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Hans Erni, age 100, in front of earlier self-portrait

Lucerne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Articulate, still handsome, far more interested in debating the state of the world than in basking in the recognition that has at last come to him: this is Hans Erni at the ripe age of 100. Visitors tend to walk up to him, awestruck by his age, and walk away from him having forgotten his age because he gives them too many other things to think about.

A career spanning 80 years, the globe – with peace an enduring theme

Erni is one of Switzerland’s finest 20th (and 21st) century artists, but he has only relatively recently been acknowledged as fully as he deserves. His career, spanning nearly 80 years, was celebrated in February with a major retrospective in Martigny at the Gianadda Foundation. The Kunstmuseum in Lucerne 24 May opened the first public museum showing of his work since 1979 with a collection that traces the development of the artist.

Erni was honoured in Geneva Saturday 6 June:  his most recent project, a 60-metre peace fresco at the entrance to the United Nations building, the Palais des Nations, was unveiled at an outdoor ceremony open to the public. The year 2009 is a series of such events, throughout Switzerland – and Erni finds the energy to travel and participate in several of them.

Politics took their toll

It is not that Erni is an unknown artist: quite the opposite. He has a large popular following, his work is housed in the Hans Erni museum in Lucerne (an extension of the country’s most popular museum, the Transportation Museum) since 1979, and for decades he has been the guest of governments around the world.

The Swiss PTT asked him to design collectors’ stamps. International organizations, including the World Health Organization, Unesco and the ICRC (Red Cross) have hired him to produce work that reflects their commitment to a better world. His paintings and sculptures radiate his love of travel and his fondness for exploring the theme of peace on a global scale. His work has been shown and exhibits organized in major art museums in other countries.

But he was shunned for many years because of his political views, by the establishment in Switzerland and in his hometown of Lucerne, making it difficult for a long time to earn money and to gain acceptance as a major European artist.

His wife recalls the years when old schoolfriends would walk past them without even nodding. In 1932 he was a member of a group of artists who brought the abstract movement to Switzerland.

He was also becoming interested in Marxism and by 1939 he had provoked the ire of officialdom with a 5 metre x 100 metre mural called “Switzerland, holiday country of the nations” for the Swiss National Exhibition, that was too politically to the left for conservative pre-war Switzerland. The mural is part of the Kiunstmuseum show.

The young artist at age 85

I met Hans Erni for the first time 15 years ago when I interviewed him for an American magazine about the extraordinary and huge mural, Panta Rhei, that bends around the curved wall of the auditorium in his museum in Lucerne, a history of philosophy and technology.

The fine draftsmanship and the rich colours are almost easy to overlook because of the complexity of the subject matter. I remember being struck by the doves that are his signature and the precision of his lines, no matter what the subject or style. He trained as a young man with a geometrist and worked as a draftsman, drawing buildings: that mastery of the mechanical underpinnings of his art has never left him.

I was surprised then by his youthful energy, marveling that a man of 85 could be so engaged in his work. My father, also born in 1909, had just died – lucid to the end, an engineer who painted as an amateur in retirement but whose health faded in his final months. I would have loved to have shown him Erni’s work, I thought sadly.

Sixty years of family life

I met Erni again a month ago, in May 2009, this time with his wife Doris. He had just been named the Swiss Personality of the Year, an award given by the Swiss Foreign Press Association. I expected a brief appearance by a feeble old man, thinking that if we were lucky he might say a few words. Instead, his energy outlasted that of most of the small group of  journalists present.

Doris – his wife of 60 years and long his business manager – gave me a magical tour of the new retrospective show in the Hans Erni museum. The artist, who remained seated while we viewed his art, occasionally added a comment or correction from a distance, but he defers regularly to Doris for details about his artwork.

“She remembers everything about all of my work!” he laughs fondly. “Don’t ask me who I was with or where I was – I don’t bother to remember.”

Asked how many pieces of art he has produced during his long and prolific career she answers that they simply don’t know. “Today it would be easy, with digital cameras to record everything. But back in those early days, we didn’t have money for a camera, for film to record things.”

There was a long stretch of difficult years, with family tragedies, with too little money.

The two celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary in late April 2009. It was a quiet fete at home, without the crowds that have been part of this busy year for the couple. Erni is fluent in his native German, the French he perfected during several years in Paris and the English he and his wife used in the early days of their romance. “It was the language of love for us,” he laughs, looking at Doris fondly. She has been talking to the journalists mainly in English, occasionally searching for a word. “Oh Hans,” she turns to him with mild dismay, “I’m forgetting my English!” He teases her gently about it.

She was still a Lucerne schoolgirl who spoke English with her British mother and German with her Swiss father, when the two met. Erni was twice her age. He had already been married and his first wife, an artist in her own right who had attended art school with him, died after a horse-riding accident. They had a young daughter. Doris became a second mother to the girl and quickly had two girls of her own but the joy of the young family was cut short when daughter June died at age eight of leukemia.

“It is still painful,” Doris says in a soft voice, looking at a beautiful painting of the children, part of a magnificent collection of sketches and paintings of Erni’s family that are currently on display at the Hans Erni Museum.

One of the most evocative in the collection is a portrait of his father, who was a mechanic on the Lake of the Four Cantons steamboats. Nearby is an elegant glass engraved bowl made by his first wife.

We talk about their other two children, two boys who were born several years after June died. One of them suffered oxygen deprivation at birth and he’s never been completely independent. But Doris lights up again, telling me that two years ago, in his fourth decade, he learned to take the train home alone from Neuchatel to Lucerne for weekends. “We were so proud of him!” Today the children remain close by and their parents see them often.

Ethnography and art: recording the human, social experience

A peaceful family scene, notes Doris Erni, "but look at the start white line" on the wall, a reminder that the war is not far in the distance (detail from an Italian painting, 1950s)

We leave the family corner and walk past paintings that show his love of sports in art, then visit an extraordinary collection of paintings from North Africa that Hans Erni did as part of a project for his close friend Jean Gabus, then curator at the Neuchatel Museum of Ethnography.

The two worked together for more than 10 years. Erni was asked to record daily life, the objects of tribal life. Today these paintings are not only beautiful but a precious record of a world that has disappeared.

The work he did in the early 1980s in China, when he was a month-long guest of the Chinese government, show a world that was also rapidly disappearing – young boys fishing or herding ducks, working men in string vests and Mao caps.

I’m enchanted by these, for they correspond to my photographs and memories of China, which I crossed on a bicycle in 1985, just months after his visit. Erni smiles warmly when I tell him that I remember it exactly this way.

“That was a wonderful trip, an amazing country,” Doris says, and he agrees.

The journalists have time for a few last questions. Erni has already told us, with a certain edge to his voice, that while he was interested in communism he was “never, never” a member of any political party. Now we want to know something more personal. Is it true that they swim every day – for an hour? The answer is yes, every evening unless they have an event to attend. No, he doesn’t swim in the lake, but in a pool.

I turn to Doris and remark that he is still walking well, that his hand as he signs autograph after autograph for the journalists is remarkably steady, that for someone of 100 he doesn’t appear to be fading much at all.

“Oh, but you know I have to keep after him to walk, he complains that he doesn’t like to,” she tut-tuts.

She laughs, though, when she recalls that Léonard Gianadda, after a show of Erni’s work in 1999 that followed one in 1989, said “See you in 10 years!” but that at the end of the March 2009 show in Martigny he didn’t say it again.

“After an evening like this, where he’s talked so much, with so many people,” he will be completely exhausted, and Doris looks at him with mild concern.

I think to myself that this is not a sign of old age, but of human nature, and Hans Erni’s art has succeeded because he is so very human, in the best, warmest sense.

Related:

• “100 year old Swiss artist unveils mural at UN,” AP, 6 June 2009
• UNOG web site, biographical details for presentation on his work with the UN, 2002

Profile by GL editor Ellen Wallace