This retrospective brings together over 90 works by Gustave Buchet, focusing especially on the artist’s modernist ambitions. Taking its cue from the publication of a fine monograph by Paul-André Jaccard, MCBA looks back over the career of Gustave Buchet (1888-1963), a major name in its collection of modern art. Buchet belongs to a generation of […]
This retrospective brings together over 90 works by Gustave Buchet, focusing especially on the artist’s modernist ambitions.Taking its cue from the publication of a fine monograph by Paul-André Jaccard, MCBA looks back over the career of Gustave Buchet (1888-1963), a major name in its collection of modern art. Buchet belongs to a generation of French-speaking Swiss artists who sought to free themselves from the hold Ferdinand Hodler and Post-Impressionism had over them. For Buchet, at the dawn of the 20th century, the time had indeed come to reconnect with Paris’s avant-garde movements. He went off to the French capital and settled there in the interwar years. Excited by the city’s art scene, which was then booming, he drew on the innovations that Post-Cubism was introducing, notably Futurism and Purism.Buchet was to be throughout his life in search of new formal solutions. In a style of painting that is demanding and disciplined thanks to the artist’s use of the straightedge and the compass, he developed an art of composition in pictures that are remarkably structured and arranged, a unique body of work in Swiss art!The show revisits the trail blazed by the artist in his lifetime, including his output in the applied arts, from the works stamped by his modernist ambitions all the way up to his late pieces, which are haunted by spirituality and the pursuit of color.Exhibition curator: Catherine Lepdor, chief curator, and Paul-André Jaccard, Fondation Gustave Buchet