Ferdinand Hodler

Ferdinand Hodler (March 14, 1853 – May 19, 1918) was a Swiss painter. He is one of the best-known Swiss painters of the nineteenth century. His early works were portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings in a realistic style. Later, he adopted a personal form of Symbolism which he called "parallelism".

Early life Hodler was born in Bern, the eldest of six children. His father, Johannes Hodler, made a meager living as a carpenter; his mother, Margarete (née Neukomm), was from a peasant family. By the time Hodler was eight years old, he had lost his father and two younger brothers to tuberculosis. His mother remarried, to a decorative painter named Gottlieb Schüpach who had five children from a previous marriage. The birth of additional children brought the size of Hodler's family to thirteen. He travelled to Madrid in 1878, where he stayed for several months and studied the works of masters such as Titian, Poussin, and Velázquez in the Museo del Prado. It was ridiculed when displayed in Geneva, prompting Hodler's remark to a friend that the Swiss "will not understand me until they see I have been understood elsewhere".

Hodler was married twice. From 1889 until their divorce in 1891, Hodler was married to Bertha Stucki, who is depicted in his painting, Poetry (1897, Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich). In 1898, Hodler married Berthe Jacques (1868–1957), whom he had met in 1894.

Parallelism

In the last decade of the nineteenth century his work evolved to combine influences from several genres including Symbolism and Art Nouveau. In 1890 he completed Night, a work that marked Hodler's turn toward symbolist imagery. When Hodler submitted the painting to the Beaux-Arts exhibition in Geneva in February 1891, the entwined nude figures created a scandal; the mayor deemed the work obscene, and it was withdrawn from the show.

Hodler developed a style he called "parallelism" that emphasized the symmetry and rhythm he believed formed the basis of human society. In paintings such as The Chosen One (1893), groupings of figures are symmetrically arranged in poses suggestive of ritual or dance. Hodler conceived of woman as the embodiment of the desire for harmony with nature, while a child or youth represented innocence and vitality. Hodler first made his conception of "parallelism" public in his 1897 lecture manuscript La Mission de l'artiste. Since then, his theory has been a highly regarded phenomenon in the art world and in research, but today it is no longer entirely uncontroversial.

Hodler painted a number of large-scale historical paintings, often with patriotic themes. He was invited to join both the Berlin Secession and the Vienna Secession groups. In 1904 he showed 31 works in Vienna, which brought him enhanced recognition and a sales success that finally eased his poverty.

In 1908, Hodler met Valentine Godé-Darel, who became his mistress, although he continued to live with his second wife. In 1913, Godé-Darel was diagnosed with a gynecological cancer, and the many hours Hodler spent by her bedside resulted in a remarkable series of paintings documenting her decline from the disease. In January 1914, three months after the birth of their daughter, Pauline, Godé-Darel was subjected to an operation for the cancer. In June 1914, she underwent a second operation. Her death in January 1915 affected Hodler greatly. He occupied himself with work on a series of about 20 introspective self-portraits that date from 1916.

In 1914 he signed a petition of intellectuals from Geneva condemning the German atrocities conducted using artillery against the Cathedral of Rheims. His Swiss and German friends tried to compel him to withdraw the signature, but he refused. Although mostly bedridden, he painted a number of views of Geneva from his balcony in the months before his death on May 19, 1918.

Legacy

In his time, Hodler's mural-sized paintings of patriotic themes were especially admired. According to Sepp Kern, Hodler "helped revitalize the art of monumental wall painting, and his work is regarded as embodying the Swiss federal identity." Both appeared in the 1911 Series Two of the notes.

Much of Hodler's work is in public collections in Switzerland. Other collections holding major works include the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Controversies concerning Nazi looting and restitution claims Many of Hodler's collectors were German Jews who were persecuted under the Nazis from 1933 to 1945. As a result, concern has been expressed when artworks by Hodler turned up after WWII with gaps in the ownership history. When a painting ‘Lied aus der Ferne’ that Polish-born German-Jewish industrialist and art collector Max Meirowsky was forced to sell in 1938 turned up in the collection of Swiss politician Christoph Blocher, it set off a debate about Nazi looted art in Switzerland.

Hodler's "Thunersee with Stockhornkette", which is at the Simon and Charlotte Frick Foundation, has been claimed by the family of the Jewish art collector Max Silberberg, who was murdered in Auschwitz.

According to Christie's, Hodler's "Thunersee mit Niesen" was spoliated as a result of Nazi persecution from Ernst Flersheim, Frankfurt am Main, and sold by Galerie Nathan, Zurich to a private collector before being returned to the Flersheim family.

The German Lost Art Foundation lists 37 works by Hodler.

Gallery