Anyone familiar with the work of the painter Leopold Haefliger (1929-1989) seems to have made his mind up. His Fasnacht paintings in particular delight some and horrify others. Haefliger wasn’t just a society painter, however, but a passionate artist who welcomed his contemporaries with enthusiasm, pleasure and skill. Thus his paintings are preferably inspired by great painters: Soutine, Vlaminck, Modigliani, Ensor, Corinth and Cézanne are some of his great models. In the Swiss context Haefliger, particularly with his depictions of waiters, serving-girls and cooks, is both artistically and personally close to the Zürich painter Varlin (1900-1977).

The gallery exhibition at Kunstmuseum Luzern is based on the idea of using selected paintings to examine the artistic and above all the painterly quality of Leopold Haefliger’s work. The forty paintings on show, almost all from the later period, from about 1967 onwards, do all reveal an artistic consciousness, an artistic will, driven by the real need for an existential expression.