierre Colle, Paris and in 1934, he had a solo show at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York.

“Giacometti emerged as the Surrealists’ most innovative sculptor, extending the parameters of sculpture both conceptually and stylistically. In addition to modelling in plaster, he made constructed sculptures with varied and fragile materials, for example suspending elements such as plaster or glass in delicate structures of extremely thin wood and string. In nearly all his Surrealist sculptures, empty space plays an active role, both compositionally and psychologically.”

From 1930 to 1936 Giacometti participated in many exhibitions around the world, including Galerie Pierre, Paris, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New Burlington Galleries, London, and others in Brussels, Zurich and Copenhagen. However, in 1935 he rejected Surrealism to return to representational art based on study from life.

In the early 1940s, Giacometti became friends with Simone de Beauvoir, Pablo Picasso, and Jean-Paul Sartre. From 1942, Giacometti lived in Geneva, and associated with the publisher Albert Skira. In late 1945, he returned to Paris where he began his second period of intense creativity. His best-known post-war sculptures portray single or grouped figures, all startlingly skeletal in proportions and often mounted on large or heavy bases.

“Giacometti’s figures, with their seeming emaciation, anonymity and isolation in space, immediately struck a responsive chord in critics and collectors. His sculptures were perceived as appropriate metaphors for the human condition of post-war Europe: the horror of the concentration camps, displaced persons, destroyed lives. On a more philosophical level, critics also viewed Giacometti’s art as Existentialist, an interpretation introduced by Sartre in his two essays on Giacometti’s art.”

During this period, Giacometti drew constantly and painted regularly. “His drawing style consisted of rapidly executed, often continuous lines that swirl around, over, and through his subject, never quite defining it yet conveying a sense of its mass and mystery. The earliest post-war drawings have heavy reworkings, often obscuring facial features in an expressionist vortex of lines. Around 1954, he expanded his drawing scope. His pencil drawings of portraits, nudes, still-lifes and interiors from the mid-1950s display a fusion of power and delicacy, as lines interweave in geometrically structured traceries overlaid with darker smudgings and greyed shadows in a ceaselessly moving realm where nothing appears solid or stable.”

Giacometti’s post-war work brought him international acclaim. Between 1948 and 1958, he exhibited several times at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York and at Galerie Maeght in Paris. Museums acquired his work, and the Kunsthalle in Berne held a one-man show in 1954. In 1955, he had separate retrospectives at the Arts Council Gallery in London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Public fame took up a great amount of Giacometti’s time in the last years of his life. Collectors, dealers, young artists, curators and the media flocked to his studio. He received the Sculpture Prize at the 1961 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the 1962 Venice Biennale. In 1965, exhibitions were held at the Tate Gallery, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. That same year, he was awarded the Grand Prix National des Arts by the French government.

On January 11, 1966, Alberto Giacometti died of complications from pericarditis (heart disease) in Chur, Switzerland. His body was returned to his birthplace of Borgonovo, Swizterland where he was interred close to his parents.

Sources: Guggenheim, MoMA

HR Giger: Biomechanics

February 5, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on February 5, 1940 in Chur, Switzerland, Hans Rudolf “Ruedi” Giger (HR Giger) was a surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer. Giger’s fascination with all things surreal and macabre began at a young age and this led to an interest in expressing himself through visual arts. Following high school, Giger studied architecture and industrial design at Zurich’s School of Applied Arts.

In 1966 Giger worked as an interior designer and completed some early paintings. In 1968 he began working full time as an artist and a filmmaker. The following year his first posters were published and he had his first exhibitions outside of Zurich.

“Giger’s most distinctive stylistic innovation is the representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, described as “biomechanical”. His paintings often display fetishistic sexual imagery.”

Meticulously detailed, Giger’s paintings are usually produced in large formats and then reworked. Giger’s popular art book, Necronominicon, caught the eye of director Ridley Scott who was looking for a creature for his soon to be produced film Alien. Giger’s designs for the film earned him an Academy Award in 1980.

Giger began work on The H.R. Giger Museum in the mid 1990s in the fortress structure of the Château St. Germain, a medieval castle in Gruyere, Switzerland. The museum holds Giger’s personal collection of art from around the world, as well as a substantial collection of his own paintings and sculptures.

Aside from the Alien movies, Giger has worked on numerous films including Dune, Poltergeist II, Species, and others. He has worked with recording artists including Blondie, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Korn, and has created signature models for Ibanez Guitars. His work in interior design includes the HRGigerMuseum and the Giger Bars in Switzerland. Giger’s work has been exhibited in galleries around the world.

H.R. Giger, passed away in May 2014 at the age of 74.

For more information about HR Giger, visit one of his official websites: HRGiger.com, Giger.com, or HRGigerMuseum.com.