Portrait de dame, Circa 1950

Albert Chavaz  

The painter Albert Chavaz, son of Alphonse, baker, and Joséphine, née Perréard (a Frenchwoman from La Balme-de-Sillingy) is the eldest of a family of nine children. He studied at the Collège Saint Joseph de Thonon where, under the leadership of a teacher, he began to take an interest in pictorial art.

He then began an apprenticeship as a baker which he did not complete. Thanks to his mother, he was admitted in 1927 to the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, where he followed the teaching of Fernand Bovy and Philippe Hainard, among others. From the start of his artistic career, he was part of the École des Pâquis, led by Alexandre Cingria and Jean-Louis Gampert. There, he met the Geneva painter Émile Chambon, with whom he remained close throughout his life and with whom he exchanged a very important correspondence. In 1931, he received the Harvey Prize for a portrait of Jeanne Delabays which will be exhibited at the Swiss National Fair of Fine Arts at the Palais des Expositions in Geneva.

Thanks to a scholarship, in 1933, he studied in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He then worked in Valais on the decoration of the church in Fully. This canton therefore becomes the central point of his artistic career. In 1940, in Savièse, he met Julie Luyet, married her and settled in the town. They will have 6 children.

Throughout Switzerland, he produced numerous murals in churches, public and private institutions, as well as in private homes, and also illustrated books. In 1944, he received a prize from the Committee of the Gaspard Vallette Foundation in Geneva, for all of his work.

In 1957, a major retrospective of his work was organized at the Musée de la Majorie in Sion. Then, 10 years later, the Museum of Art and History of Friborg organized an exhibition on the occasion of its 60th anniversary.

He lost his wife in 1977. A major retrospective of his work was organized at the Gianadda Foundation in Martigny and at the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Sion, in 1983. For his 80th birthday, he was made an honorary bourgeois of the town of Savièse. On January 17, 1990, Chavaz died in Sion hospital, he rests with his wife in Savièse.

Albert Chavaz belongs, with Raphaël Ritz, Édouard Vallet, Ernest Biéler and others, to what is called, the School of Savièse.