Gustave Buchet, the Dada Detour

In 1920, Gustave Buchet took part in a Dada exhibition with Christian Schad, followed by a Grand Bal Dada. The reception was hostile. The guide to the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne reports that the experience unsettled him to such an extent that he felt he had betrayed his art.

Yet this detour did not become his destination. Buchet returned to Paris. There he developed a style of painting based on planes and geometric forms, close to Post-Cubism and to the Purism of Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant.

Seen in the light of his constructed compositions, this episode invites us to look at them differently: their balance belongs to a journey that also passed through provocation and doubt. An artist’s career is sometimes shaped by the paths one decides to leave behind.