Peter Birkhäuser (7 June 1911 – 22 November 1976) was a
Swiss
Swiss most commonly refers to:
* the adjectival form of Switzerland
* Swiss people
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* Swiss, Missouri
* Swiss, North Carolina
* Swiss, West Virginia
* Swiss, Wisconsin
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poster artist,
portrait
A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face is always predominant. In arts, a portrait may be represented as half body and even full body. If the subject in full body better r ...
ist, and
visionary painter
Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...
, noted for his paintings illustrating imagery from dreams in the context of
analytical psychology
Analytical psychology (, sometimes translated as analytic psychology; also Jungian analysis) is a term referring to the psychological practices of Carl Jung. It was designed to distinguish it from Freud's psychoanalytic theories as their ...
.
Life and work
The son of an
oculist, Birkhäuser was born and raised in
Basel
Basel ( ; ), also known as Basle ( ), ; ; ; . is a city in northwestern Switzerland on the river Rhine (at the transition from the High Rhine, High to the Upper Rhine). Basel is Switzerland's List of cities in Switzerland, third-most-populo ...
. His mother died early and he was brought up by his father in a
rationalistic,
agnostic environment. He wanted to be a painter from an early age, and left grammar school to study at an art school under Basel artist
Niklaus Stoecklin.
In his early career as an artist, he produced still-life and landscape paintings, ex libris plates, stamps, cartoons for the satirical magazine ''
Nebelspalter'', posters, and portraits. He met his future wife Sibylle Oeri in the early 30s, and they married in 1939.
One evening, while working in his studio, he was struck by the image of a moth fluttering against the window. He painted this image in 1944, and later interpreted it as symbolic of his own state of mind: the moth, representing his soul, was struggling against the glass to reach the light, representing consciousness. This image precipitated a crisis in his career, resulting in a period of stagnation and depression.
During this period, he encountered works of
C.G. Jung, and began to analyze his dreams. He and his wife entered Jungian analysis with
Marie-Louise von Franz. Over the next 35 years, he collected and worked on over 3,400 of his dreams, discussing them with von Franz and corresponding with Jung himself.
As he interpreted them, his dreams often reflected images of himself as stultified by artistic tradition, and urged him to break with his previous stylistic constraints. In 1956, he achieved an artistic breakthrough with his painting ''The World's Wound'', the first of a long series of works painted directly from unconscious dream images.
His new works were not well received by the Swiss art community, and it took several years before they would achieve sufficient recognition to provide Birkhäuser and his wife with a satisfactory income. Most of the initial support for his new work came from a younger audience, largely based in the U.S.
In 1971, his wife of 32 years died, and he developed a serious lung complaint. Nevertheless, he produced a number of his most significant paintings in the last five years of his life.
Birkhäuser died in
Binningen in 1976.
In 1980, a selection of his later works was published in the book ''Light from the Darkness: The Paintings of Peter Birkhäuser'', edited and introduced by his daughter and son, Eva Wertanschlag and Kaspar Birkhäuser, with commentary on the paintings by Marie-Louise von Franz. In addition to his paintings, the book also includes a 1970 lecture by Birkhäuser titled "Analytical Psychology and the Problems of Art."
Quotes
References
External links
Stiftung Peter und Sibylle Birkhäuser-Oerisite in German with biography and small gallery
*
ttps://web.archive.org/web/20071114050442/http://www.wie.org/j17/hollis.asp An interview with James Hollis on Carl Jung, with a brief discussion of Birkhäuser and his workPeter Birkhäuser Gallery at Jung Page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Birkhauser, Peter
1911 births
1976 deaths
20th-century Swiss painters
20th-century Swiss male artists
Swiss male painters
Fantastic art