Louis Soutter
Louis Soutter (born June 4, 1871 in Morges , † February 20, 1942 in Ballaigues ; actually Louis-Adolphe Soutter ) was a Swiss painter. He is counted among the most important representatives of the brut species .
Life
Soutter was the son of a pharmacist, his mother, a musician, was the great-aunt of the architect Charles Edouard Jeanneret (better known as Le Corbusier ). He began studying engineering at the University of Lausanne , but broke it off in favor of studying architecture in Geneva. He did not finish this either, but moved to Brussels to the Conservatoire Royal , where he a. a. from the violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe received lessons. He did not complete his music studies either, instead he returned to Switzerland at the end of 1894 to take drawing and painting lessons from Léon Gaud, a student of Barthélemy Menn . In 1895 he traveled to Paris to continue his studies in the studios of Jean-Paul Laurens , Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant , Emmanuel Frémiet and Filippo Colarossi . In 1897 he moved to Colorado Springs (USA). There he married the violinist Madge Fursman, whom he had met in Brussels.
At Colorado College , Soutter became head of the newly formed Art Department. In 1903 he divorced his wife and resigned from the college management. Soutter returned to Switzerland and joined the Lausanne Symphony Orchestra in 1908 (direction from 1910: Ernest Ansermet ). In 1915 Soutter moved to the Geneva Symphony Orchestra. Since he led a lavish lifestyle, but could not finance it and had been showing increasing behavioral problems for a long time, he was forcibly placed under guardianship .
Louis Soutter made several trips as a musician through Switzerland, but increasingly vagabond. In 1923 - 52 years old - Soutter was admitted against his will, but with the consent of his family, to a nursing home in the Vaudois village of Ballaigues by his guardian . In this last phase of his life he switched to drawing and painting and had contact with the artist René Auberjonois . From around 1937 Soutter began to paint with his fingers , sometimes using his entire body. His relative Le Corbusier, with whom he was still in contact, met this activity with incomprehension and rejection. At the age of 71, Soutter died mentally and emotionally lonely in the home.
Hermann Hesse wrote the poem Louis Soutter about him , in which the break with the correctly learned painting technique is described as: Not correct, not beautiful, but correct./ I paint with ink and blood, paint true. Truth is terrible.
Larger groups of works by Louis Soutter are in the Musée cantonal des Beaux-arts de Lausanne and in the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. Soutter's work is also represented in numerous other public art collections such as the Aargau Art House , the Museum im Lagerhaus in St. Gallen and the Art Museum Basel (as a deposit of the Im Obersteg Foundation).
Quotes
- "Look, the shadows and lights on this paper; I don't do anything but interpret them, and that's how my drawing comes about."
- "I am not attracted by houses and roofs, but the emptiness between them."
literature
- Alfred Bader : Louis Soutter. A pathographic study . With a poem by Hermann Hesse, Stuttgart: Eckhardt, 1968.
- Michel Thévoz: Louis Soutter. Catalog de l'oeuvre. Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme; Zurich: Institut suisse pour l'étude de l'art, 1976.
Web links
- Literature by and about Louis Soutter in the catalog of the German National Library
- Biography at Museum Platform NRW
- Michel Thévoz: Soutter, Louis. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- Louis Soutter at artfacts.net
- Exhibition "Louis Soutter et les modern" , 2002/2003, Kunstmuseum Basel
- Michel Thévoz: Soutter, Louis Adolphe. In: Sikart
Individual evidence
- ^ Hermann Hesse: Complete Works 10. The Poems , Suhrkamp 2002
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Soutter, Louis |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Soutter, Louis-Adolphe |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Swiss painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 4, 1871 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Morges |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 20, 1942 |
| Place of death | Ballaigues |