Casimir Reymond

The bathers , dated 1923
Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard
Monogrammed and dated lower right
Signed and dated on the back
Size: 45 x 16cm
With frame: 59.5 x 30.5 cm
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Casimir Reymond’s painting is both graphic and elegantly structured. The colors he uses, intense and tangy, are drawn on audacious formats. This painting represents bathers by the sea. The forms are sculptural, stylized and in volume. The bodies, arranged frontally, are highlighted by bright and contrasting colors. The triangular veils of the background form a pattern that echoes the neat geometry of the whole.

“He saw the shapes, the volumes in nature, like a sculptor”. For Edith Carey, author of the reference monograph devoted to the artist, Casimir Reymond’s work is “plural”. He was both a draftsman, painter and sculptor, influenced by Ferdinand Hodler and Paul Cézanne. His artistic career is made of ruptures and changes of style. He explored and experimented a lot even in his signatures which were varied.

Painter and sculptor, originally from Vaulion in the Vaudois Jura, Casimir Reymond studied at the School of Fine Arts in Geneva. Eugène Gillard, a teacher who had a great impact on him, introduced him to avant-garde art through painters such as Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne.

The young artist’s future as a painter is very promising. Barely twenty years old, he presented 180 paintings and drawings in a personal exhibition in Lausanne. Felix Vallotton advises him to go to Paris to make a career. He went there in 1922, and stayed there for ten years.

To make himself known to critics, art dealers and collectors, he exhibited in Parisian salons such as the Salon d’Automne, the Salon des Artistes Indépendants or the Salon des Tuileries. It receives very rave reviews.

In 1932, he taught at the cantonal school of drawing and applied art in Lausanne, which he directed in 1933-1934 and from 1945 to 1955.

Casimir Reymond has also established himself in sculpture, particularly monumental, thanks to public commissions. We owe him a sculpture of Mary in the church of Saint-Paul-de-Vienne and many of his sculptures that adorn the city of Lausanne, including that of the Caryatids of the Federal Court of Lausanne.

He received the Wilhelm Gimmi Prize in 1969 shortly before his death.

Museums:

• Paris George Pompidou Center, Lausanne Fine Arts Museum.

Bibliography:

• Edith Carey director, Casimir Reymond, 1893-1969. His life and work, Infolio, Gollion, 2010.

• Jordan et al., Casimir Reymond, sculptor, 1893-1969 , 1974.

• See also Jean-Paul Berger, Belles-Lettres and the fine arts, in Two centuries in red and green , Belles-Lettres de Lausanne, 1806-2006, p. 110-11.