Painted music

The works of Swiss-born Camille Graeser (1892-1980) sometimes appear strictly geometric, sometimes as a dancing structure of moving pictorial elements. With the exhibition Camille Graeser and the music focuses on an important aspect of the artist's work that has been little researched to date: Camille Graeser's relationship to music. The exhibition focuses on the 'Loxodromic Compositions'1 created between 1946 and 1955. The approximately 70-part group of works shows the influence that musical rhythms and sound patterns had on Camille Graeser's artistic work.

Born in Carouge near Geneva, Camille Graeser (1892-1980) is considered an important pioneer of constructivist-concrete art in the post-war period. In 1933, he emigrated from Stuttgart to Zurich, where, as a former furniture designer, graphic artist and interior designer, he devoted himself entirely to the visual arts. As a concrete artist, Camille Graeser cultivated a sober formal language that dispensed with narrative content. In contrast to his companions Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse, who pursued a strictly theoretical approach, Graeser chose a freer and more poetic approach, comparing the creation of images to the virtuoso composition of music. He made his first reflections on the analogy between art and music in Adolf Hölzel's lectures at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. Furthermore, Johann Sebastian Bach's Art of the fugueThe free tonality of Paul Hindemith, as well as Arnold Schönberg's twelve-tone technique, inspired him to rethink concrete art compositionally.

Between 1946 and 1955, the group of works of the Loxodromic compositions. In them, geometric shapes, rhythmic angular and bar constructions combine to form dynamic compositions. Titles like Symphony of color or Delicate joint in red-green-black illustrate the reference to music. For his virtuoso handling of color, form and material, Graeser draws not least on his media-rich experience as an interior designer, furniture designer and commercial artist.

Camille Graeser, Symphony of Color, 1946/50

Camille Graeser Foundation, Zurich. Photo: © Camille Graeser Foundation, Zurich / ProLitteris, Zurich

The exhibition Camille Graeser and the music, January 30 to April 10, 2016, is a collaboration between the Camille Graeser Foundation, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and the Aargauer Kunsthaus. Around 70 paintings, drawings and conceptual sketches are on display.