Literature

The date was January 1945; the place was Basle. The Second World War was not yet ended when the young artist Marie-Suzanne Feigel opened a gallery on the Aeschengraben. Georg Schmidt, then director of the Basle Art Museum, gave a speech at this opening. The gallery was to be, over the coming decades, an important meeting-point for representatives of the Basle art scene and also a place for the presentation of works by international artists, among whom Hans Arp, Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, El Lissitzky, Marino Marini, Meret Oppenheim, Kurt Schwitters, Victor Vasarely. Some of these prints were also to come to the Graphische Sammlung ETH: Hans Arp, Marino Marini, Walter Bodmer, among others.

On May 6 1958 appeared a piece in the Appenzeller Zeitung saying that a small gallery in Saint-Gall was under new direction and now awakened to a life full of promise. Franz Larese (1927-2000) and Jürg Janett (b. 1927) did not want their gallery to be no more than a cultural centre in eastern Switzerland; their work was to extend well beyond the banks of Lake Constance. One of the first artists to whom they opened up their gallery was Otto Dix, a Dresden artist, one of the chief proponents of New Objectivity, who had lived since 1946 on the Untersee. Franz Larese had trained as a bookseller and had already known considerable success as a publisher before starting work in the gallery. He was later to be the successful salesman in the gallery; Janett, who created books, was equally skilful. The two of them were soon to begin a third activity: the edition of lithographs printed on their own presses. Erich Heckel, co-founder of Die Brücke (The Bridge) art group, exhibited in Saint-Gall, and like Dix allowed himself to be won over to the art of lithography. Serge Poliakoff, Antoni Tàpies, Hans Hartung, Piero Dorazio, Asger Jorn, Eduardo Chillida and others enabled Larese and Janett to come into contact with the contemporary international modernists. Other young artists who were later to join them were Günther Uecker and Günther Förg. All of those mentioned gladly embraced the opportunity offered them in Saint-Gall to draw and paint on stone. And so it was that within the space of 40 years more than 1,000 lithographs, about 30 series of works and almost 100 bibliophilic books, and also special editions of catalogues were to appear. This is without taking into account the many other publications which, year after year, were to appear on booksellers’ shelves. Thanks to the considerable donation made by the Stiftung Franz Larese und Jürg Janett, the printed works by their artists is now well represented in the Graphische Sammlung.