Just posted, Leo J. O'Donovan, S.J., reviews "Ferdinand Hodler: View To Infinity," now at the Neue Galerie in New York:
When Fyodor Dostoevsky and his wife visited the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland, and discovered Hans Holbein the Younger’s “Christ in the Tomb” of 1521, the great novelist was so appalled that he fell into an epileptic fit. Years later, in “The Idiot,” he brought Prince Myshkin before the same painting. “A man’s faith might be ruined by looking at that picture,” says Myshkin—and himself suffers an epileptic fit. The stark, almost life-size horizontal painting of the festering body of Jesus pressed within the narrow confines of his grave is a unique presentation of Holy Saturday, and the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler, another pilgrim to Basel in 1875 to study the Holbeins, was likewise overcome by it. (So was I, on first seeing it over 50 years ago.)
Hodler was born in Berne, the eldest of the six children of a carpenter and a woman from a peasant family. By the time he was eight his father and two brothers had died of tuberculosis. His mother remarried, but soon succumbed to the same disease, as did his remaining siblings. “In my family, death was everywhere,” the young artist later said. Later the Holbein haunted him.
After being apprenticed to a painter in Thun under whom he learned to make conventional landscapes for tourists, Hodler determined to find a larger world and in 1871, without knowing a word of French, set off by foot for Geneva, then Switzerland’s art center. There he was fortunate to be accepted for study from 1872 to 1877 under Barthélemy Menn. Menn introduced him to personal landscapes and plein-air painting and schooled him in exact observation and drawing. Hodler also adopted Menn’s concept of parallelism, which emphasized formal repetition and symmetry as revealing the order and harmony of creation.
After a year in Madrid (1878) studying the masters at the Prado (as had Manet and Eakins shortly before him), Hodler continued to concentrate on romantically realistic landscape. He achieved some original work using Albrecht Dürer’s method of subdividing the picture plane in squares for the sake of stronger composition and also by adopting a lighter palette. But his real breakthrough came in 1889-90 when, capitalizing on his Symbolist interests, he painted his first great canvas, “The Night,” which shows a muscular young naked man, surrounded by six other nude figures, being suddenly awakened by a black figure looming over him. (It was a scandal in Geneva and a huge success in Paris.) At the end of the decade he won the competition for the murals of the Swiss National Museum in Zurich, for which he produced his large historical fresco “The Retreat from Marignano of 1515.” He was also successful with character studies such as “The Halberdier” and, later, “The Woodcutter,” now prized works in the Dallas Museum of Art and the Musée d’Orsay, respectively. By 1904 he was so widely admired that Gustav Klimt invited him to be the Guest of Honor at the Fourth Vienna Secession exhibition.
This is roughly the point at which a gem of an exhibition, “Ferdinand Hodler: View to Infinity,” at that gem of a museum, Neue Galerie in New York City, begins. In “Study for Day” (1899), for which his wife Berthe served as the model, the nervous line, taut limbs and strained nudity point towards Egon Schiele. Especially typical for the last decades of the artist’s life are the monumental frieze-like processions of female figures, entitled “Feeling” (1905, 1911, 1912) and painted in predominantly red or blue tones. (Red for Hodler connoted passion, blue spiritual transcendence.) The same gallery exhibits side by side, perhaps for the first time since their creation, three over life-size portraits of women wearing deep red robes and moving in cheerful abandon or ecstasy—modern versions of Michelangelo’s Sibyls.
Read the full review here. And view selections from the exhibit here.
Tim Reidy
