La Chaux-de-Fonds, The Sapin-Style and Charles L’Eplattenier

4 March 2024

Between 1905 and 1914, students at the École d’Art (Art School) de La Chaux-de-Fonds (canton of Neuchâtel), under the guidance of their teacher Charles L’Eplattenier (1874-1946), devised an original artistic language (le Style sapin) inspired by the Jura’s local nature. Sapin means pine, and there are plenty of them in this region.

In the early twentieth century, La Chaux-de-Fonds was a developing town. In barely sixty years, the population had tripled, and the isolated village in the middle of the forests at an altitude of 1,000 metres in the Jura mountains had become an industrial town of 40,000 inhabitants, a factory town focused entirely and exclusively on watchmaking.

La Chaux-de-Fonds established several specialised schools to train its pupils: L’École d’horlogerie (the watch school), of course, but also l’École de mécanique (the mechanic’s school), l’École de commerce (the trade school), l’École professionnelle de jeunes filles (the vocational school for young girls) and, finally, l’École d’arts appliqués à l’industrie (the school of applied arts for industry), or l’’École d’art (Art School).

The La Chaux-de-Fonds art school was founded in 1870 by the Société des Patrons Graveurs. The city took over the school in 1872 and moved to the new Collège Industriel (now the Collège Numa-Droz and the city library) a few years later.

Charles L’Eplattenier. Foto: Wikipedia

Charles L’Eplattenier

Charles L’Eplattenier was born on 9 October 1874 to a farming family near Neuchâtel. During his apprenticeship as a house painter, he also took drawing lessons. Talented and passionate, he was sent by his family to Budapest, where he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts. Thanks to a cantonal scholarship, he went to Paris to study for three years at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

In 1897, back in his canton, Charles L’Eplattenier was hired by the École d’art de La Chaux-de-Fonds as a drawing teacher. He was 23, highly ambitious and charismatic.

Charles L’Eplattenier, Les Musiciennes, 1907, still Art Nouveau. Collection: Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds

In 1905, L’Eplattenier proposed opening a higher art and decoration course for the school’s best students. A major innovation was that this course would no longer be limited to horology-related subjects.

L’Eplattenier changed the entire education system, revised the curriculum and resolutely applied modern and innovative teaching methods. His great ambition was to create a new formal artistic language, le Style sapin (Pine-Style), rooted in Jura.

He dreamed of inventing with his students a regionalist variant of Art Nouveau (Jugendstil in Germany, Modernismo in Spain) specifically for la Chaux-de-Fonds.

André Evard (1876-1972), Femme à la Fourrure, 1909. Collection: Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds

L’Eplattenier wanted to use the Jura’s nature, its flora and fauna, as his main (if not only) source of inspiration. He defined a method in five successive stages, which his students had to master one by one: starting with the observation of the natural form in situ to extract the essential element, the idea, and gradually arriving at a geometric, stylised motif that could then be used in decorative compositions.

Inspired by L’Eplattenier, the École d’art de La Chaux-de-Fonds took part in competitions and international exhibitions and won the honorary diploma at the Milan International Exhibition in 1906 for the pocket watch cases made by its students.

La Chaux-de-Fonds, Crematorium. Photo: Wikipedia

Les Ateliers réunis and the Villa Fallet

In 1910, L’Eplattenier launched the Ateliers d’arts réunis to ” encourage cooperation between artists, industrialists and merchants”. The Ateliers produced mainly decorative commissions that served as practical work for students.

They designed about a dozen interiors, including the homes of watchmakers, such as the Salon bleu Spillmann, the hall of the post office in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the chapel in Cernier-Fontainemelon, and the pavilion of the observatory in Neuchâtel.

Observatory in Neuchâtel

The following year, L’Eplattenier broke away from the school by creating a New Section within the School of Art. The aim was to work together on joint projects and, ideally, to integrate artistic production into society and the region.

L’Eplattenier was assisted by three assistants, including Charles Édouard Jeanneret (1887-1965), the future Le Corbusier. Together with Jeanneret, he convinced watchmaker Louis-Edouard Fallet (1845-1916) to entrust the entire design and construction of his villa to students at the school. The Villa Fallet would become the ultimate manifesto of the Sapin style – a collective and total work of art.

The end and rediscovery of the Sapin-Style

In just a few years, Charles L’Eplattenier had made the art school one of the three most important in Switzerland, alongside Zurich and Geneva. However, despite, or thanks to, these successes, from 1913, L’Eplattenier came into open conflict with his management and with the ‘classical’ teachers at the Collège Industriel.

His assistants tried to save the Nouvelle Section and received support from the big names of Art Nouveau in Paris, Berlin and Munich, who signed a manifesto. In vain, the city council closed the section on 1 August 1914. Les Ateliers réunis went bankrupt two years later due to a lack of sponsors.

The term “sapin style” is a recent invention: L’Eplattenier and his contemporaries never used it. The style was quickly forgotten, and many of his creations were destroyed: the post office hall lost its decorations in 1959, and the chapel in Cernier-Fontainemelon was converted into flats in 1975 (although the original stained-glass windows were recovered in a warehouse last year).

The rediscovery and ‘sapin-style’ adventure dates back some 15 years. Today, the Musée des Beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds dedicates a room to it, where the famous stained-glass windows and their typical motifs of gentians, thistles and pine trees can be seen.

Lars Kophal (Neuchâtel), editor and journalist

Some Impressions of the Style Sapin Collection of the Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds

Some more impressions of the Jura