In the footsteps of Hans Josephsohn Portrait of the Swiss sculptor

Special correspondent in Switzerland

Born a German Jew in 1920 in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), this artist went into exile in Zurich in 1938 before ending up in St Gallen near his foundry, now a museum. The Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris has a magnificent exhibition of his work.

It's a peaceful little village on the road to Bellinzona in the Ticino, with no historical landmarks other than the Battle of Giornico on 28 December 1478, when a Swiss troop of 600 soldiers defeated 10,000 Milanese. We pick up the key at the Giornico café. You cross the narrow streets, cross an old stone bridge over running water, walk along the foot of a steep hillside, past fields bristling with steles and walls with large granite blocks. After a ten-minute walk, you come to an isolated flat spot where stands a sort of blind concrete mastaba, the Congiunta. This is the realm of the late Hans Josephsohn (1920-2012), the other great Swiss sculptor after Alberto Giacometti.

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For the French public, he is an unknown. For the Swiss, this great sculptor has a place of honour in the museum, like Giacometti. One of his ghostly sculptures stands in front of the Kunstmuseum in St Gallen. In 2003, the Kesselhaus Josephsohn opened in this prosperous city of Baroque splendour, housing his works and archives and adjoining the Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen, where his pieces with their prodigious patina were cast. Every contemporary artist, from Ugo Rondinone to Camille Henrot, from Simone Fattal to Isa Genzken, every major gallery owner, from Thaddaeus Ropac to Max Hetzler, from Iwan Wirth to Per Skarstedt, knows the place.

The story of Hans Josephsohn, a German Jew born in 1920 in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), is one of upheaval and rebirth. It is a plunge into the brutal history of the 20th century. It can be read in the interplay of shadows and patinas of an exiled artist, ‘too poor for a long time to work with anything other than clay, and who succeeded in the feat of creating life without colour’, says Felix Lehner,  director of the Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen, whose Hans Josephsohn is the hero ’.