Louis Soutter

Original poster by lithographer, print shop owner and publisher Charles Sauter, designed on the occasion of the first retrospective of Louis Soutter’s work. An intense, even downright captivating poster, no doubt about it; accordingly, the Swiss Confederation named it one of the 28 best posters of 1961. However, this is more due to Soutter’s stormy, drastic work (here is a detail from his work created with bare fingers in the second half of the 1930s and now known as «Composition. Cinq personnages») than to Sauter’s creative achievement. But well, yes, that’s probably a bit petty.

In any case, it remained Sauter’s (1899 – 1969) only poster, as he was not a commercial artist anyway. In 1925, he initially took over the management of the Simplon printing company in Lausanne (which emerged from a branch of the Aarau printing company Trüb & Cie.), before taking over the branch completely and merging it with a publishing house he co-founded in 1940, which specialized in bibliophile editions.

Louis Soutter (1871 – 1942), a cousin of Le Corbusier, was – as you can guess from the poster – an exciting and tragic figure. Enormously versatile and trained in various countries (engineering, architecture, violinist, painter), he emigrated to the United States in 1897, where he married a violinist he had met during his training in Brussels. He taught music and drawing before becoming head of the fine arts department at Colorado College. Then, in 1903, the big break, the cause(s) of which are the subject of various theories: He left family, career and prosperity behind and returned to Switzerland, where his incessant decline took its course. Initially playing first violin in the Geneva symphony orchestra, he ended up working as a street musician and auxiliary worker.

Heavily in debt and too isolated for his family’s taste, Soutter was admitted to the retirement home in Ballaigues in the canton of Vaud in 1923. Despite his seclusion, a handful of acquaintances supported him in his work, including the Vallotton brothers, who exhibited his works in their gallery in Lausanne, as well as Le Corbusier, who, for example, made him known outside Switzerland in 1936 with an article in the Parisian surrealism magazine «Minotaure». Cut off from the world and his loved ones by the war, Soutter died in a hospice in 1942.

Meanwhile, his largest works, such as the one used on the poster (approx. 51×68 cm – he did not create larger works), regularly fetch prices of between CHF 200,000 and 400,000 at auction. Soutter’s work also made a significant contribution to the French artist Jean Dubuffet coining the term Art Brut in 1945.

maybe of interest as well:

Joan Miró – Kunsthalle Basel