André René César Brechet

Sunset at Pont Royal and Notre Dame, Paris

André Bréchet, born in Delémont on October 22, 1921 and died on March 27, 1993 in the same city, is a Swiss painter, sculptor and glass craftsman. After his schooling in Delémont, he took courses in painting, sculpture and drawing at the Kunstgewebeschule in Basel, from 1942 to 1944. He traveled a lot then moved to Paris where he was a pupil of André Lhote (1947-1948) and by Fernand Leger (1949). From 1944, he made numerous exhibitions of sculpture and painting in Switzerland and abroad. Between 1947 and 1949, André Bréchet was a pupil of the French painters André Lhote and Fernand Léger. During his French period, he notably frequented the Swiss sculptors Alberto Giacometti and Jean Tinguely, the French poet Paul Fort, the French cubist painter Jacques Villon as well as the Catholic writer Paul Claudel. He has produced numerous stained glass windows for churches in Switzerland, the United States and France, and for individuals. Among his works intended for foreign countries, let us mention in particular the remarkable stained glass windows of the chapels of Saint-Joseph and St-Patrick in Detroit in the American state of Michigan. He received the André Susse prize winner in 1961, and the first prize from the Swiss Embassy in Paris in 1966.