Marguerite Burnat-Provins
To mark the publication of a major critical monograph edited by Anne Murray-Robertson (2019), the Jenisch Vevey Museum (Switzerland) is teaming up with the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Arras and the Musée d’art du Valais to stage an exhibition devoted to Marguerite Burnat-Provins, a versatile and visionary artist who enjoyed a remarkable career.
Born in Arras and trained in Paris, she lived in Vevey and La Tour-de-Peilz between 1896 and 1907, and fell in love with the Valais region. She worked tirelessly and with great skill in a wide range of artistic fields, from drawing and painting to writing and the decorative arts. Her life, like her work, is striking in its modernity: an accomplished artist, a speaker and journalist, lover, campaigner, teacher of art and even shopkeeper, Marguerite Burnat-Provins defies any attempt at categorisation. This presentation reflects her multifaceted personality.
A display of works by Sandrine Pelletier and Christine Sefolosha complements the exhibition.
Marguerite Burnat-Provins was born into a wealthy and cultured family. Encouraged by her father, she became involved in writing and painting from an early age and received artistic training in Paris. Married to a Swiss architect, she painted and wrote, but divorced in 1906 to marry a young engineer. The couple was living in Bayonne when the First World War broke out. Already in fragile health, the war caused her such a shock that it led her to create a series of unprecedented pictorial works entitled My City (“Ma ville”). Marguerite drew and painted as if taking dictation, while suffering from hallucinations. “I undergo them, I feel them coming by hunching my shoulders, and I cannot help[…]