1950-2025. Peter Stämpfli before Peter Stämpfli

Peter Stämpfli, a young Swiss man of 26, became known in 1963 at the 3rd Paris Biennale. It was the birth of Peter Stämpfli, the artist. Thirteen years earlier, in 1950, Peter Stämpfli, a 13-year-old boy who dreamed of becoming an artist, put into practice, with gouache, the teachings he had received and his own intuitions, reproducing works by great masters of Impressionism: Sisley, Monet, Cézanne, Maurice Utrillo, among others. In these youthful exercises, his concern for positioning the lines of force and the nuclei of colour that effectively structure the composition stands out.

A selection of these works is exhibited in this room. One of these cardboards took on a new life. On 15 April 2019, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris was destroyed by a fire. For the publication of a book, Éditions Jannink invited the artists of Paris to offer a personal vision of the reconstruction of the Viollet-le-Duc spire and the destroyed roof. Peter Stämpfli reconstructed them with a collage on the gouache he had painted in 1950, inserting a fragment of tyre.