[1] After an apprenticeship as a bookbinder with his father and courses in painting and drawing at the Basel Gewerbeschule (vocational school) he worked for local sculptor Carl Gutknecht (1878–1970), before he went to the Académie Julian in Paris in 1910.

[2] But he soon became an independent artist there and formed lifelong friendships with the writer Blaise Cendrars[3] and the English painter Frank Budgen, who worked as a model for him.

During the World War I Suter worked in Basel and Zurich, where he, his brother Paul and Frank Budgen got to know the exiled Irish writer James Joyce.

His work in that field was sensitive, forthright and masculine, occasionally leaning towards the baroque, yet always saved by a sense of measure from falling into expressionist caricature.

"[10] Suters most famous sculpture is the memorial “Prometheus and the Soul” for the Swiss Nobel Prize poet Carl Spitteler at Liestal near Basel, which he worked on from 1926 to 1931.