Snowy Landscape
Cuno Amiet
CUNO AMIET, 1904. OIL ON CANVAS.
A monumental canvas of more than four square metres has the majority of its bulk dedicated to the infinitesimal small variations of white on a snowy day. The figure, a long skier who traverses the length of the artwork in a desperate attempt to reach its end, is comically small with the bulk of colour behind dwarfing him. The work is deeply unusual, all the more so for the fact it was painted at the turn of the century. The modern viewer, after a near century of artists such as Rauschenberg, Malevich, Ryman and others creating all white canvases, may be used to the starkness of this work, but Amiet predates even the earliest of these by some fifteen years. The work is presented as a landscape, but it becomes about the insignificance of man in the face of nature, the perseverance of the human spirit and, perhaps most simply, of the effect of colour. Amiet never achieved major success in his life, and has remained undeservedly unknown today. His work was, perhaps, so ahead of his time, so singular that he was destined to remain of the fringe of a world he anticipated before so many others.