Cuno Amiet
Cuno Amiet | |
---|---|
Academy of Fine Arts Munich | |
Known for | Painting, graphic arts, illustration, sculpture |
Movement | Expressionism |
Cuno Amiet (28 March 1868 – 6 July 1961) was a Swiss painter, illustrator, graphic artist and sculptor.[1] As the first Swiss painter to give precedence to colour in composition, he was a pioneer of modern art in Switzerland.[1][2]
Biography
Amiet was born in
Dissatisfied with
After his 1898 marriage to Anna Luder von Hellsau (d. 1951), Amiet moved to Oschwand. Initially he stayed at a guesthouse, but in 1908 he moved to a house built by Otto Ingold. In 1913, he also purchased a farmers house nearby.[3] His house would become a meeting place for artists and writers such as Wilhelm Worringer, Adolf Frey, Hermann Hesse, Arthur Weese, and Samuel Singer, and where he taught students such as Werner Miller, Marta Worringer, Hans Morgenthaler, Hanny Bay, Marc Gonthier , Albert Müller, Josef Müller, Walter Sautter, Werner Neuhaus, and Peter Thalmann.[1]
In the late 1920s and in the 1930s, Amiet executed numerous wall paintings. A 1931 fire in the
.Work
Amiet created more than 4,000 paintings, of which more than 1,000 are self-portraits.[1][4] The great scope of his work of 70 years, and Amiet's predilection for experimentation, make his œuvre appear disparate at first – a constant, though, is the primacy of colour.[1] His numerous landscape paintings depict many winter scenes, gardens and fruit harvests.[1] Ferdinand Hodler remained a constant point of reference, although Amiet's artistic intentions diverged ever further from those of Hodler, whom Amiet could and would not match in his mastery of monumental scale and form.[1]
While Amiet took up themes of expressionism, his works retain a sense of harmony of colour grounded in the French tradition.[1] He continued to pursue mainly decorative intentions at the beginning of the 20th century, but his late work of the 1940s and 50s is focused on more abstract concepts of space and light, characterised by dots of colour and a pastel brilliance.[1]
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Müller, Paul (1998). "Cuno Amiet" (PDF). SIKART dictionary and database. Swiss Institute for Art Research.[permanent dead link]
- ^ a b Pierre-André Lienhard / KMG: Cuno Amiet in German, French and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, 2005.
- ISBN 3-7245-0483-7.
- ^ Cuno Amiet: self-portrait, 1922, Museo Cantonale d'Arte, Lugano
External links
- "Cuno Amiet". SIKART Lexicon on art in Switzerland.
- Publications by and about Cuno Amiet in the catalogue Helveticat of the Swiss National Library
- Gallery at SIKART
- Cuno Amiet in the German National Library catalogue