Gustave Buchet
Born in Étoy (Switzerland) in 1888.
Died in Lausanne (Switzerland) on 14 July 1963.
Swiss · Swiss avant-gardes · Futurism, Post-Cubism and Purism · geometric abstraction and a return to figuration.
Trained at the École des beaux-arts in Geneva, Gustave Buchet emerged as a distinctive figure within the Swiss avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. His stays in Paris in 1910–1911 and 1916–1917, when he attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, directed his work towards the new pictorial possibilities of Cubism and Futurism. In Geneva, he also helped found the group Le Falot alongside, among others, Maurice Barraud.
After a brief engagement with Dada, Buchet settled in Paris in 1920 and participated in the activities of the Section d’Or. His painting became flat, structured and geometric, engaging with Fernand Léger’s Post-Cubism and with the Purism promoted by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant. At the same time, he broadened his practice to include sculpture, the applied arts, advertising, fashion and theatre.
His solo exhibitions at Galerie Mantelet in 1926 and Galerie Zak in 1929 brought his first Parisian successes. During the 1930s, his work gradually returned to the figure and the natural motif; after settling in Lausanne in 1939, he developed a more liberated idiom attentive to transparency, light and, in his later paintings, the primacy of colour. The 1958 retrospective at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne and the 2022 exhibition Gustave Buchet : Accusé de peindre restored the full scope of a career spanning painting, sculpture and the decorative arts.
His work is held, among other institutions, by the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The abstract oil Composition presented by Swiss Art Gallery belongs within this body of work.
The works by Gustave Buchet presented by Swiss Art Gallery extend this artistic journey and take their place naturally within this corpus.
