Swiss Sunlight

For all its businesslike calm. Switzerland has produced a few passionate painters, and possibly two with an important place in art history. The first was the sophisticated fantasist Paul Klee, who died in 1946. His art had all the delicacy and sparkle of a Swiss watch. The second great Swiss painter may well be Max Gubler, 54, a sober, square-faced man with straggly grey hair and intense grey eyes. His art is sunny and nourishing as Swiss cheese. Last week the Zurich Art Museum was staging a retrospective show of 136 Gubler canvases dating all the way back to 1917.

Considering the length of his career and the size of his accomplishment. Gubler is amazingly obscure. He has gone hungry in Italy and France as well as in Zurich, and hardly anyone outside Switzerland ever heard of him until he won a top prize in last summer's Biennale at Venice (TIME, July 28).

Critics were agreed on Gubler's genius. Said one: "The daring of a Picasso and the colors of a Bonnard." Said a German critic: "Most of the younger Swiss artists behave like goldfish in a sheltered pond . . . Gubler stands out among these goldfish like a pike." A visitor, who had flown from Paris to see the show, more aptly compared Gubler to a salmon that has produced remarkably after a terrific uphill climb.

In the course of his climb, Gubler resolutely refused to do anything for money. He painted as he pleased, and only occasionally sold a canvas to one of the few friends (mostly doctors and dentists) who admired his work. "I don't know how we lived," says Mrs. Gubler. "Often we had to make the difficult choice between buying food or colors and canvases. We always finished by buying the colors and canvases first and somehow we survived." In 1937 they reached the quiet pool where Gubler was to do his best work: a studio home overlooking the Limmat valley, outside Zurich. The Swiss government had finally granted Gubler an annual $1,000 subsidy, and Swiss collectors had begun to find him out.

Gubler's triumphs of the last decade are intense portraits (often of his wife or of himself) and pictures of what lies before his door. He rises with the sun every day, and goes out to sketch the valley in all weathers. The sketches he likes he puts aside for a year or more, then translates them into big (5 ft. by 7 ft.) canvases in his studio. He works fast, but when a painting goes badly, he puts it aside at once, perhaps for months. "You have to get it inside yourself," he says. "Talent you can have in your pocket, but poetry is the thing, the light, the vision of the painter, beyond all words and theories."

His vision is lyrical, and his execution is both monumental and uncannily luminous. Sunshine and clear air seem to flow over the rich, rolling land of Gubler's canvases into the rooms where they hang.

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