The invention of photography in the 19th century visibly changed art. Portrait photography soon replaced classical painting and contributed greatly to the rapid spread of the new medium, which also aroused increasing interest among artists!
Artists and their studios soon became the focus of the photographers themselves and became a motif. The surviving photographs give us fascinating insights into the world of art studios and the artists' working methods. The German photographer Carl Teufel (1845-1912) was one of the first to systematically photograph artists in their studios and took more than 300 photographs of Munich studios from 1890 onwards.
Before and after the Second World War, the studios of famous artists became important motifs for photographers, who created independent art with these works and contributed greatly to the recognition of the genre as an art form.
The high intensity of these works, their sensuality and ultimately their quality were often the result of a close relationship between the people portrayed and the photographers. Many of the photographs shown in this exhibition are fine examples of this.
Image: Bernhard Giger, Andy Warhol, New York, 1974
The French photographer Michel Sima (1912-1987), for example, had a very close relationship with Pablo Picasso, who not only supported him after his return from the concentration camp, but also encouraged him to photograph again. Sima subsequently photographed his work in progress for Picasso and documented its progress.
The current exhibition at the Kunsthaus comprises around 100 photographic portraits, mostly in black and white, from the studios of artists of national or international significance. The focus is on photographs by Michel Sima, who visited and photographed almost all the important artists of the Ecole de Paris in their studios over several years. Sima's photographs of Pablo Picasso and never-before-published photographs of Alberto Giacometti are also on display in Paris.
The rediscovered film Swiss Artists in 21 Minutes (1968) by Peter von Gunten expands the exhibition into a filmed portrait of an artist.
Schwanden - Santa Monica, the title of the exhibition, is emblematic of the diversity of the show and refers to the photographs taken by Paul Senn (1901-1953) in Johann Peter Flück's studio in Schwanden in the early 1940s and those taken by Kurt Blum (1922-2005) in Sam Francis' studio in Santa Monica.
The exhibition combines the regional with the international and includes works from the early days of photography to the present day.
March 10 to May 12, 2024
