Hans Eggimann
New Year 1916
Interesting triptych sheet, probably made by the artist as a New Years card for his friends and clients. The scenes show the passage from the Old to the new year and illustrate the artist's ambivalence about life.
See enlargements of individual texts opposite.
Condition: The sheet is slightly browned with
age
Dimensions: 21 X 11 cm (platemark - as shown in first photo)
28 X 18 cm (full sheet - as shown in last photo below))
Hans Eggimann
Bernese painter,
illustrator, engraver, works of satire and political
commentary. Fantasies and fairy tales. Listed
in the Benezit.
Hans Eggimann
was one of two sons of a Bernese couple who
ran the Restaurant Hotel zur Pfistern near the
Zeitglocken in the center of the Swiss capital.
While his brother Fritz followed in the parents
footsteps in the hotel instustry (he became
a manager of the famous Bellevue Palace Hotel
in Bern, Hans studied music, architecture and
painting at the technical university of Dresden
and later at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Eggimann was a cofounder of the monthly Bernese
newsletter the "Baerenspiegel" to
which he regularly submitted illustrations and
later opened a bureau for art and architecture
on the Montbijoustrasse.
One year later Albert Welti and Wilhelm Balmer
moved to Bern to work on the grand mural for
the Swiss Federal Council chamber. These two
artists and their milieu were to have a profound
impact on Eggimann's work. Welti and Eggimann
became close friends and Eggimann studied engraving
with Welti. Both artists had a fascination with
the fantastic, shown in the central motifs of
their work as well as in the tiny imaginary
creatures that sometimes populate the edges
of their engravings. Jugendstil is also very
evident in his work, particularly his illustrations,
miniatures and ex libris.
But during the late 1920s, the artist began
to suffer depression, and on May 29, 1929 he
committed suicide by throwing himself off Bern's
Kirchenfeld bridge.
More
work by Eggimann
|
And once again the old year stands at heaven's gate, as always there, and glances with its gruesome gaze back on our unhappy world.
Forgive me oh lord, I cannot go on from this place, my beloved year, says St. Peter, just once again, do not forsake it.
God the father makes the world anew, with happiness and joy, and when the new day dawns, you see in its glow the light of hope.
|