LOUIS SOUTTER

Provenance:
- Fondation Le Corbusier collection, Paris, inv. no. 412.
- Swiss private collection.

Literature:
Michael Thévoz: Louis Soutter. Catalogue de l'œuvre, Zurich 1976, vol. II, p. 362, no. 2824 (with ill.).

The present work comes from the last and most important period in Louis Soutter's artistic development. In 1923, at the age of 52, Soutter was admitted to a nursing home. There he began a regular practice of secretly drawing in his notebooks, creating unadulterated, expressive works of faces and figures. From 1937 onwards Louis Soutter suffered from impaired vision and arthritis and he was no longer able to hold the pencil correctly: “Since then, Soutter applies the ink directly with his finger, which he uses like a living brush by shifting the impulse of movement back towards the elbow and thereby increasing the use of physical strength. This coincides with an increasingly limitation to the pure sign, dramatically playing on a contrast of black and white.” (Michel Thévoz, 2016 in: SIKART, Lexicon on Art in Switzerland, Louis Soutter, online version).