Gottfried HONEGGER

Gottfried Honegger: Biography, Screenprints and Original Prints of Concrete Art

Gottfried Honegger (born in Zurich on 12 June 1917, died there on 17 January 2016) was a Swiss graphic designer turned painter, sculptor and printmaker, and one of the most consistent voices of European Concrete art. For almost six decades he worked with a deliberately limited vocabulary – the circle, the square, the series and chance – in cardboard tableaux-reliefs, lacquered metal sculpture, computer-generated drawings and a body of original prints, the majority of them screenprints. He was also a collector, a writer and an educator, and co-founded the Espace de l’Art Concret at Mouans-Sartoux in the south of France.

Le Coin des Arts follows Honegger’s work closely and currently offers one original print, Untitled, dated 1997, chosen, like every sheet we handle, for the quality of its printing, its edition details, its provenance and its condition. Further prints are added as they become available; to be told when one arrives, simply “follow the artist” on our Gottfried Honegger page.

A designer of the Swiss school (1917–1957)

Largely self-taught, Honegger attended the preparatory class of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich and trained as a window dresser before working as a decorator, graphic designer and exhibition organiser. In the late 1930s he opened a studio for graphic art, illustration and photography in Zurich with Warja Lavater, who became his wife; the pair saw advertising as a form of social art. British readers will find him in Richard Hollis’s standard history, Swiss Graphic Design (2006), which places him within the generation that shaped the international Swiss style; he is also recorded as art director of the Basel chemical company Geigy in the mid-1950s. A first stay in Paris in 1939 produced landscapes and Cubist-inflected portraits, but the war sent him home. He returned to painting in 1949, close to the Zurich Concretists Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse and Camille Graeser; experiments in a lithographic workshop in 1948–49 led to his first collage-monotypes. Figurative references disappeared altogether in 1956–57, and in 1957 he made the first tableaux-reliefs: small pieces of cut card glued to canvas and covered in layers of monochrome paint, their relief revealed only by raking light.

New York and the decision to paint (1958–1960)

In 1958 Honegger left for New York, where he stayed for two years and met Sam Francis, Al Held, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. The encounter with Abstract Expressionism persuaded him to give up design and devote himself entirely to his own work. In 1960 the Martha Jackson Gallery showed his red monochromes punctuated by fine geometric elements – early forms of the tableaux-reliefs – and the Museum of Modern Art received his collage painting Henceforth (1959).

Paris: series, sculpture and the computer (1960–1989)

Settling in Paris in 1960, Honegger joined the circles of geometric abstraction around Aurelie Nemours, Marcelle Cahn and Sonia Delaunay. He worked in long series: the Tableaux-reliefs; from 1964 the Biseautages, a name coined by the critic Michel Seuphor, in which incised card catches the light; then Volume and Structure, which from 1970 took to monumental scale the lacquered sheet-metal sculpture he had begun in 1961. Around 1970 he was among the first artists in France to use a computer, producing programmed drawings; dice and random systems now decided where forms would fall. The Musée national d’art moderne bought his three-metre Tableau-relief P 757 A (1975–76) in 1983, and the 1980s brought polyptychs and shaped stretchers.

Honegger as a printmaker

Printmaking was a natural extension of the designer’s craft: standardised forms, flat colour, the logic of the multiple. Screenprinting dominates, with immaculate fields of colour in which circles, squares, angles and curves interlock as they do in the paintings. He also made etchings – an Untitled etching of 1968 belongs to the University of Michigan Museum of Art – and mixed processes such as the embossed monotype, which brings the relief of the paintings onto paper. One of his publishers was the Atelier Éditions Fanal, whose archive of prints (1965–2023) entered the Swiss National Library in 2022. It includes Angle vert, courbe bleue (2014), a three-colour screenprint in an edition of 21, and the 3 empreintes suite (1999), embossed monotypes in an edition of 21 plus artist’s proofs. Many sheets are untitled, and the descriptive titles found in catalogues are often assigned ones. As far as we are aware, no catalogue raisonné of the prints has been published, so identification depends on date, sheet size, colours, edition and publisher. For the basics, see what is an original print, the printing and the signature.

Mouans-Sartoux and a collection given to France (1990–2016)

In 1990, with his partner Sybil Albers-Barrier and the mayor André Aschieri, Honegger founded the Espace de l’Art Concret in the château of Mouans-Sartoux, near Grasse, a place conceived as much for teaching as for display; in 1993 he designed the Viseur, a device to help children look actively. In 2000 the couple gave their collection – more than 500 works – to the French state as the Donation Albers-Honegger, housed from 26 June 2004 in a building by Gigon/Guyer. The Fondation Cartier in Paris showed Métamorphose (2 April – 30 May 1999), with over eighty paintings and sculptures staged by Jean Nouvel, and from 24 June to 14 September 2015 the Centre Pompidou mounted a retrospective curated by Christian Briend, ending with the white cut-out cylinders of the Pliages. Honegger died at home in Zurich aged 98, a week before the opening of alpha oméga at Mouans-Sartoux; in Zurich he had been a founding member of the foundation behind today’s Haus Konstruktiv.

Collecting Gottfried Honegger prints: a buyer’s guide

Edition and numbering. Editions are usually small. The pencil numbering (9/21, for example) and any artist’s proofs – marked E.A., sometimes numbered in Roman numerals – should tally with the edition recorded by the publisher.

Signature. A hand signature in pencil, often with the date, is what you are looking for; an unsigned impression needs documentation from the publisher.

Paper and margins. Flat screenprinted colour shows every scuff, fold and trace of light damage. Check for full margins, no toning and fresh colour, particularly in the whites and reds.

Catalogue raisonné. With no standard reference, ask for the publisher, year, exact technique and sheet dimensions, which allow comparison with public holdings such as the Swiss National Library’s.

Condition and provenance. Provenance from the studio, the publisher or an early collection is a plus. Embossing must be crisp, not flattened by tight framing.

Pitfalls. Exhibition posters (Centre Pompidou, Espace de l’Art Concret, dealers’ shows) are offset reproductions, and the posters and advertising of his design years belong to graphic design rather than to original printmaking. See our pages on authenticity and framing.

We select Honegger’s prints with the same care as those of other masters of geometric abstraction: Josef Albers, Max Bill, Auguste Herbin, Victor Vasarely and Jean Gorin. Browse contemporary art and our engravings and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Richard Hollis, Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920–1965, Yale University Press, 2006 · Centre Pompidou – Gottfried Honegger, 2015 · Espace de l’Art Concret – Gottfried Honegger · Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich · Swiss National Library – Atelier Éditions Fanal archive · University of Michigan Museum of Art – Untitled, 1968 · Fondation Cartier – Métamorphose, 1999