Niklaus Stoecklin
He is regarded as a Swiss exponent of New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) and Magic Realism, and at least with his early works numbers among their international co-founders.
At the outbreak of war, Stoecklin returned to Switzerland and took courses at Basel School of Arts and Crafts, where his teachers included Burkhard Mangold.
In 1918 Stoecklin, was one of the founding members, alongside Zschokke, Fritz Baumann and Otto Morach, of the artist group Das Neue Leben.
[citation needed] Niklaus Stoecklin was the only Swiss artist to be included in the seminal exhibition Neue Sachlichkeit.
The artist paid regular visits to Paris, Venice, the village of Vairano in Ticino, where he owned a house, and the Engadine.
[citation needed] At his father’s wish, Stoecklin began an apprenticeship as a house painter, but was soon granted permission to abandon this and train as an artist instead.
From 1920 onwards Stoecklin would concentrate on that modern variant of realism which had first manifested itself in some works of 1916, and whose dispassionate style of representation would later be subsumed under the heading New Objectivity.
Stoecklin’s preferred variant of New Objectivity was Magic Realism, whereas the parallel strand of Verism with its provocative social critique is very much a rarity in his work.
[citation needed] Stoecklin’s New Objectivity paintings combine modernist influences with those of Italian and Nordic Gothic.
His “post-Expressionist” art bears all the stylistic hallmarks of the New Objectivity: graphic clarity, airless space, a radiant palette and a meticulous attention to detail, even to the point of illusionistic trompe-l’œil.
The emphatic frontality and tactile quality of his almost creaturely motifs also inform his posters of the 1920s to the 1940s, in which the clarity and proximity of the advertised product make us want to reach out and grab it.
His masterpiece Casa Rossa (1917) was reproduced in a 1918 edition of the German art magazine Das Kunstblatt, and two years later he took part in his first major exhibition, alongside Giovanni Giacometti and Albert Müller, at Kunsthalle Basel, which in 1928 would dedicate a whole show to his work.
Stoecklin’s works were winning admiration in Germany even before his invitation to the Mannheim Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition of 1925, and in 1918 he had taken part in a group show of the Freie Secession in Berlin.
The 1920s saw him included in ever more group shows in Germany, meaning that his paintings could be seen not just in Mannheim, but also in Karlsruhe, Dresden, Chemnitz, Hannover and Hamburg.
After the war, a solo presentation at the Overbeck-Gesellschaft in Lübeck in 1959 sought to pick up the thread, though the hoped-for international rediscovery failed to materialize.
It was not until the 1970s reappraisal of New Objectivity that Stoecklin was accorded Europe-wide recognition as one of the great pioneers of the style, leading to his inclusion in exhibitions in Milan, Mannheim, Vienna and Berlin.
Whereas his reputation as a painter and leading exponent of New Objectivity is confined largely to Europe, as a poster designer he now enjoys worldwide acclaim.
From 1928 until his death the artist lived in Riehen, where his friends included the painter Jean Jacques Lüscher and his family.
Museum Oskar Reinhart Winterthur / Musée des beaux-arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, Scheidegger & Spiess, Zürich 2018, ISBN 978-3-85881-572-9.
Kunstmuseum Winterthur / Städtische Museen Freiburg, Museum für Neue Kunst, Wiese Verlag, Basel 1996, ISBN 3-906664-13-9.
