Aimé Barraud

Aimé Barraud, born in La Chaux-de-Fonds on March 14, 1902 and died in Neuchâtel on February 14, 1954, is a Swiss painter representing the New Objectivity.

The painting of the Barraud brothers is a vast subject, commensurate with the scale of their production, the interest it continues to arouse, an interest which even seems to grow, also at the height of the uniqueness, thereby a little enigmatic, of the relationship between four brothers who are almost equally gifted. Charles, François, Aimé and Aurèle were born between 1897 and 1903 in La Chaux-de-Fonds; the family will have seven children. The father was an engraver, a profession acquired from his own father in the watchmaking city.

In the siblings, François is considered as the master, the factor of emulation. Suffering from tuberculosis, he was the first to disappear in 1934 (he was born in 1899). Aurèle and Aimé, close and linked like twins, are indeed, stylistically, the least dissociable. Finally, Charles, the eldest, the one who will live the longest (he died in 1997 at the age of 100), will lead a somewhat more lonely career, and his painting gives more signs of a liberation from touch. But on the whole, and this exhibition common to the four painters is striking in this regard, the Barraud brothers are, more or less, the same in the choice of their subjects, among which the human figure occupies a central place, in the mastery of means, in the committed nature of their art, which testifies to social injustice and poverty.

All four experienced this misery: when they followed evening classes at the Art School of La Chaux-de-Fonds, where Charles L'Eplattenier and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret taught in particular, they worked during the day as masons. or stone breakers, activities they pursued in the following years to earn a living and that of their family. Interested in primitive art, also influenced by Dutch painting, the Barraud brothers produced realistic paintings, tinged with melancholy and a certain strangeness, like the German painters of the Neue Sachlichtkeit or New Objectivity.

In Geneva, Galerie Moos will sign a contract with them, undoubtedly providing them with support, subjecting them to demands as well. During the Geneva exhibitions, for example at the time of the homage to François just deceased, some will criticize a meticulous technique, "wood with icy veins, extinct metals, leaden flesh". Good description of the painting of François Barraud and his brothers, but it lacks an allusion to the evocative accuracy of the situations, to the intelligence of the constructions and especially to the contained emotion which emanates from the paintings. Paintings that feature familiar and family models, starting with the painters' wives and… the brothers.