Louis Soutter

1871-1942 · Ballaigues, Switzerland

Le Corbusier’s cousin trained as a concert violinist and ran an American fine arts department. Then, old and arthritic in a Jura hospice, he dipped his fingers straight into the ink and became great.

The life

Soutter was born in Morges, Switzerland, in 1871, son of a pharmacist and a singing teacher, and cousin to Le Corbusier. He studied engineering, then architecture, then violin under Eugène Ysaÿe in Brussels, married the American singer Madge Fursman and by 1898 headed the fine arts department of Colorado College. After their divorce in 1903 he returned to Switzerland, scraped by as an orchestral violinist, and in 1923, eccentric and penniless at 52, was placed against his will in a hospice at Ballaigues. He filled notebooks with drawings for two decades; Le Corbusier championed him with exhibitions in Hartford and New York. He died in 1942.

The work

Thousands of drawings in pen and pencil on notebook pages, envelopes and whatever paper came to hand. From 1937, with his hands crippled by osteoarthritis, he painted directly with his fingers in ink and gouache: looming black figures with the force of cave painting. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art and the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne.

Why we love them

Everything the academy gave him, illness took away, and what was left was the best work of his life. The fingers knew things the training never did.

Go deeper

• Louis Soutter at the Outsider Art Fair
• Louis Soutter on Wikipedia
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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