Born in 1893 in Vaulion - a small village at the foot of the Vaud Jura mountains, to which he will always remain deeply attached - Casimir Reymond, already at the age of six, gets up to draw one or two hours before going to school. Trained at the Municipal School of Fine Arts in Geneva, at the age of twenty he presented 180 paintings in a solo exhibition in Lausanne (1913). The writer Gustave Roud predicted a brilliant future for him.
In 1914, he tried his hand at sculpture for the first time by carving his father's head into a boundary marker delimiting his father's field. His ardour and talent did not prevent him from experiencing misery in Paris from 1922 to 1932, during a period of economic crisis.
In 1932, he was appointed professor and then director of the School of Drawing and Applied Art in Lausanne. He then established himself in sculpture, particularly monumental sculpture, thanks to public commissions, in particular the Grape Harvest, in the Denantou Park in Lausanne, and the two allegorical figures of Craftsmanship and Agriculture, at the entrance to the Comptoir Suisse.
Casimir Reymond has always drawn. He considered drawing to be the essential discipline, not so much in its finished form, but as a means of research and experimentation, to materialise a certain essential presence in his paintings as well as in his sculptures, as can be seen in the countless sketches and statuettes kept by the Casimir Reymond Foundation.
This double graphic and sculptural research constitutes the guiding thread of the present exhibition, beyond a random chronology of works that are mostly undated.
The artist died in 1969, shortly after having created, at the request of his family and friends, the Casimir Reymond Foundation, based in his former studio in Lutry.
