Maison de la Commune Savièse, Espace d'exposition de la collection communale, Rue de St-Germain 50, 1965 Savièse
Alfred Rehfous returned to Switzerland a year later and, in the spring of 1890, discovered the Valais region. There, he stayed in Savièse with painter friends such as Ernest Biéler (1863-1948), Henry van Muyden (1860-1936), John-Pierre Simonet (1860-1915) and Otto Vautier (1863-1919).
Alfred Rehfous' proximity to these figures links him to the Ecole de Savièse, a term commonly used to designate the twenty or so artists who, in the wake of Biéler, succeeded one another in the Valais between 1880 and around 1930. In Savièse and elsewhere, these artists, busy depicting customs and traditions, rural life and the regional Alpine environment, fostered the development of an idyllic image of a canton perceived as a veritable lost paradise.
While his acolytes strove to depict the locals, exploiting stereotypical motifs such as traditional village dress, Alfred Rehfous differentiated himself by focusing almost exclusively on the landscape. Far from the rural genre scenes found in the work of the majority of other artists belonging to the singular Ecole de Savièse phenomenon, Rehfous paints, not without great attention to topography, peaks, moraines, alpine pastures and rock faces, all constituent elements of the mountain landscapes specific to the canton of Valais. From the Lower Valais to the Saas Valley, the exhibition focuses on a selection of landscapes painted by Alfred Rehfous during his Valais period, and questions the nature of the peaks represented, between manifestos of alpine painting and hieratic elements of a universal mountain setting.
Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.
Alfred Rehfous' proximity to these figures links him to the Ecole de Savièse, a term commonly used to designate the twenty or so artists who, in the wake of Biéler, succeeded one another in the Valais between 1880 and around 1930. In Savièse and elsewhere, these artists, busy depicting customs and traditions, rural life and the regional Alpine environment, fostered the development of an idyllic image of a canton perceived as a veritable lost paradise.
While his acolytes strove to depict the locals, exploiting stereotypical motifs such as traditional village dress, Alfred Rehfous differentiated himself by focusing almost exclusively on the landscape. Far from the rural genre scenes found in the work of the majority of other artists belonging to the singular Ecole de Savièse phenomenon, Rehfous paints, not without great attention to topography, peaks, moraines, alpine pastures and rock faces, all constituent elements of the mountain landscapes specific to the canton of Valais. From the Lower Valais to the Saas Valley, the exhibition focuses on a selection of landscapes painted by Alfred Rehfous during his Valais period, and questions the nature of the peaks represented, between manifestos of alpine painting and hieratic elements of a universal mountain setting.
Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.