Hélène de Mandrot

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Ernest Biéler : Hélène de Mandrot (1904)

Hélène de Mandrot (born as Hélène Revilliod de Muralt on November 27, 1867 in Geneva ; died on December 26, 1948 in Le Pradet , France ) was a Swiss artist, art collector and promoter of architectural and artistic modernism .

Life

Hélène Revilliod de Muralt came from an upper-class family in Geneva. Her father Aloys Revilliod (1839–1921) was a banker and also a collector of East Asian art, her mother Rachel de Muralt came from the Geneva nobility. She attended courses at the École des arts industriels de Genève with Joseph Mittey , studied with William Bouguereau at the Académie Julian in Paris and went to Munich for a semester. From 1900 she repeatedly exhibited paintings and works in metal and stone in Geneva and in 1903 took part in an exhibition in St. Petersburg .

She married the agricultural entrepreneur Henry de Mandrot (1861–1920) in 1906 and together with him created the Société du Musée romand in Mandrot's Château de La Sarraz . The museum was dedicated to the regional arts and crafts of French-speaking Switzerland, an idea that went back to the theses of the nationalist intellectual Gonzague de Reynold . In 1911 she joined the Société d'art domestique founded by the Swiss artisan Nora Gross , which wanted to promote traditional folk art practiced at home , and set up an embroidery school .

After Hélène de Mandrot became a widow at the age of 52, she founded the Maison des Artistes de La Sarraz in 1922 . She made it available to visual artists as a place to stay and in the following years made it a center of architectural and artistic modernism. In Paris, where she had a second residence from 1924, she established contacts with artists and architects. In 1928 she won Sigfried Giedion and Le Corbusier for their idea of ​​an architecture congress. The first Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne took place from June 26th to 28th of the same year with 25 architects from eight countries on La Sarraz. He became groundbreaking. In September 1929 she organized the first Congrès international du cinéma indépendant , which was under the banner of the avant-garde of cinema. Mandrot wanted to promote the film independent of commercial interests. The filmmakers, film critics, and theorists who participated included a. Sergej Eisenstein , Hans Richter , Walter Ruttmann , Alberto Cavalcanti , Béla Balázs and Léon Moussinac .

Mandrot benefited from her fame as a patron and was invited to the Paris Autumn Salon with her own works in 1929 and to the founding exhibition of the Union des Artistes Modernes in Paris in 1930 . In 1929 she commissioned Le Corbusier to build a summer house for her in Le Pradet near Toulon . For the garden of the Villa de Mandrot , which was finished in 1931, she bought a cubist sculpture by Jacques Lipchitz .

In the 1930s, the Künstlerhaus developed into a place of refuge for encounters and exchanges. László Moholy-Nagy , Werner Hartmann , Willi Baumeister , Oskar Schlemmer , Max Ernst and Alfred Roth were among the guests. Up until Mandrot's death in 1948, La Sarraz Castle remained a meeting place for the Swiss and international avant-garde, despite hostility from cultural and political circles in western Switzerland .

The 1998 exhibition “Hélène de Mandrot et la Maison des artistes de La Sarraz” in the Musée des Arts décoratifs Lausanne documented and paid tribute to her life and work.

literature

  • Antoine Baudin: Hélène de Mandrot et la Maison des artistes de La Sarraz. Payot, Lausanne 1998, ISBN 2-601-03238-3 .
  • Hélène de Mandrot-Revilliod , in: Corinne Dallera, Nadia Lamamra: Du salon à l'usine. Vingt portraits de femmes. Un autre regard sur l'histoire du canton de Vaud. ADF, Lausanne 2003, ISBN 2-88413-095-0 , pp. 103-116
  • Jean-Marie Pilet: Hélène de Mandrot et la Maison des artistes au château de La Sarraz: chronique - extraits des archives, éléments de la correspondance: 1920-1948 . La Sarraz: Archives de la Maison des artistes, 1999
  • Laura Martínez de Guereñu: A Vernacular Mechanism for Poetic Reactions: The Villa Mandrot in Le Pradet . Massilia. Annuaire d'Etudes Corbuseennes, 2005

Web links

Commons : Hélène de Mandrot  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The training stations are poorly occupied, see Dallera, Lamamra. 2003
  2. ^ Gilbert Marion: Mandrot, Henry de. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  3. ^ A b Philippe Mathonnet: Quand La Sarraz était vraiment au center du monde , in: Le Temps, December 22, 1998
  4. ^ Marie-Hélène Guex: Gross, Nora. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  5. ^ Katrin Schwarz: Building for the world community. CIAM and the UNESCO building in Paris , De Gruyter, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-040347-3 , p. 319
  6. ^ Roland Cosandey, Thomas Tode: Le 1er Congrès international du cinéma indépendant - La Sarraz, September 1929. In: Archives. No. 84, April 2000, Jean Vigo Institute .
  7. ↑ Malte Hagener (Ed.): The Emergence of Film Culture. Knowledge Production, Institution Building, and the Fate of the Avant-garde in Europe, 1919-1945 , Berghahn Books, New York 2016, ISBN 978-1-78533-354-5 , p. 79
  8. ^ Jacque Siclier: La vie telle qu'elle était , Le Monde Archives, September 21, 1978
  9. ^ Villa de Madame H. de Mandrot, Le Pradet, France, 1929. Le Corbusier Foundation . See also Villa l'Artaude (Villa Mandrot) on French Wikipedia
personal data
SURNAME Mandrot, Hélène de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hélène de Mandrot-Revilliod; Hélène Revilliod de Muralt (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss artist and art patron
DATE OF BIRTH November 27, 1867
PLACE OF BIRTH Geneva
DATE OF DEATH December 26, 1948
Place of death Le Pradet