Walter Rudolf Mumprecht (1918-2019) - E de primo mattino

Walter Rudolf MUMPRECHT (1918-2019)

Dawn at Primo Mattino, Circa 1980

Watercolor on paper, hand-signed.

Sheet size: 65.5 × 50 cm - 25.79 × 19.69 in

Generally good condition, mounted on cardboard, with signs of tears along the edges, having undergone restoration.

“Drawing while writing, writing while drawing”: this is how Rudolf Mumprecht once described the program of his art, with which he traces associations of ideas between the word and the image in drawings, engravings and other etchings.

At the beginning of the 1950s, he lived for several years in Paris, attended the courses of the semiologist Roland Barthes at the Sorbonne, temporarily returned to Switzerland, then settled in Versailles from 1961 to 1964.

Mumprecht came to art as a self-taught artist. Inspired by Ferdinand Hodler’s early work, he began with figurative painting, then turned to gestural abstraction in the late 1950s. He developed a nearly calligraphic style. After returning from France, he settled in Köniz near Bern in 1965.

In 1968 he created Le Miroir, the oldest work by Mumprecht in the Mobilière collection. Das trojanische Pferd (The Trojan Horse), Le roi de l’échiquier (The King of the Chessboard), La pendule heureuse (The Happy Clock), La girouette (The Weather Vane) and Le grand jongleur (The Great Juggler) are other (undated) works from the same period. Their common feature: the playful and virtuosic interpenetration of the signifier and the signified in the space of the image.

The word becomes a motif without losing its meaning. It is no accident that Mumprecht turns to writing as a visual medium. In impetuous writing paintings, often bilingual, such as sichtbar sichtwahr (1979) or Rendre prendre comprendre (1979), where long rows of letters dance between aphorisms and Dadaist poetry, he hints at how the act of writing has become for him an important act— the literary act to compose words, the artisanal act to engrave words.

With his passion for experimentation and his subtle humor, the painter of language Rudolf Mumprecht occupies an independent artistic position in the history of Swiss art."