Work

1916-1923
Living in his parents’ apartment situated on Dapples Avenue in Lausanne, after a period of convalescence, Loupot is ready to enter into professional life.

His drawings were published for the first time in 1916. Examples include his work for concert programs. Later, his drawings feature in press advertisements — in the Feuille d’Avis de Lausanne. Swiss artists were fascinated by construction, composition and internal logic, and not so much by narrative and anecdote.

In its radical form, this school rejects all human intervention, concentrating solely on the object itself: perfect for ensuring the emphasis lay on the product at hand.

In 1923, Loupot departs for Paris and moves in with Marcelle Vittet in a hotel on Rue de Constantinople. He is thirty-one years old and has a well-established reputation in Switzerland. Those who knew him testify that he was leading a happy life at this time.

It is speculated that this move was in pursuit of employment by Devambez, whose collaborations included work with Leonetto Cappiello, one of the founding fathers of this period.

For a while, advertisers were reticent to commission posters by the artist, as the French public was yet to embrace him as the Swiss had. As a result, during the two years which followed his arrival in France, the artist worked more as an illustrator than poster designer.

Later, however, once fully embedded in the work of St. Raphaël, Loupot’s work is everywhere: occupying four thousand painted walls up to thirty metres square in size — not including the several thousand of posters on sheet metal which adorned the city of Paris.

Loupot’s evolution towards a measured dynamism and total maturity is marked by its being remote from the impressionistic form and romantic expression of his youth.

In these last works, Loupot’s creations characterise themselves as more intellectual and less spontaneous. They perfectly express the spirit of the time, bearing witness to total professionalism as opposed to the amateurism of the publicity from days gone by.

The end result of this path towards the purity of form are the inventive acronyms for Air Liquide and RV (Route et Ville). Here, the artist rejects all ornamentation to return to conveying only the essential.