Raphael Ritz: Fabrique d'un Valais exotique - Hardcover

Edited By Céline Eidenbenz

 
9783039420339: Raphael Ritz: Fabrique d'un Valais exotique
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 303942033X ISBN 13: 9783039420339
Publisher: Scheidegger &Spiess, 2022

Synopsis

  • First new monograph in decades on Swiss genre painter Raphael Ritz (1829–94), who became famous as the “Raphael of the Alps”
  • Explores Ritz’s work in the context of nineteenth-century European art
  • Text in French and German


Raphael Ritz (1829–1894) is one of the most important artists to have emerged from the Swiss canton of Valais. In the 1850s, Ritz, who later became famous as the “Raphael of the Alps,” studied at the renowned Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Germany, and perfected his technique in the genre of mountain painting, which focuses on the relationship between landscape and man. Ritz, who felt a strong connection to his roots, created landscape idylls in faraway Düsseldorf for an audience that appreciated regional peculiarities. At times with a touch of irony, he put his works at the service of a modern effort to illustrate the timeless character of everyday life.

This new monograph looks at the work of the Valais-born artist beyond national borders and frames it in both the Swiss and international artistic contexts of the time. Ritz’s correspondence with his father, Lorenz Justin Ritz, who was a painter as well, is also comprehensively examined for the first time: it constitutes an important testimony to his artistic self-discovery. Selected photographs by Swiss contemporary artists from the museum’s collection show the Valais of today and establish a connection between Ritz’s ethnographic view of his own origins and the present.

Text in French and German.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

Celine Eidenbenz is director of the Musee d'art du Valais in Sion, Switzerland. She has been curator of the Salon Suisse at the 2019 Biennale Art in Venice.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
Scheidegger &Spiess
Publication date
2022
Language
French
ISBN 10 
303942033X
ISBN 13 
9783039420339
Binding
Hardcover
Number of pages
216