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A great first for the Pierre Gianadda Foundation - from 19 December 2003 to 23 May 2004 it will be presenting a major retrospective on Albert Anker.
Anker was an international celebrity during his lifetime. Since 1859, he regularly participated in the Paris Salon, where he won many medals. He was the son of a veterinarian and was born on 1 April 1831 in Anet (in German: Ins, in the Canton of Bern), and it was there that he grew up on the border between two cultures, one French-speaking, the other Germanic. He was educated in Neuchâtel, where he took his first drawing classes, and he sat his baccalaureate in Bern. From the autumn of 1853, he studied theology, which he had started in Switzerland, in Halle, in Germany. Being unsatisfied with the idea of a career in the priesthood, what he really wanted was to become an artist.
He went and settled in Paris, where he followed courses given by the Swiss painter and teacher, Charles Gleyre, in whose class he had been preceded by many compatriots, not to mention the future impressionists, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. At the same time, he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts and copied the old masters at the Louvre. Back in Anet, after his father's death, he installed a studio in the house of his childhood, in 1860, and in 1864 he married Anna Ruefli, a friend of his late sister's. The couple had six children, of whom two died in infancy. The Anker family regularly spent the winter in Paris and the summer in Anet. The artist went to Italy very often where, by way of exception, he also devoted himself to landscape painting, especially in light, airy watercolours, thus exhibiting the delicacy of his palette.
His mastery of the watercolour technique stood him in good stead during the last ten years of his life when, in 1901 following an attack, he had to give up working on canvas and turn to the motives that had always been so dear to him, pictures of rural life, that he captured in several hundreds of watercolours with tireless creative vigour.
Albert Anker has now become the most popular Swiss painter of the 19th century, whose characters - girls knitting, lively and playful schoolchildren, old men smoking their pipes - are accessible to a very broad public. His art derives from the deep attachment he felt for the little people. Anker led an orderly life - his daily routine was perfectly organised, he regularly recorded his income and expenditure in a Livre de vente (Sales Ledger). After his first child, he had to think of a supplementary source of income. He found it in 1866 while working with Théodore Deck, an Alsatian crockery maker who had him decorate plates and dishes with three-quarter portraits or characters drawn from history and mythology.
His work is characterised by an astonishing degree of continuity and a stability, and always portrays his great interest in mankind and the passing of events while, at the same time, showing his humanist side. It is difficult to divide his work into stages that would help explain an evolution in his vision of things. His subjects include, on the one hand, scenes involving several characters, with a carefully thought-out composition, drawn from daily country life - school, local affairs, such prominent events as marriages, baptisms, etc. - while, on the other, he portrayed people around him in isolated canvases, some of which constitute only partial individual portraits. Apart from commissioned portraits, Anker painted all the children he met every day and who came to visit him in his studio.
Anker lived in the days of realism. In his work, the realism ignored the social criticism of Millet or Daumier, or the anecdotal transfigurative or the edifying folkloric approaches of Vautier or Defregger. His main themes were children playing at school, reading and studying, as well as involved in household tasks. Girls knitting, schoolchildren studying, old men drinking and doubled-up old grandmothers were his most characteristic representations; he took in human beings of all age groups, painted from every viewpoint, caught in the act as they performed their daily tasks in a familiar setting. In a number of impressive still lifes, Anker also demonstrated that he was able to produce an exceptional painting, with a minimum of strokes.
The exhibition at the Pierre Gianadda Foundation will present all of Anker's techniques - pictures, drawings, watercolours and crockery - as well as the entire range of his subjects. A large number of the works will be on show for the very first time. The exhibition will pay a resounding tribute to the intuitive character of the artist and to his pictorial finesse, as well as to his sense of form, colour and tonality. He will be rightly recognised as having been and remaining one of the most important of Swiss painters.
The exhibition is being run by Therese Bhattacharya-Stettler, the curator of the Bern Kunstmuseum and author of the Anker Catalogue raisonné. The bilingual French-German catalogue reproduces all the exposed works in colour. Selling price: CHF 45.- (approx. euro 30.-).
The Anker exhibition
The Franck Collection
The Sculpture Park
The Gallo-Roman Museum
The Automobile Museum
are open every day
from 10 am to 6 pm
from 19 December 2003 to 23 May 2004
With the support of the UBS
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