Walter Clénin

Walter Clénin (born February 19, 1897 in Tschugg and died June 2, 1988 in Ligerz) was a Swiss artist and professor of fine arts.

His work includes paintings, murals, mosaics, lithographs and drawings.

Walter Clénin attended the Bern School of Trades from 1913 to 1914 and the Geneva School of Fine Arts from 1913 to 1915. After the First World War, he traveled to Munich, Vienna, Paris, Italy and Tunisia . In 1921 and 1922, he received a federal art grant. Clénin was a member of the Bernese section of the Society of Swiss Painters, Sculptors and Architects. His closest friends were Jakob Probst and Traugott Senn.

Clénin married Hanuscha, née von Harten, in 1921. She was the daughter of a Russian minister of state who had emigrated to Bern. In 1926, he took part in the Venice Biennale. In 1934, Clénin retired to the ruins of Festi, where a colony of artists around Elsi Giauque and her husband Fernand Giauque had formed in the late 1920s.

Along with Heinrich Altherr, Paul Bodmer, Otto Plattner and Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini, Clénin was one of Switzerland's most active mural painters in the first half of the 20th century. He produced murals for the auditorium of the University of Bern (1934) and for the Swiss pavilion at the Universal Exhibition of 1937 in Paris. This last fresco was built in 1983 after many controversies. Between 1940 and 1947, Clénin also produced murals for schools and for the Federal Museum of Letters. From 1943 to 1953, he produced frescoes for the wellness center of the Bührle machine factory, and eight large frescoes in the large courtroom of the Federal Court of Lausanne.

Clénin lived in Biel from 1945 to 1956 and produced murals for churches and religious buildings in the canton of Bern. In 1956, he was appointed professor of architectural painting and mural painting at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. In 1966 he returned to Switzerland with his second wife, Christina Jolanda Petronella, née van den Ende, and was active in the protection of cultural heritage and the preservation of monuments.

Ligerz conferred honorary citizenship on Clénin in 1977.