Portraits

Over the years, René Groebli has portrayed many of the great names of the international art and culture scene, including Robert Frank, Le Corbusier, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Charles Chaplin and Walt Disney, to name just a few. Some he portrayed during fleeting encounters and in documentary style, with others, he created entire series (Brassaï, Marcel Marceau). And with others still, Groebli created so-called “communicative portraits”, as he himself termed them: using colored lights in the studio or dye-transfer processes and montage techniques in the laboratory, he tried to create portraits that would reveal something about the nature, the personality or even the work of the person portrayed - in an attempt to find a way out of the “stagnation of portrait photography” that he felt at the time. It was certainly also these color experiments that earned him the title “master of color” from the American magazine Popular Photography Color Annual in 1957.