Cuno Amiet Swiss artist, sculptor and graphic artist. Date of Birth: 28.03.1868 Country: Switzerland

Biography of Kuno Amiet

Kuno Amiet was a Swiss artist, sculptor, and graphic artist. He was born into a family of a civil servant in the canton of Solothurn, and his father was a state archivist. Amiet started taking painting lessons in 1882. In the autumn of 1886, he went to Munich with the watercolorist Paul Demme and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. Among Amiet's teachers were masters such as Gabriel von Hackl, Karl Raupp, and Nikolaos Gyzis. In 1887, Amiet met the artist Giovanni Giacometti at the Academy, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. In October 1888, both young artists traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Julian Academy, where they studied under Pierre Bonnard, J.-E. Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, and Tony Robert-Fleury. Amiet and Félix Vallotton joined the Nabis group of symbolist painters.

In May 1892, Amiet went to Pont-Aven, a fishing town in Brittany, where Paul Gauguin was living and working at the time. He stayed in the artists' colony there until June 1893. In the same year, Amiet met the prominent Swiss symbolist painter Ferdinand Hodler and visited him in his studio. Both Hodler and Gauguin had a strong influence on Amiet's artistic style. In 1896, while visiting Giacometti in Stampa, Amiet became acquainted with the artist Giovanni Segantini, whose skill had interested him since 1893. In 1898, Hodler, Giacometti, and Amiet organized a joint exhibition at the Zurich Artists' House. In 1904, Amiet, together with Hodler, participated in the Vienna Secession movement. In 1905, a solo exhibition of Amiet's works was held at the Richter Gallery in Dresden.

In 1919, Amiet was awarded an honorary doctorate in arts by the University of Bern. Since 1944, he was an honorary member of the Artists' Union in Solothurn. On the occasion of Amiet's 90th birthday in 1958, his works were exhibited at the Wolfberg Art Salon in Zurich and in a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern. During his lifetime, Amiet was often referred to as the "Swiss Bonnard." Unfortunately, in 1931, 50 of his artworks were destroyed in a fire at the Glass Palace in Munich.