Cuno Amiet Spent Seventy-Five Years Chasing Pure Color

Feature image: Cuno Amiet, Woman Lying Down, 1893 via Fondation Cuno Amiet

Disclaimer: Painting titles originally in German or French have been translated to English throughout.

Much of late nineteenth-century Swiss painting stayed loyal to gray light and careful tone, and pure, unmixed color arranged for its own emotional weight sold much more easily in Paris or Dresden than in Bern. Cuno Amiet spent a seventy-five year career changing that, moving through Munich's academies, Brittany's Pont-Aven colony, and a decade inside the German Expressionist group Die Brücke before settling into a farmhouse in Oschwand that he painted, in one form or another, for the rest of his life. He produced more than four thousand paintings across that span, over a thousand of them self-portraits, and outlived nearly every movement he passed through.

Amiet was born on March 28, 1868, in Solothurn, the son of the canton's chancellor and court clerk, Josef Ignaz Amiet. His mother died shortly after his birth, and he grew up under his father and stepmother alongside two older siblings. His talent surfaced early in drawing lessons with the history painter Heinrich Jenny, and the family friend Frank Buchser, a painter himself, persuaded Amiet's father to let his son pursue art as a career. In the autumn of 1886, Amiet traveled to Munich with the watercolorist Paul Demme to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he met Giovanni Giacometti, the painter who would remain his closest friend for the next four decades.

The two continued their training together in Paris between 1888 and 1892, enrolling at the Académie Julian under Adolphe-William Bouguereau, Tony Robert-Fleury, and Gabriel Ferrier. Academic painting left Amiet cold, and in 1892 he left Julian's classrooms for the artists' colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany, where he studied alongside Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, Roderic O'Conor, and Armand Séguin. There he encountered the work of Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, and the pointillist handling of pure, unmixed color he saw in their circle became the foundation of everything he painted afterward. His family's limited finances ran out before he was ready to leave, and he returned to Switzerland owing more to Brittany than to either academy he had actually enrolled in.

Amiet supported himself as a decorative painter through the mid-1890s while his personal work met open hostility. Christoph Vögele, longtime conservator at the Kunstmuseum Solothurn, has described the critical response to Amiet's 1894 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel as dismissive to the point of calling his canvases daubs. His father died in 1895, cutting off the one relationship that had first sanctioned his career. Three years later, a portrait commission changed the trajectory of both his art and his life. In 1898, Amiet was hired to paint Ferdinand Hodler, already Switzerland's most established modern painter, and the two became lasting friends and reference points for each other's work. That same year Amiet married Anna Luder von Hellsau and moved to Oschwand, a farming village in the canton of Bern that would remain his home, and his primary subject, for the next six decades.

The turn of the century reversed Amiet's fortunes. His 1899 painting Evening Riches won a silver medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, and steady invitations to exhibitions across Europe followed. He painted The Yellow Hill and Self-Portrait With Apple in 1903, then moved deeper into winter subjects in 1904 with a run of snow paintings, among them Ski Tracks and Snowy Landscape (Deep Winter), built from the same cold, saturated palette he had carried out of Pont-Aven. Oschwand itself, its orchards, its gardens, its winters, had by now become his standing subject, one he would return to for the rest of his working life instead of chasing new locations the way many of his contemporaries did.

Amiet met several future members of the German Expressionist group Die Brücke in 1905 and exhibited alongside them the following year at the Berlin Secession. That 1906 exhibition led Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff to invite him to join the group outright and show with them in Dresden. Amiet accepted, becoming the only Swiss painter inside a movement otherwise built around Dresden and Berlin studios. The year 1907 produced some of his most recognized work from this period, among them Apple Harvest, Self-Portrait in Rose, a canvas painted almost entirely in pink that dropped out of public view for decades before its rediscovery in 2010, and The Violet Hat, his portrait of Gertrud Müller. Die Brücke's raw, flattened color pushed Amiet's own palette further than Pont-Aven alone had, even as his subject matter, gardens, portraits, snow, stayed closer to home than the urban and figural themes his German colleagues favored. In 1908 he moved into a permanent house at Oschwand, built by Otto Ingold, replacing the guesthouse he had rented since his marriage.

With a permanent house now in place, Oschwand turned into something closer to a salon. Writers and critics, including Hermann Hesse, Wilhelm Worringer, Adolf Frey, Arthur Weese, and Samuel Singer, visited regularly, and Amiet took on students of his own, among them Werner Miller, Marta Worringer, Hans Morgenthaler, Hanny Bay, and the brothers Albert and Josef Müller. He served on the Swiss Federal Art Commission from 1911 to 1915, and in 1913 purchased a nearby farmhouse, the same year Die Brücke dissolved and his active membership in the group ended. The University of Bern awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1919, formal recognition of a reputation that had, by then, moved well past the artist once accused of daubing paint at Basel.

Through the late 1920s and into the 1930s, Amiet took on large-scale wall paintings alongside his easel work, extending the same color logic to a much bigger surface. In 1931, a fire tore through Munich's Glaspalast exhibition hall and destroyed roughly fifty of his paintings, a large share of his early Pont-Aven and Die Brücke output lost in a single afternoon. He returned to the Swiss Federal Art Commission that same year for a second term, serving into 1932, and kept working for thirty more years after the fire, a stretch of late-career productivity that the Venice Biennale recognized twice, first in 1934 and again in 1954. He served on the board of the Gottfried Keller Foundation from 1934 to 1948 and on the board of the Kunstmuseum Bern from 1935 to 1948, positions that put him inside the institutions shaping Swiss art history even as his own paintings kept circling the same Oschwand garden. Broader recognition of the full range of his seventy-five year output only caught up with him in the 1950s, close to the end of his life. Amiet died in Oschwand on July 6, 1961, at ninety-three.

The market has taken even longer to catch up. Amiet's current auction record, Mother and Child in a Flower-Strewn Meadow, sold for $3,424,315 at Galerie Kornfeld in 2022, more than a century after the painting most closely tied to his color breakthrough won a minor medal in Paris. What the Glaspalast fire took in 1931 cannot be recovered, but Oschwand still holds the paintings Amiet kept producing for another thirty years after the loss, proof that the color argument he first made in a Breton fishing village never needed rebuilding from scratch.

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