René Bernasconi

René Bernasconi and Pablo Picasso (Villa "La Californie", 1955)

René Bernasconi (born April 15, 1910 in Strasbourg , France , † August 4, 1994 in Basel , Switzerland ) was a Swiss painter , graphic artist and sculptor. His last place of residence was Paradiso in Ticino .

Life

René Bernasconi was born in Strasbourg as the son of the dentist Emilio Bernasconi and his wife Anna (née Klein). He spent his childhood and school years in Lugano , where his parents gave free rein to his artistic inclinations and where he won a school painting competition at the age of nine.

He finished school at the age of 16 and then enrolled at the Art Academy in Turin . There he worked between 1926 and 1930, among other things, with lithography , applied art , oil , watercolor and tempera painting . He then continued his studies in Paris at private schools until 1934 and in the meantime moved to the south of France again and again, where he earned his living with stage decorations and equipment in the casinos of Marseille , Nice and Cannes as well as lithography work in printing companies.

When he returned to Switzerland, he had to do military service from 1943 to 1945. He then moved to Basel in 1946, where, in addition to his artistic work, he worked part-time in a lithography company for several years. Study trips took him to the Mediterranean countries, England, Scandinavia as well as North and South Africa. In Cannes he met the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso , with whom he became a lifelong friend. The exchange with him helped Bernasconi to further refine his style and thereby break away from the previous pictorial traditions.

As in his apprenticeship, it was typical for him in Basel to act out different techniques. For example, he dealt with stained glass , mosaics and reliefs on the basis of tenders for the state art credit and with wall painting on the basis of private orders .

His late work included travel sketches, nude studies and portraits as well as colorful landscape paintings.

plant

SIKART , the lexicon of the Swiss Institute for Art Research , lists five group exhibitions by Bernasconi in the Kunsthalle Basel during his lifetime and one posthumously each in the cantonal art gallery Giovanni Züst in Rancate (“Gruppo di famiglia in un interno. La collezione Bellasi di Lugano. Lugano e il Ticino in dipinti, stampe, antichi libri e carte geografiche ”) and in the Museo civico di belle arti in Lugano (“ Il confronto con la modernità, 1914–1953 ”). In 2000 there is an exhibition together with works by Zobrist / Waeckerlin and Claudia Müller in the Aargauer Kunsthaus ; In 2002 and 2006 he was honored in a solo exhibition at the Demenga gallery in Basel ("René Bernasconi") and the Lilian Andree gallery in Riehen ("René Bernasconi (1910 to 1994). Painting and watercolors").

In 1959, Bernasconi received a direct order from the Basel building department for four large concrete reliefs for the new school building in Engelgasse in Basel's St. Alban district . In the early 1990s he - u. a. alongside Joseph Beuys , Francesco Clemente and Hieronymus Emil Bischoff - to the artists from whom large groups of works or individual works are donated to the Basel Public Art Collection of the Basel Art Museum . In addition, his works have u. a. Found in the BEWE collection, which focuses on the red-blue group , as well as in the “Swiss Art of the 20th Century” collection of National Insurance .

reception

In the obituary, the Basler Zeitung wrote that Bernasconi “with his noble abstractions belonged to the habitués of the city's exhibition business”. In addition, he developed a visual language that “knew how to start up violently as well as the restrained, fashionable gestures”. His late work is determined by “a vehemence that hardly reveals the eighty-year-old author”.

On the occasion of the exhibition “Radiation-Radiation III” in the Demenga Gallery, the Riehener Zeitung listed Bernasconi and Mark Tobey as two examples of “brilliant artists who were successful in their homeland” who came to Basel and settled there.

Awards

For the lithograph Tamburino della morte (1955) he received the gold medal at the Reggio Emilia Biennale .

Works (selection)

• Fanny , 1955, Art Credit Basel-Stadt
• Passeggiata a cavallo , 1965, Museo Caccia, Lugano
• Sotto la pioggia , 1965, private property
• Hommage à Giacometti , 1970, private collection

literature

• Aldo Pattochi: René Bernasconi , Bianco e nero series. Artisti ticinesi del '900 , La Toppa, Lugano, 1961.
• René Bernasconi , in: For Us. The Swiss magazine for the second half of life , No. 11, May 1979.
• Dorothea Christ , Aldo Patocchi, Vinicio Salati: The painter René Bernasconi , Schwabe , Basel 1989.
• Laure Bohrer, Giorgio L Bellardi: René Bernasconi. 1910 to 1994: his life, his work , Schwabe, Basel 2004.
• José Warmund-Cordelier, Laure Iselin-Bohrer: A short journey through the oeuvre of René Bernasconi , Petri, Basel 2013.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Bernasconi, René - SIKART Lexicon on Art in Switzerland. In: sikart.ch. Retrieved July 29, 2019 . 
2. ^ Zobrist / Waeckerlin, Claudia Müller, René Bernasconi. In: artlog.net. Retrieved August 12, 2019 . 
3. ↑ René Bernasconi. In: artlog.net. Retrieved September 1, 2019 . 
4. ^ Kunstmuseum Basel (ed.): Annual reports . Basel 1993, p. 72 .
5. ↑ Selection 97 - Art from the region with partial presentation of the BEWE collection. In: kunsthausbaselland.ch . Retrieved July 29, 2019 . 
6. ^ Swiss art of the 20th century. The National Insurance Collection - SIKART Lexicon on Art in Switzerland. In: sikart.ch. Retrieved July 29, 2019 . 
7. ↑ mu: On the death of René Bernasconi . In: Basler Zeitung . August 19, 1994.
8. ^ Rz: Exhibition: Radiation III at Demenga - Art in Basel and from Basel . In: Wiehener Zeitung . September 6, 1996, p. 8 ( docplayer.org ).

Web links

• www.renebernasconi.com
• Literature by and about René Bernasconi in the catalog of the German National Library