Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918)

At the end of the nineteenth century Hodler was one of the leading Symbolist painters. His creative force, his taste for decoration and his simplified painting are reminiscent of Rodin and Puvis de Chavannes, the undisputed masters with whom he is often compared. However, Hodler remains relatively unknown in France, whereas in Switzerland he is considered their great painter, and in Germany and Austria he is regarded as one of the founders of modern art.
This exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay offers a real opportunity to rediscover Hodler, with eighty paintings, many on show in France for the first time, and about thirty paintings and photographs.

From Berne to Geneva: difficult beginnings

Hodler's arrival in Geneva at the end of 1871 marked his true artistic début. Up to this point, he had studied with his father in law, a sign painter, then with Ferdinand Sommer, a specialist in alpine views for tourists. But for the young Hodler, born into a very modest family in Berne in 1853, this was more an apprenticeship for a craftsman than for an artist. His father, a cabinet-maker, died when Hodler was still a child. The eldest of six children, Hodler was then orphaned at the age of fourteen, but he was determined to do whatever was necessary to achieve his ambition to be an artist.

Once he had moved to Geneva, then the main artistic centre in Switzerland, Hodler was noticed by Barthélemy Menn, a teacher at the Geneva School of Drawing, and studied with him between 1872 and 1877. This apprenticeship with Menn, a friend of Corot and former pupil of Ingres, was a defining experience for Hodler: Menn liberated him from the convention of the picturesque and based landscape painting on measurement, drawing and patient observation of the subject. He completed Hodler's visual and artistic cultural education, and introduced him to French painting. Courbet's work was to have a significant influence on him.

His self-portrait, The Student, a profession of faith, shows him beginning his life as an artist. It was painted in 1874, coinciding with the first public appearances of Hodler's work. Hodler exhibited mainly in Geneva, and entered competitions in the hope of winning prizes. He made his ambition clear by trying all genres: paintings about Swiss history and on Swiss themes, at a time when this country was looking for an artistic identity and a national painter, as well as commissioned portraits, landscapes and genre paintings.

Harsh realism was a feature of Hodler's painting: it disconcerted the critics of Geneva, who for a long time were divided into two opposing camps: one censured his indulgence of ugliness; the other praised the originality of an art which was paving the way for a Swiss school of painting. Although he had achieved some recognition, Hodler had difficulty making a living from his painting. His stay in Madrid in 1878 was a happy, although brief, interlude against a background of extreme financial difficulties.

Hodler and Symbolism

In the mid 1880s in Geneva, Hodler met poets, critics and journalists such as Louis Duchosal, Mathias Morhardt, and Edouard Rod. Admirers of Wagner, Mallarmé and Verlaine, they formed the first Symbolist circles in Geneva with which Hodler was closely involved. They were also in contact with the Parisian artistic world, and certainly fuelled the young painter's desire to join it.
From the beginning of the 1880s, in fact, Hodler had been looking to widen his audience: in 1881, at the National Society of Beaux Arts, he exhibited a self-portrait entitled The Angry One; he also exhibited several works in London. In 1885, his first one-man exhibition was organised in Geneva, then another in Berne in 1887. Even if Hodler did not achieve the success he had hoped for, these exhibitions helped to establish him as one of the most important artists in Switzerland.

Hodler's art developed towards a style of realism coupled with idealism and Symbolism. His portraits of the destitute and of artisans at work were the starting point for a much wider reflection on man's destiny. A Glimpse into Eternity was a significant development: an old man is making a child's coffin. As well as carefully recreating the details of the carpenter's work, Hodler links the scene to a superior order through the character's attitude of prayer, the rigorous composition and the powerful light. Gradually divested of any reference to daily life or specific social environment, the theme develops, through processions or groups of careworn, old people, towards a radical portrayal of our inexorable march towards death. For, in this period at the end of the 1880s and the beginning of the 1890s, death had become an obsession for Hodler who, since his childhood, had been faced with the loss of his family members. He revealed this in The Night, painted in 1889 to 1890, a seminal work and manifesto of Hodlerian Symbolism.

The Night (1889-1890)

In The Night, the painter portrays himself as having been rudely awakened by the figure of death. Around him are entwined men and women asleep, with self-portraits slipped in along with portraits of the two women with whom Hodler shared his life at that time: Augustine Dupain, his companion since the early days and mother of his son, and Bertha Stuckie, his wife from a brief and tempestuous marriage.

Just as Courbet did in The Studio, Hodler presents a period in his life in an autobiographical picture on the scale of a history painting.
For Hodler, the work's meaning is universal because it is symbolic: it does not represent a particular moment but evokes the very essence of night and death. In it, the artist combines a heightened realism and a strict decorative order to an extent which had hitherto never been equalled, and which became the trademark of Hodlerian Symbolism.
As in the work of Puvis de Chavannes, a painter much admired by Hodler and a great defender of The Night, the couples are placed in a two-dimensional setting where the rhythmic layout of the figures and the lines take precedence.

The sequencing of the figures according to a principle of symmetry and the search for frontality here are also one of the most stunning expressions of a principle called parallelism (defined by Hodler as the repetition of similar forms), which the artist made the key to his art throughout his life. Parallelism is more than a principle of formal composition, it is a moral and philosophical idea, relying on the premise that nature has an order, based on repetition, and that in the end all men resemble each other.

The realism of the nudes and the poses of these entwined couples in The Night caused a scandal in Geneva in February 1891. The painting was not accepted for the Beaux-Arts exhibition in Geneva.
Hodler organised a private exhibition, and used the admission fees to achieve an ambition he had frequently delayed: to establish his reputation in Paris. Admitted into the Salon for the National Society for the Beaux-Arts, The Night was singled out by Puvis and also by Rodin and some of the critics. Hodler felt it was a triumph, even if this first Parisian success did not lead to the glory he had hoped for. In fact, the artist exhibited in Paris every year until 1897 (except 1896), but he had to wait until 1900 and the Universal Exhibition to obtain a gold medal, again with The Night among other Symbolist paintings.

Restoring emotion

In the meantime, Hodler was inventing an original form of Symbolism, not reliant on literary inspiration, drawing on man's quest for a lost harmony with nature. Woman became the spiritual heroine of a desire for harmony, whereas the child, then the adolescent – Hector, the painter's son – symbolised innocence and the life force.
This celebration of vital energy, of light as a source of truth, inspired him to produce ambitious paintings of figures preceded by numerous preparatory drawings. These compositions, harmonising with each other in the spirit of great Symbolist themes and cycles, brought him success in Europe, particularly in the newly formed Secessions in Austria (Vienna) and in Germany (Munich and Berlin).

Hodler gradually abandoned the realism of the 1880s in favour of a realism of expression and colour: clothes became atemporal, draped to emphasise movement; emphatic gestures were inspired by modern dance and experimental ways of expressing emotion - a revival led by Isadora Duncan, Loie Füller and Rudolf Laban. Hodler invented a new choreography to interpret and restore emotion, which, according to him, was the founding principle of the act of creation.

Portraits and self-portraits

Portraits and history paintings developed in a similar way. From a genre often practised in the past to earn money, the portrait became for Hodler his genre of choice for experimenting with colour and expression. The models stand out against a neutral background devoid of any setting. The painter excludes any reference to the model's daily environment in order to concentrate on his or her features. The poses recall those of the protagonists in choreographed, Symbolist paintings, without compromising the artist's preference for strict frontality and for close dynamic framings. From 1900, Hodler was in great demand as a portrait painter, and he pushed the genre to its limit in painting the last days and the death of his mistress Valentine Godé-Darel.

With an almost unbearable, documentary brutality, he records the inexorable progress of her illness and suffering in some hundred drawings and paintings, which he then exhibited and sold shortly afterwards. For Hodler, this exceptional series, unique in the history of art, was not only an escape from pain and grief, but it was part of his much wider reflection on death which, with its ghostly, nightmarish appearance in The Night, and as the common destiny for all in Tired of Life and Eurhythmy, became, with Valentine, the great styliser, exposing the truth about the body and the face.

In a similar but less radical spirit of experimentation and exploration, Hodler produced self-portraits throughout his career, thus outlining his autobiography in some two hundred paintings and drawings. From the first portraits of the 1870s, focusing on an image of himself as a budding artist, and on his relationship with the world of art, his self-portraits moved towards uncompromising introspection where the painter expressed his questions and his doubts, but also the satisfaction he found in fame and recognition.

Hodler and history

From 1900 onward, Hodler was regarded as one of the great decorators and history painters: he received major commissions in Switzerland and in Germany. By the mid 1880s, he had painted key episodes in the history of Switzerland, and profoundly changed ideas about history painting and mural decoration although this was not without difficulties.

His first two works in Switzerland in this field, were the subject of great controversy. The first was the decoration in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, for the 1896 Swiss National Exhibition in Geneva, and the second was for a painting of The Retreat from Marignan for the Swiss National Museum in Zurich. This commission resulted in what would become known in Switzerland, as the "quarrel of the Frescoes" and continued for almost two years (1898-1900). The artist was reproached for not keeping closer to historical fact and for not expressing the heroism normally extolled in more descriptive and narrative history paintings.
In Europe, Hodler exhibited the cartoons for his Marignan decoration at the Viennese Secession in particular, where, like his friend Gustav Klimt, he was admired as one of the greatest decorators of the time.

Nevertheless, he had to wait more than ten years for his mural on the opposite wall to The Retreat from Marignan to be confirmed. Hodler chose to illustrate a victory by the Swiss Confederation over Charles the Bold: The Battle of Morat. This was the artist's last historical panel, which he worked on from the summer of 1915 in France, then left unfinished in 1917. This episode was the end of Hodler's radical attempt at simplifying the genre. He regenerated it in a profound way by his choice of bright colours, applied without depth, and by the power of his expression.

His skills in monumental painting earned him commissions for vast decorations for the University of Iena, for the town hall in Hanover (Unanimity in 1913), for the Kunsthaus (A Glimpse into Infinity, 1915) and for the University of Zurich (Blossoming, unfinished). He also gave Switzerland two of its most emblematic images for a national identity which was developing throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. These were the designs for the first bank notes published by the Swiss National Bank.
Hodler was commissioned to paint the Reaper and The Woodcutter, celebrating agricultural work and a close relationship with nature in these timeless evocations of Switzerland. Veritable icons, Reaper and The Woodcutter are easel paintings with more than ten versions for each subject.

Hodler and the landscape

Hodler's landscapes express the same close relationship with the countryside of Switzerland untouched by any human presence. He mainly painted Swiss landscapes, taking numerous subjects: famous, awe-inspiring mountains like the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau, lakes like Lake Thun and Lake Geneva, as well as trees, rocks, rock falls, forest streams and glaciers. Passionate about the "substance of nature" since his adolescence, as he himself admitted, Hodler would regularly go to study the location of his chosen landscape, later reproducing it in his studio where his respect for topographical detail was combined with his desire for formal stylisation, making him one of the greatest landscape artists ever.

In a way, for Hodler, landscape painting had a philosophical dimension. He felt that a painter had to reveal the laws of nature and of the world through a patient, structured study of the location. This order, relying on "parallelism", repetition and symmetry, was more easily perceived in some themes, such as reflections on water, which allow a double axis symmetry, both horizontal and vertical, to be developed.

According to Hodler, landscape painting should "show us nature made greater and simpler, pared of all insignificant details". The Hodlerian landscape is characterised by the elimination of all that is incidental and irregular, by the suppression of aerial and chromatic perspective. These are replaced by a monumental, decorative composition culminating in his final paintings of Lake Geneva which prefigure abstract art.
This highlighting of a natural order should not stifle, but on the contrary should intensify the emotion experienced before the splendour of nature, and this for Hodler, was the source of the creative act. Consequently, nature was both a mirror for the artist, and the reflection of a cosmic feeling of fusion with the world, but also a reflection of solitude.

In order to create a dialogue between the work of Hodler and the art of today, the Musée d'Orsay has invited Helmut Federle, an artist who acknowledges Hodler as one of his main sources, to display four of his works in the exhibition as a counterpoint to Hodler's alpine landscapes.

Hodler's studio: the artist's drawings and photographs

Hodler never tired of drawing. He left more than nine thousand drawings, and almost twelve thousand sketchbook drawings. For him drawing was essentially a preparatory activity. His compositions gradually emerged through many, sometimes very allusive, sketches which formed the matrix for pictures sometimes painted more than ten years later. Once the subject had been defined, and the composition outlined in the drawings, the painter went on to make studies of the figures. He would work using a model, always preferring to work from life. This phase of intense preparation sometimes entailed hundreds of studies, at the end of which the painter had fixed the gestures of the protagonists in his figure paintings, whether portraits, Symbolist compositions or history paintings. It was at this stage that he used what was called "Dürer's glass", a plate of glass on which he traced the outline of the model in transparent paint, and then transferred it to paper.

This method impressed the painter's contemporaries. Examples can be found in the many beautiful photographs left to us by a great collector and friend of Hodler, Gertrud Dubi-Müller. Presented for the first time in France, they offer us an intimate view of the artist and his studio in Geneva through the years after 1910.