«Damned Guy!» Karl Stauffer-Bern: Painter, Etcher, Sculptor
With Sturm and Drang to great naturalistic achievements
The second of September, 2007, is the 150th anniversary of Karl Stauffer-Bern's birthday. The first large retrospective since 1957 offers us a comprehensive overview of his complete works. From each of his creative periods we are showing paintings, printing plates, drawings, sculptures, photographs and documents. In addition, the exhibition illustrates that Stauffer-Bern, a manic creator, made a large major contribution to the naturalistic realism of his times.
«Damned Guy!» This quote of Gottfried Keller's, pertaining to Stauffer-Bern, has been taken for the title of the exhibition. One night, after visiting a tavern together, Stauffer-Bern gave a speech at the top of his voice in the middle of Zurich, provoking Keller to the exclamation in which a great amount of admiration for this stormy, impulsive man from Bern is implicit.
Stauffer-Bern's oeuvre was produced between 1875 and 1891.
Particularly in the field of portrait painting, the artist, who died
young, was among the most important artistic personalities of his
generation. As a painter, engraver and graphic artist, he created
powerful and striking character analyses. Stauffer-Bern, who sometimes
in the later stages of a canvas over-painted his pictures or simply
scratched off all the paint, often used photographs to spare models and
himself from long and tiring sittings. The work photographs and studies
for portraits presented in the exhibition demonstrate with what
intensity Stauffer-Bern attempted to capture the personality of his
models and to distil their essence.
Stauffer-Bern switched between one activity and another with boundless enthusiasm and in the process accomplished great artistic achievements. In Berlin during the Wilhelminian period, his insistent naturalism corresponded to the taste of a wealthy stratum of society who enjoyed having him paint their portraits. Lydia Welti-Escher, daughter of the Gotthard magnate Alfred Escher, daughter-in-law of the Federal Councillor Emil Welti and Stauffer-Bern's patroness was one of those who sat for her portrait. Stauffer-Bern came to public notice mainly due to the speculation and scandal surrounding his affair with Lydia Welti-Escher. The events, the details of which are still not completely clear today and which were the subject of many books and articles, continue to overshadow Stauffer-Bern's deserved recognition as a significant artist and excellent portrait painter of the 19th century.
