Word: hodler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Busch-Reisinger continues its show on the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler for a few days more. Hodler, although respected widely in Switzerland and Germany during his lifetime has been little appreciated here, and on previous stops in New York and Berkeley the show gained attention for Holder as a major new point of perspective in viewing early modernist art. The sketches are the most interesting thing in the show, and most of the larger works appear stiff and stilted by comparison. The landscapes are significant for prefiguring German Expressionist works...
...BUSCH-REISINGER: Paintings and Drawings by Ferdinand Hodler, through June...
...pictures in which Hodler placed most pride are his large, carefully structured nude groups. These include consciously symbolist works with titles like Night, Day, Love and Truth. Carefully composed and painted, these are likely to strike us now as overly flat and academic. The symbolist aura of the time when they were painted has faded, and the preliminary sketches appeal much more than the stiff finished paintings...
...Perhaps Hodler's clearest claim to the recognition so long denied him consists in the series of bluish, highly structured landscapes which lead directly to the rough, brightly colored landscapes of German Expressionism. These depict jagged mountains or seething lakes and are constructed according to Hodler's notions of "parallelism," as he called his method of discovering parallel and reflective patterns in nature...
...MOST POWERFUL works of the exhibition are a series of brisk sketches and tense, tormented oils done during the fatal illness of his mistress Valentine Gode-Darel in 1914 and 1915. Hodler is obsessed with death throughout his career--the death of an earlier mistress in 1909 had been captured in a Munch-like oil full of looming and vertiginous space. Through the series, the curved, living lines of the woman's face grow harsh and geometrical, until a final version shows the corpse, bony and stiff, with the bedclothes around it indicated by a chaos of loose lines...