Walter Clénin
Born in 1897.
Died in 1988.
Walter Clénin (19 February 1897, Tschugg – 2 June 1988, Ligerz) was a Swiss artist active as a painter, muralist and teacher of fine arts. His oeuvre includes paintings, murals, mosaics, lithographs and drawings.
He received his training at vocational and art schools in Switzerland, attending the Gewerbeschule in Bern (1913–1914) and then the École des beaux-arts de Genève (1913–1915). After the First World War, he travelled to Munich, Vienna, Paris, Italy and Tunisia, and received federal art grants in 1921 and 1922.
Professionally, Clénin is cited among the most active mural painters in Switzerland during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, he created a mural for the auditorium (Aula) of the University of Bern in 1934. In 1937, he executed a fresco for the Swiss Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition; the subsequent treatment of this wall provoked controversy and led to an intervention in 1983.
Between 1940 and 1947, he also produced murals for educational institutions and for the Federal Museum of Charters (Bundesbriefmuseum).
He lived in Biel from 1945 to 1956. In 1956, he was appointed professor of architectural painting and mural painting at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He returned to Switzerland in 1966 with his second wife, Christina Jolanda Petronella (née van den Ende), and subsequently became involved in heritage protection and the preservation of historic monuments.
The municipality of Ligerz awarded him honorary citizenship in 1977. He was a member of the Bern section of the Swiss Society of Painters, Sculptors and Architects. His associates included Jakob Probst and Traugott Senn.
His career combined a diverse body of work—painting on supports, mural interventions and graphic techniques—with international teaching activity and a later commitment to the built heritage.
