Lucien Schwob
Born in 1895.
Died in 1985.
Lucien Schwob (born 7 October 1895 in La Chaux-de-Fonds; died 6 June 1985 in the same city) was a painter, draughtsman, lithographer, and essayist, a professional identity attested by local sources.
Trained partly outside Switzerland, he travelled in Spain, Italy, Belgium, and southern France. During this period, around 1924, he experimented with an approach influenced by Cubism before swiftly returning to a pictorial language close to that of Cézanne.
Active in local artistic life, he served on the committee of the Société des amis des arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds from 1938 to 1945 and, from 1951 onwards, taught painting at the École d’art de La Chaux-de-Fonds for approximately fifteen years; during this period, students such as André Evrard attended his classes. It is further noted that he worked in Vevey in 1959 while continuing to return each week to the classes he taught in La Chaux-de-Fonds.
Following a period of depression, he ceased all artistic production from 1965 onwards and subsequently devoted himself to writing books on painting. These writings include Fulgurance et magie picturale : Le Greco, Velasquez (Lausanne, L’Âge d’homme, 1984) and Le peintre Léopold Robert (La Chaux-de-Fonds, Éditions d’En-haut, 1986, published after his death).
The presence of works by Lucien Schwob is recorded at the Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds and the Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchâtel, as noted in the consulted entries. In light of the available information, his career is distinguished by the coexistence of graphic and lithographic practice with written reflection on painting, as well as by a stylistic oscillation in which a brief Cubist incursion stands alongside a return to a mode of expression close to Cézanne’s.
