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Camille Graeser
Abgewandelte Quadrate, 1943 |
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The Swiss-born artist Camille Graeser grew up in Germany and had a considerable reputation as a product designer and interior decorator when he fled the country in 1933 for Zurich, where he remained for the rest of his long life. He joined forces there with a number of similar minded artists and some time later became one of the leading members of the group known as the ‘Zurich Concretists.’
It took Graeser nearly 10 years to start devoting himself regularly to painting. In the early 1940s he began to paint – at first producing only five to seven pictures a year. The painting “Abgewandelte Quadrate” or ‘Modified Squares’ comes from the early phase of Graeser’s work as a freelance artist.
In front of a subdued light greyish-green background we see a variously stacked formation of squares and almost square rectangles – the ‘modified squares’ of the title – in black and white, blue, green and red. Although the structure of the picture seems governed by highly rational organizational principles, Graeser manages to create movement in the composition by tipping the squares, by rotating their surfaces and layering them spatially, by alternating white base areas with colored edges and differently colored backdrops. The dense crowding of the shapes is reminiscent of the collage still-lifes of Cubism – but this is an example of the purely geometrical-constructivist art that was already being called ‘concrete.’
In 1944 Graeser wrote a kind of poetic manifesto in an attempt to define this term. In the work we find the following lines:
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