Curated by
Tobia Bezzola
Taisse Grandi Venturi

In collaboration with
Kunsthaus Zürich
Stiftung Ernst Scheidegger-Archiv

Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016) was a painter, graphic, editor, director, publisher and gallery owner, but also a photojournalist and author of artist portraits, in particular of Alberto Giacometti, a lifelong friend. His long career enabled him to write a chapter in the history of photography.

The exhibition opens with a large selection of early photographs, mostly unpublished and taken between 1945 and 1955. These are followed by his famous artist portraits, commissioned from the mid-1950s onwards and later become iconic. From Joan Miró to Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst to Marc Chagall, the exhibition features the artists with whom Scheidegger came eye to eye through the camera.

The photographic portraits dialogue freely with a selection of paintings and sculptures, most of which are from the Kunsthaus Zürich, and from other important public and private collections. The works of the leading figures of 20th-century art history thus punctuate the exhibition dedicated to an eclectic artistic figure who shared their creative adventure for years.

Conceived on occasion of the centenary of Scheidegger’s birth and the fruit of an extensive re-evaluation of his photographic archive, Eye to Eye not only pays due homage to one of the most important Swiss photographers of the previous century, but at the same time offers a choral and intimate insight into the artistic and cultural milieu of the 20th-century avant-garde.

Ernst Scheidegger and Peter Münger
Alberto Giacometti
1964–1966
video, 28 min

Thanks to Werner Bischof, Scheidegger not only became a member of the prestigious Magnum agency, but also discovered a passion for filmmaking. While his friend and mentor’s premature death prevented him from exploring the field of cinema, Scheidegger himself made numerous documentaries.

The best-known example featured his most famous model. Made between 1964 and 1966, the documentary film Alberto Giacometti opens with the artist leading us into his studio, in front of his easel, and ends at the modelling table, according to a rhythm that reflects Giacometti’s artistic practice and his creative process, which does not end in a single work but is constantly in progress, sans fin, like the Paris that forms the backdrop to many of the shots.

Sharp contrasts, alienating perspectives and nonchalant focus: Scheidegger’s early photographs are the dreamlike, hazy result of the wanderings of a young flâneur striving to unlearn everything he had acquired during his years of training.

From Belgrade to Montecassino, the Valle Verzasca to Paris, between one reportage trip and another, the road became the ideal place to immortalize the life that, following the end of the Second World War, spilled out into the open again, in the form of folk festivals and sporting events, circus pavilions and funfair lights. His photographer’s eye often focuses on the human being: what emerges is a lyrical, melancholic and personal depiction, but with a strong social emphasis.

The world that Scheidegger shows us is often dark, but when light appears, it is immediately blinding. It is modulated using a wide range of greys, with a colour scale ranging from deep black to bright white.

Ernst Scheidegger met Alberto Giacometti by chance in 1943, when he was stationed in Maloja, in Bregaglia, during his military service. He photographed him often in the 1950s and 1960s, in his studio in Paris, in Stampa and Maloja, and finally at his funeral in Borgonovo near Stampa, on a cold winter’s day in January 1966.

The deep friendship between the two is recorded in a series of photographic masterpieces that have become classics. From the first dark, opaque images taken in the famous studio at 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, to the later more composed shots of Giacometti working on La Grande Tête for the Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York, which would occupy him until his death, the photographs reveal a relationship of trust and mutual esteem.

Only once, in Stampa, during posing sessions conducted over two winters (1958–1959), were the roles reversed: Giacometti painted a single Portrait of Ernst Scheidegger. In the artist’s characteristic style, everything accidental disappears and, contrary to what usually happens, it is the photographer who remains motionless, trying to resist the painter’s deep artistic probing.

Intriguingly, there is only one photograph showing the two men together, taken in an unspecified year at an italian circus.

Ernst Scheidegger arrived in Paris in 1949. During those fertile years, discussions commenced in certain cafés in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Montparnasse often ended in a studio. This is how a habit begins for the photographer, which later turns into a job.

In his photographic production, the portraits of artists began to multiply around the mid-1950s. They were almost always commissioned works, initially requested by magazines such as Cahiers d’Art, Verve or Du, but they were often also featured in the catalogues of Aimé Maeght’s Paris gallery, in the illustrated books released by the Arche publishing house, and later, in those of Scheidegger himself.

Scheidegger’s success derived from his ability to work discreetly, in the shadow of creation. Photographed at work and among the tools of their trade, the artists play with the camera but rarely appear posed, occupied in their studios, like Germaine Richier, or in the intimacy of their homes, like František Kupka. Some photographs have background stories of personal encounters, alliances and mutual admiration, while many others reflect more casual and fleeting contacts. Far from any staging, the varying degrees of intimacy and closeness to the subjects give each shot different tones and character.

Cuno Amiet
Solothurn, 1868 – Oschwand, 1961
“Cuno Amiet, Alberto Giacometti’s godfather, worked in his elegant studio, with its Persian carpets. He spoke mockingly of the new generation of artists who, despite their fame, ‘live in caves’.”  This is how Scheidegger described his meeting with Cuno Amiet in his studio near Bern in 1960. Along with Giovanni Segantini and Ferdinand Hodler – all close friends of the Giacometti family – Amiet is considered one of the pioneers of Swiss modernism.

Ernst Morgenthaler
Kleindietwil, 1887 – Zurich, 1962
Ernst Morgenthaler’s vocation for painting was not an early one: he was already 27 years old when, thanks to an uncle, he joined Cuno Amiet in Oschwand, where he mastered oil painting in the space of 18 months. Following his move to Zurich in the 1930s, Morgenthaler actively participated in the cultural life of the city and cultivated numerous friendships, with Hermann Hesse, Karl Geiser and Hermann Hubacher. Scheidegger photographed him in his Zurich studio in the 1960s.

Oskar Kokoschka
Pöchlarn, 1886 – Montreux, 1980
In 1953 Oskar Kokoschka, “the wildest” of the Viennese Expressionists, settled in Villeneuve, in the Canton of Vaud. During his long stay in Switzerland he made frequent visits to the Wolfensberger Printworks in Zurich, a famous meeting place for many artists, where Scheidegger photographed him in 1970. It was a period of peacefulness and prosperity: his increasingly acclaimed painting gradually moved away from psychological analysis to focus on open spaces, landscapes and city views, although the characteristic spiral sign of his earlier production could still be discerned.

Max Ernst
Brühl, 1891 – Paris, 1976
Whatever Salvador Dalí may have said about him, and despite the quarrels and his expulsion from the group by André Breton, Max Ernst is the Surrealist artist par excellence. After having met him in Paris, Scheidegger photographed him in 1974 in Seillans, in the south of France, where the artist was living at the time with his fourth wife, the painter Dorothea Tanning. According to an anecdote, it was the stones painted by Ernst during his stay in the Engadine in the summer of 1935 that led Scheidegger to Alberto Giacometti’s studio in Maloja.

Salvador Dalí
Figueres, 1904 – Figueres, 1989 
Around the mid-1950s when Scheidegger was commissioned to photograph him by Arnold Kübler, editor-in-chief of Du magazine, Salvador Dalí was already a media star. In the shots, brimming with playful irony, the Spanish painter is silhouetted against the backdrop of his studio in Portlligat. The contours and shapes of the diverse landscape surrounding the bay are a constant presence in the paintings of the artist, who claimed to feel at home only in the places of his youth, as if connected by an umbilical cord.

Joan Miró
Barcelona, 1893 – Palma de Mallorca, 1983
Joan Miró shares a deep bond with Catalonia with Salvador Dalí, whom he introduced into the circle of the Surrealists. It is Mont-roig that is most prominent in the artist’s emotional landscapes: the little village near Tarragona is the ideal counterbalance to the intellectual turmoil that he experienced first in Paris and then in New York. His long retreats there consolidated his identity. It was there, in his studio on the old family estate, that Scheidegger photographed him in 1953, after having met him a few years earlier in Paris.

Marc Chagall
Vitebsk, 1887 – Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1985
Despite using bold colours and fairy-tale tones, Marc Chagall infused his works with a great deal of personal experience, particularly his condition as an exile: flight is among the recurring themes of his oeuvre, along with the sense of vertigo, loss of roots and instability that it entails. The final stage in a life of continual movement was Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where he moved in 1949. It was there that Scheidegger photographed him in 1955, thanks to their mutual friendship with the art dealer Aimé Maeght.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret)
La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1887 – Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, 1965
When he had just turned 30, Scheidegger became fascinated by Chandigarh, the new capital of the federal state of Punjab, conceived as an “ideal city” by the architect Le Corbusier, whom he had the opportunity to photograph just a year later in his Paris atelier (1956). There he spent his mornings painting, before going to his famous studio in rue de Sèvres. According to Le Corbusier, painting and architecture were two complementary parts of the same artistic universe, where painting was the workshop in which sculptural forms and basic elements were created. 

Hans Arp
Strasbourg, 1886 – Basel, 1966
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Davos, 1889 – Zurich, 1943
Like Le Corbusier, Hans Arp (who from 1944 onwards began to call himself Jean in reaction to the National Socialist regime) cannot be placed in the Surrealist movement. The metamorphic and biomorphic forms in his work and the concepts of chance and automatism derive from Dada, the movement he helped found in Zurich in 1916 with Sophie Taeuber. While the Dadaist connections soon dissolved, Hans and Sophie married in Pura, in the Canton of Ticino, in 1922, thus formalizing a union that would also spawn four-handed works.

Despite their frequent visits and the close relations that both artists maintained with Switzerland, and especially with Max Bill, Scheidegger did not meet Arp until 1949 at the Maeght gallery in Paris. He subsequently photographed him several times between 1953 and 1958 in his studio in Meudon, which Taeuber had designed. The portrait of the latter, who died prematurely, is one of an absence: in 1958 Scheidegger immortalized her empty studio, left unchanged by Arp.

František Kupka
Opočno, 1871 — Puteaux, 1957
A member of Abstraction Création, like Taeuber-Arp, Arp, Max Bill and Georges Vantongerloo, who had founded the group in 1931 in outright opposition to the Surrealists, František Kupka was one of the pioneers of abstraction. Belonging to a group was, however, an exception for the Bohemian painter: his shy, withdrawn nature clearly emerges in the photographs Scheidegger took in 1955 in his flat in the Parisian suburb of Puteaux, where the artist had spent much of his life marked by severe financial difficulties. 

Fernand Léger
Argentan, 1881 – Gif-sur-Yvette, 1955
Scheidegger met Fernand Léger in Aimé Maeght’s gallery in Paris. The photographer greatly admired him and visited him frequently in the 1950s at his studio in rue Notre Dame des Champs. These were the last years of the painter’s life, marked by fervent activity and a revived political credo. At the core of his canvases, with their bright colours and well-defined outlines, lay his enthusiasm for mechanical progress and his fascination with “the useful, useless, beautiful object”.

Georges Vantongerloo
Antwerp, 1886 – Paris, 1965
Despite their very different approaches to art, Max Bill and Georges Vantongerloo were close friends for many years and shared the desire to forge new developments in the field of abstraction. Indeed, it was at Bill’s Zurich studio that Scheidegger first met Vantongerloo, whom he later often visited in his Parisian atelier, not far from that of Alberto Giacometti, marking the start of a friendship that would continue until the Belgian artist’s sudden death.

Max Bill
Winterthur, 1908 – Berlin, 1994
Trained at the Bauhaus, throughout his life Max Bill strove to promote the ideas of the modern avant-garde in the post-war period, updating and developing them, in the conviction that graphics, design, architecture and art should be practised as one fundamental activity able to improve the present, down to the tiniest detail, even in the design of a simple stool. 
Bill was a fundamental mentor, as well as one of Scheidegger’s first models: his early work already features photographs documenting his teacher’s creative activity at the time. Indeed, it was in the classrooms of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich that the seed of a friendship was sown that would later bear precious fruit for both of them. Their professional paths would continue to intertwine over the years, and Scheidegger’s photographs illustrate some of the important stages in Bill’s artistic career: the installation of the first version of Kontinuität in Zurich (1947), the exhibition Die gute Form in Basel (1949), his teaching in Ulm (1954), up until the work in his studio.
Scheidegger also dedicated one of his most important films to Max Bill (Max Bill, 1995).

Fritz Glarner
Zurich, 1899 – Locarno, 1972
Younger than Mondrian, with whom he cultivated an active and friendly dialogue, but older than the generation of the Swiss Concrete artists, Fritz Glarner met Scheidegger through Georges Vantongerloo. Although he was living in New York at the time, Glarner had maintained a large studio in Paris, where he had spent his formative years in contact with the avant-garde groups. In 1966 he travelled to Zurich especially for the premiere of Scheidegger’s documentary Alberto Giacometti. The painter also spent the last years of his life in Ticino, donating a significant body of works to the Canton, now part of the MASI collections.

Richard Paul Lohse
Zurich, 1902 – Zurich, 1988
Richard Paul Lohse was an artist, graphic designer and illustrator. Together with Max Bill, whose political urgency and interest in music he shared, he was the driving force behind the golden years of Concrete art in Zurich. Indeed, following the adventure of Dada, the Swiss city once again became fertile ground for the avant-garde in the 1930s due to the influence of numerous artists fleeing National Socialism. These were the years of the “Zürcher Konkrete” and the Allianz, Vereinigung moderner Schweizer Künstler, the association founded by Lohse himself in 1937.
In the 1940s, the artist began to embrace concrete art: from 1942, his canvases focused on the horizontal and vertical subdivision of colour fields arranged in a modular and serial manner. The modules consisted of squares or rectangles, arranged according to mathematical rules and compositional principles that find parallels in the tonal techniques of twelve-tone music. From 1947 to 1955, he designed the magazine Bauen und Wohnen, and from 1958, as a co-editor, the Neue Grafik, through which he met Augusto Giacometti, Hans Arp, and Le Corbusier. Lohse participated in documenta 4 (1968) and documenta 7 (1982) in Kassel.

Scheidegger photographed the artist in his studio in 1960, his rational, rigorous works behind him.

Verena Loewensberg
Zurich, 1912 – Zurich, 1986
The poetic soul of Zurich Concrete art, Verena Loewensberg joined the inner circle of the “Zürcher Konkrete”, along with Richard Paul Lohse, Camille Graeser and Max Bill, thanks to the latter whom she met in 1935 in the Parisian entourage of Abstraction Création. Loewensberg was driven by the quest for a pictorial connection between reason and sentiment, a systematic approach and invention. The photograph in the exhibition was taken by Scheidegger in the artist’s studio in Zurich in 1971.

Marino Marini
Pistoia, 1901 – Viareggio, 1980
In 1943 Marino Marini fled Milan, finding refuge in Tenero, in the Canton of Ticino. The artist’s time in Switzerland had a fundamental influence on his work: the forms of his sculptures, initially solid and compact, stiffened into pained, agitated poses, while their surfaces became rough and scratched. His first encounter with Scheidegger, who later photographed him in his Milan studio, dates from this period. In 1959 Scheidegger also published a series of drawings that the artist had given him in a book released by Arche Verlag. 

Henry Moore
Castleford, 1898 – Perry Green, 1986
Drawing was a fundamental part of Henry Moore’s work, constantly supplementing and alternating with his sculpture. Among his best-known sketches, the Shelter Drawings are the result of the nights that the artist spent in various London Underground stations, which were used as bomb shelters during the Second World War. Scheidegger, who photographed Moore in the Wolfensberger printworks in 1965, wanted to publish a book of them but it was never realized. 

Germaine Richier
Grans, 1902 – Montpellier, 1959
The human figure was always at the centre of Germaine Richier’s work, just as it was for her masters Auguste Rodin and Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. Scheidegger first met the French sculptor in Zurich, where she spent the Second World War with her first husband, the sculptor Otto Charles Bänninger. The photographs in the exhibition, taken in Paris in 1953, document the most original period of the artist’s production, in which the animal, human and plant worlds mingle, spawning hybrid beings with constantly metamorphosing bodies and identities.

Eduardo Chillida
San Sebastián, 1924 – San Sebastián, 2002
In 1948 the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida moved to Paris, where he stayed for three years. He thus came into contact with the art dealer Aimé Maeght, becoming the youngest artist represented by his gallery, where Scheidegger saw his works on several occasions. However, the two did not actually meet until 1978, at the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. The resulting photographs reveal the more artisanal side of the artist’s work, focused on respecting the true nature of the material and its specific and symbolic characteristics.

Henri Laurens
Paris, 1885 – Paris, 1954
Scheidegger’s interest in and admiration of Henri Laurens’s sculptures was shared by Alberto Giacometti, who was introduced to Cubism through them upon his arrival in Paris in 1922. However, a few years later the French sculptor began to abandon its rigorous forms in favour of more organic and realistic sculptural ones. It was during this phase that Scheidegger had the opportunity to meet and photograph him in his Paris atelier in 1952, a few years before his death.

1923
Ernst Scheidegger is born on 30 November in Rorschach, in the Canton of St. Gallen.

1940
He begins an apprenticeship as a window decorator at the Jelmoli department store in Zurich.

1943
Stationed in Maloja (in the Canton of the Grisons) for military service, he meets Alberto Giacometti for the first time.

1944
He starts painting; his works will be exhibited in numerous solo shows between 1950 and 1981.

1945
He attends Hans Finsler’s photography class at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich, along with courses taught by Alfred Willimann and Max Bill.

1946
He volunteers to help rebuild the European countries devastated by the war: this gives him the opportunity to travel abroad to Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia.

1948
He starts working as an assistant to his teacher, Max Bill and, at the same time, in the studio of the photographer Werner Bischof, who allows him to use the darkroom to develop his own works as well.

1949
The magazine Schweizer Illustrierte publishes his first photo report on the reform school in Arese, near Milan.
Thanks to Bill, he moves to Paris to work on the design and staging of the touring exhibitions promoted by the Marshall Plan. During that time, his collaboration with the Aimé Maeght gallery and the magazines Cahiers d’Art and XXe Siècle for which he takes his first artist portraits, allows him to forge close ties with the Parisian art scene, particularly to Georges Vantongerloo, Joan Miró, Henri Laurens and Alberto Giacometti.

1952
The Magnum Photos agency hires him as a freelance photojournalist, assigning him photo reports across the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. His photographs are published in Paris Match, Picture Post, Life, Collier’s, Holiday, and Stern.

1953
He starts working as a cameraman and public relations officer for various film productions. Fascinated by the freedom of expression that world appears to offer, he plans to produce several documentaries together with Werner Bischof, and with the support of Robert Capa.

1956
Following the tragic deaths of Werner Bischof and Robert Capa (1954) he leaves photojournalism and accepts the chair of graphic design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, which Max Bill had helped found. He will teach there for two years.

1957
He works on the Horizont series released by the Zurich publisher Arche Verlag, editing books on Joan Miró, Hans Arp, Marino Marini, and Alberto Giacometti.

1958
The Museum of Ulm stages his first solo exhibition as a photographer.

1960
He visits India repeatedly, documenting the birth of Chandigarh, the new capital of the Punjab federal state, designed by Le Corbusier. At the same time, commissioned by the Ford Foundation, he collaborates in establishing the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad.
He succeeds Gotthard Schuh as photo editor of the weekend supplement of the daily newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a position he holds until 1981. Some 200 of his own photo reports will also be published in the supplement.

1962
After designing several books for other publishers, he founds his own publishing house. With this new venture, he releases a book by Jean Genet on Alberto Giacometti and his studio, marking the first literary tribute to Giacometti’s studio. It is accompanied by Scheidegger’s own photographs and drawings expressly made by Giacometti.

1964
He oversees the graphic presentation of the L’art de vivre – Bilden und gestalten section of the Expo 64 in Lausanne.

1966
He completes the first version of his documentary on Alberto Giacometti and manages to present it to him, unfortunately without audio, the day before his death in the cantonal hospital of Chur.

1971
In Zurich, he opens his own art gallery, which will remain active until 1992.

1980
He becomes an independent director for Swiss Television (now SRF), with which he will work until 1984.

1990
He works on a film about Max Bill, which he will only complete a few years later. It is the second film dedicated to his former teacher and mentor, following the 1988 documentary about the installation of his sculpture Kontinuität in Frankfurt.

1992
The Kunsthaus Zürich dedicates a large retrospective to Scheidegger, celebrating all aspects of his production. The photographic section will spawn a touring exhibition that, with the support of Pro Helvetia, will visit France, India, and Pakistan over the following years.

1997
Together with Heiner Spiess, he founds the publishing house Scheidegger & Spiess in Zurich.

2003
Among his numerous accolades, the city of Zurich awards him the Heinrich Wölfflin Medaille for services to art.

2010
The Stiftung Ernst Scheidegger-Archiv is established in Zurich.

2016
He dies in Zurich on February 16.