Alexandre Blanchet

Portrait of Ursula Stauffacher at the Red Book

1947

Geneva painter and sculptor, author of numerous wall decorations, civil and religious Alongside an apprenticeship in enamel painting, Blanchet completed his training at the School of Industrial Arts in Geneva. The Lissignol scholarship, in 1905, enabled him to make a first stay in Paris, and the Diday competition, in 1906, a trip to Italy. He moved to Paris in 1907, befriending René Auberjonois and Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, for whom he illustrated Nouvelles et Pieces (1910). He therefore exhibited regularly both in Paris, where his items were praised by critics, and in Geneva and Switzerland, where collectors began to show up. His painting Les deux amies was exhibited in Paris at the Salon d'Automne in 1912, then, the following year, as part of the Armory Show in New York, where it was purchased by the collector John Quinn. Returning to Geneva in 1914, he participated in the Premier Salon des Cahiers vaudois and, the following year, in various group exhibitions in Zurich, Winterthur and Bern, where several German-speaking collectors became loyal to him, in particular Max Wassmer, his patron. From 1918, he also devoted himself to sculpture (portraits) alongside his easel work (portraits and self-portraits, landscapes, still lifes). From stays in Valais, he brought back two large paintings and, through them, affirmed his dispositions for monumental painting that he would have the opportunity to practice, as soon as he moved to Confignon in 1922, for the decoration of the Federal Tribunal in Lausanne (1925 –27), then the churches of Christ the King in Tavannes (1930), of Saint Joseph in Geneva (1943) and of the Sacred Heart in Geneva (1947). From 1930 to 1942, he taught at the Geneva School of Fine Arts. In 1944, a retrospective was dedicated to him in Basel. He received the first prize from the City of Geneva in 1947 and, until the end of the 1950s, carried out several portrait commissions. Blanchet enjoyed equal esteem on both sides of the Sarine during his lifetime. During the interwar period, he was certainly, along with the Vaudois René Auberjonois and the Genevan Maurice Barraud, the French-speaking painter most regularly summoned to represent his country in major Swiss art exhibitions organized abroad. The beginnings of his career were marked by the unmistakable influence of Hodler. Cézanne's revelation in Paris in 1907, however, encouraged him to reorient his art in a more "Latin" direction. From the first, he still retains for a few years the outline and certain Symbolist subjects (even if he attributes them purely descriptive titles); the second, it adopts the modulated application of color to build the shape of the interior on an absorbent canvas accentuating the mattness of the material. In 1913, a few paintings even revealed the ephemeral temptation to pursue the analysis of form in the manner of early Cubism. This "hybridization of Swiss art by France" will be greatly appreciated by collectors, especially German-speaking ones.