LAUSANNE.- The Fondation de l’Hermitage hosts a particularly unusual collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces from the Petit Palais, Geneva. In the 1950s Oscar Ghez, an industrialist of Tunisian origin, began acquiring works that reflect his remarkably free approach to collecting, with an interest in late-19th and early 20th century painting that was not confined to the great masters. Alongside magnificent works by Édouard Manet and Auguste Renoir, Ghez also acquired superb paintings by artists lesser known at the time, such as Gustave Caillebotte, Charles Angrand, Maximilien Luce and Louis Valtat, some of whom have since become iconic. Ghez also purchased many paintings by women, including Marie Bracquemond, Jeanne Hébuterne, Nathalie Kraemer, Tamara de Lempicka and Suzanne Valadon, long before their work began to be studied and ultimately received the recognition it deserved.

ART OFF THE BEATEN TRACK

A particular feature of the Ghez collection is his early acquisition of works by women painters in numbers that were unusual for the time. In the late 1950s the collector’s anti-conformist approach and belief that these artists not been given their just value led him to purchase works by Marie Bracquemond, Suzanne Valadon, María Blanchard, Nathalie Kraemer, Jeanne Hébuterne, and Tamara de Lempicka, whose work has since gained much greater recognition.

Ghez’s approach to the main currents in figurative painting similarly took him off the beaten track. Alongside the great names of Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, the School of Paris and Cubism, his collection includes highly original works by lesser known artists of the second half of the 20th century. This attention to the periphery of artistic movements led him to the early discovery and collection of Gustave Caillebotte, Charles Angrand and Suzanne Valadon.

THÉOPHILE-ALEXANDRE STEINLEN

Ghez’s enthusiasm for certain painters, whose studio collections he bought, created large groups of works offering a panorama of the artists’ careers. The most iconic of these is Lausanne-based Lausannois Théophile- Alexandre Steinlen, represented at the Petit Palais by nearly 630 paintings, drawings and engravings.

Steinlen moved to Paris in 1881 and became a regular at the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre, for which he created the now-familiar poster La Tournée du Chat Noir (1896). While he made his name with cats, Steinlen was an activist artist interested primarily in social subjects. His drawings, prints and paintings endlessly reflect the hard lives of manual workers, the destitution suffered by sex-workers and vagrants, and the harsh conditions of low and unskilled work in late-19th century Paris. He was also a pacifist and forcefully denounced the horrors and destruction of the First World War.

A LANDMARK EXHIBITION

Ghez’s collection went on display in 1968 at the Petit Palais, a neo-renaissance residence just outside Geneva’s Old Town. But in 2000 the Petit Palais was closed to the public, since when the works have only been seen on loan to temporary exhibitions or when the collection travels outside Switzerland.

For this reason, the exhibition at the Fondation de l’Hermitage will be a landmark event offering a unique opportunity to (re)discover 136 of the Petit Palais masterpieces, arranged according to the major art movements represented, and to experience the breadth and boldness of one of Switzerland’s foremost collections.

OSCAR GHEZ: A VISIONARY COLLECTOR

Oscar Ghez was born in Tunisia in 1905 and died in Geneva in 1998. He worked in the rubber industry, first in Italy, and from 1938 in France, before going into exile in the USA during the Second World War. He began collecting on his return to France in 1945. His passion for figurative painting led him to focus on Impressionism, Neo Impressionism and the French modernist movements of the early 20th century (among them Fauvism, Cubism, the School of Paris School). In the late 1940s he moved to Geneva and, in the mid-1960s, bought a neo-renaissance residence, which he converted into the Petit Palais museum.