The Fondation William Cuendet & Atelier de Saint-Prex owns 365 prints covering almost 150 different subjects by Albert Chavaz, a painter who lived in the Valais but liked to visit in the early seventies the Atelier de Saint-Prex on the shores of Lake Geneva. More than 300 of these sheets comprise the "legal deposit" of the artist's works produced at the Atelier. Numerous colour proofs and test prints, half aquatints and half lithographs, all registered and inventoried in 1997, bear witness to the artist's extensive research into copper. More recently, in 2022, the Fondation Albert Chavaz added 43 prints to this initial collection, most of them dating from the artist's youth.
Born in Geneva, Albert Chavaz began drawing at a very young age. After a customer in his father's bakery noticed his talent, Chavaz took a test course at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, where he then studied painting with Emile Chambon and others from 1927 to 1932. In 1931, the Swiss Confederation awarded him a scholarship to complete his training in Paris. He was awarded the Prix Harvey several times for his portraits. In 1935, drawn to the landscapes of the Rhône Valley, he travelled to the Valais. He there met his wife in 1939, and they settled in Granois. His art would be the subject of several exhibitions in Lausanne, Fribourg, and Sion. The Fondation Gianadda in Martigny mounted a retrospective of Chavaz’s work in 1983, as well as a second retrospective in 1994, four years after the artist’s death. Chavaz went to the Atelier de Saint-Prex for many years, appreciating its vibrant atmosphere of technical and aesthetic conversation. Using the studio's presses with the help of Pietro Sarto, Edmond Quinche and Michel Duplain, he produced a large number of coloured etchings and aquatints to illustrate the literary works of his poet and writer friends.
