Geiger / Latimer / Celio-Scheurer Irène Zurkinden: Love, Life

Sketches, Paintings and Drawings – Exhibition Catalogue and Art Book
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-7757-6197-0
Verlag: Hatje Cantz Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 312 Seiten

A unique insight into the work of Irène Zurkinden – with sketchbooks published for the very first time

Accompanying the exhibition of the same name, this book offers a fascinating insight into the multifaceted work of Irène Zurkinden. Over more than five decades, the artist created intimate, powerful, and uncompromisingly expressive works that continue to captivate today.

The beautifully designed catalogue not only presents her most renowned paintings and drawings but also, for the very first time, her sketchbooks – a rare window into the creative process of an exceptional artist.

Book Highlights:

- First-ever publication of Irène Zurkinden’s sketchbooks
- Comprehensive overview of more than 50 years of artistic work

- High-quality reproductions of paintings, drawings, and sketches

- Exhibition catalogue and collector’s item for art enthusiasts

This publication reveals how Zurkinden’s oeuvre oscillates between grace, beauty, and critical engagement with her time – an art book that unites inspiration, insight, and visual intensity.

Swiss painter Irène Zurkinden (1909–1987) trained as a fashion illustrator in Basel before turning to the visual arts. A leading figure of the city’s cultural scene, she spent her life between Basel and Paris—her place of longing. Throughout her career, she exhibited widely in Basel galleries and Swiss institutions, with her paintings and sketchbooks bearing witness to a unique view of society and her personal surroundings.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Latimer, Quinn

Celio-Scheurer, Marie-Eve

Illies, Florian

Eigen, Rebecca

Thüring, Reto

Suter, Raphael

Geiger, Kulturstiftung Basel H.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Latimer, Quinn

Celio-Scheurer, Marie-Eve

Illies, Florian

Eigen, Rebecca

Thüring, Reto

Suter, Raphael

Lusa, Studio Marie

Zurkinden, Irène

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstformen, Kunsthandwerk Malerei: Ölfarben
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Künstlerische Stoffe, Motive, Themen Portraitdarstellung in der Kunst
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstformen, Kunsthandwerk Malerei: Gemälde
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Einzelne Künstler: Biographien, Monografien
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstformen, Kunsthandwerk Zeichnung und Zeichnen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Cover
Title Page
Contents
The Other Irène Zurkinden
Introduction
Irène Zurkinden: Life, Love, Stage
Painting Desire: Irène Zurkinden’s Art in 1930s Paris and Her Poetics of Space
Irène Zurkinden: Life in the Parisian Avant-Garde and the Surrealist Milieu
Sketchbooks
Body Work: Eros and Economy in the Drawings and Notebooks of Irène Zurkinden
Look at Me When I Look at You: The Gaze as Agency
Plates
Irène Zurkinden (1909–1987)
Image Credits
Transcriptions of the Sketchbooks
Acknowledgements
Imprint

Leseproben

Painting Desire: Irène Zurkinden’s Art in 1930s Paris and Her Poetics of Space Florian Illies

One day in the late 1920s, a young woman came home excited from her drawing class at the Basler Zeichenschule and told her husband that one of her fellow students was a graphic artist who looked from head to toe like she had been painted by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. She was effervescent and wore her hair in wild fringes and an enameled heart pendant around her neck. Curious about what he had heard, the husband, the collector Christoph Bernoulli, visited the young artist in her studio—and on the spot he bought a self-portrait that the artist herself had laid aside to be discarded. It shows a perky blonde with piercing blue eyes that peer out from under her hat, her gaze bold and adventurous, ready to conquer the world. With its delicate use of watercolors, the work still recalls the Cézannesque technique of Arnold Fiechter, who taught Irène Zurkinden in Basel, yet it is also already entirely individual, spirited, and fresh throughout. The Kunstmuseum Basel first wanted to buy it from Bernoulli, then so did the legendary gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim, who discerned a quality not unlike that of Pablo Picasso in it. Bernoulli drew the right conclusion and urged the young artist to leave Basel for Paris—to go to the place that, in her looks, her nature, and her style, she was destined for without quite knowing it. And so, one warm spring day in 1929, Zurkinden arrives in the French capital—and the best decade of her career as an artist begins.

*

During two initial visits in 1929 and 1931, Zurkinden absorbs what she can of Paris, she positively engulfs it and lets herself be engulfed in turn by its unique blend of lightheartedness, frivolity, and elegance. “I must not forget my first months in Paris, right after my arrival, the months of being drunk on this city”—the line is from Adam Zagajewski, but it was, one could say, the motto of Zurkinden’s life. Until her last days, she never forgot those first months on the Seine. She seeks the old Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec and the Ballets Russes, but she also seeks the new Paris of Josephine Baker and Picasso and of Montmartre, and she finds both. Since she was little, her mother has told her about her own blissful trips to Paris, French was the second spoken language in her home, and the young Irène swooned over how she imagined the fashion shows in the metropolis and made her drawing pencil saunter down the catwalks of Chanel or Lanvin. She wants to be a fashion illustrator—and now that she has the opportunity to plunge into the vibrant Paris of the 1930s, it is not only childhood daydreams that come true, but also all her present-day yearnings. The city brims with playfulness and sensuality, enjoying its temporary respite from the tempests of world affairs that are again gathering; and Zurkinden’s drawings and paintings are about nothing but this Hemingwayesque “Paris, a feast for life.” She does not mind being no more than a very minor figure in this great bloom of bohemia, she is grateful to be part of it, to be sitting at the Café du Dôme and capture with her pencil the people, the streets, the dresses of the women under the plane trees along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, the run-down backyard studios, and the electric atmosphere at the Folies Bergère; in short, to experience the singular Paris mélange that, like a buoyantly melancholy chanson, can be sensed in every one of her works from the 1930s.

*

Soon enough, in December 1931, Galerie Marguerite Schulthess in Basel mounts an exhibition of Zurkinden’s drawings and paintings from Paris (the first of many over the course of decades). 1932 then brings the young artist’s presumably most consequential departure for Paris, for this time she has found the ideal partner for the voyage. Meret Oppenheim is four years younger than Zurkinden and the bud of her creative gift has yet to open. Together, the two attractive and intelligent women set out from Basel for Paris, where they crack open the doors to the city’s life and the back rooms and beating heart of the Surrealist movement. Both artists later recounted this magical beginning—Oppenheim in the overwhelmingly vital yet delicately sensitive Album from Childhood to 1943 she compiled in 1954; Zurkinden did not dwell on it until late in life, in a speech at Schloss Ebenrain in 1983. That is how we know about the Pernod that helped them ease the initial agitations, and about how the very first destination after their train had pulled into the Gare de Lyon was of course the Café du Dôme, where they spent hours in the shadow of the light-green planes just looking, looking, looking. The two young artists from Basel soon found a studio to share, but it was too dilapidated; they moved to a hotel on Rue Delambre, only a cigarette’s length from the Café du Dôme. And there they alighted right in the middle of the passionate debates among the Surrealists around Paul Éluard and André Breton; Oppenheim, in particular, was spellbound: “It always seemed to me,” Zurkinden would say, “that, if all Surrealists together had given birth to one human child, it would have been Meret.” She is devoured by the movement’s senior leaders in short order; awestruck, she draws Giacometti’s ear, and Man Ray, in a cycle of pictures, casts her as the oil-soiled muse at the printing press (tellingly, he does not identify the work as a portrait of Meret Oppenheim; it is merely part of his nameless Érotique-voilée, ca. 1933). Zurkinden, too, poses for his camera, but he cannot persuade the artist, who is not ordinarily bashful, to undress and the photo does not come out too well; their respective roles, it seems, are too undefined.

What we do have from those Paris years bristling with energy is a wonderful picture of the two Man Ray models, the two women from Basel in the foreign city, captured by a keen-eyed anonymous photographer. It was taken at that same Café du Dôme, Oppenheim on the left, her hand resting on Zurkinden’s shoulder in a gesture of trust, a picture of great intimacy and optimism; one half can be found in Oppenheim’s album, the other, among Zurkinden’s papers: they had cut it so that each would always have her friend’s likeness to look at.

No one knew and understood Meret Oppenheim as unforgivingly and as forgivingly as Irène Zurkinden did. The series of her early portraits of her friend no doubt rank among her most important works, her brush transmuting the young woman into an ageless sphinx. It is the first flowering of Zurkinden’s idiosyncratic painterly style, that “virtuosity of evasion, of dabbing, intimating, and tenderly touching,” as Hans-Joachim Müller has put it. Contemplating, say, Meret à l’orange (1932–35; fig. 1), we feel the sitter, Oppenheim, so fully precisely because the painter contents herself with intimations, because her brush seems to keep skipping across the canvas, leaving little blanks between its leaps. Paradoxically, it is those blanks that in the end compose a complete likeness of the model, spots of paint coalescing into a human being. A heartbeat, too, has its pauses, and it is of those pauses that Zurkinden’s depictions of humans speak. Indeed, the leopard skin we see behind Oppenheim in Meret en bleu, no xxxvi (1930; fig. 2), with its dark-brown dabs on a light-brown ground, might as well be the feral visual teaching aid for Zurkinden’s technique. Meret en bleu is so remarkable also because, like many of her works, it toys with the iconography of the blue headscarf, which can instantly transform women into reincarnations of the Virgin Mary as rendered by a Renaissance painter. It is interesting to note that Zurkinden works with this motif at the same time as the Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka, who electrified Paris with her metallic style and in whose output the blue headscarf in the course of the 1930s comes to stand for a return to Catholicism, as in The Blue Madonna (1934; fig. 3). In Zurkinden’s work, by contrast, the headscarf is no more than a gamble; Oppenheim wears it like an actress. Women, the picture presumably means to say, have shattered their old gender roles and society’s expectations and won the freedom to choose what they want to be right now or in the next moment, whore or saint, cleaning lady or Madonna.

Fig. 1

Irène Zurkinden, Meret à l’orange, 1932–35. Oil on canvas, 65 × 54.5 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel, acquisition. © Estate Irène Zurkinden. Photo: Martin P. Bühler

Fig. 2

Irène Zurkinden, Meret en bleu, no xxxvi, 1930. Oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm. Stiftung für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Winterthur. Photo: skkg 2019

Fig. 3

Tamara de Lempicka, The Blue Madonna, 1934. Oil on canvas, 20 × 13.5 cm. Private Collection. © Fine Art Images / Bridgeman Images; Tamara de Lempicka Estate, lcc / 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich

In Maria (1937; fig. 4), Zurkinden even has her model with the saintly name lolling lasciviously on the sofa, naked save for a rose-stippled brassiere and a blue headscarf from beneath which she gazes alluringly toward the beholder—no less contorted than the woman’s body, the symbol of the Virgin ends as lingerie. And here, too—those dapples of green and blue paint scattered across the canvas with such an uncannily sure hand, painting as a soft flickering leopard’s skin. Brought to life, like every one of Zurkinden’s pictures, by the fire in the model’s eyes. Yes, the eyes, they are always the glowing nucleus of her pictures.

Fig. 4

Irène Zurkinden, Maria,...