Ferdinand Hodler, 1853-1918

By Annabel van Grenen

Night, 1890, oil on canvas, 116.5 x 299 cm.

Ferdinand Hodler was a Swiss painter born on the 14th of March 1853, who was internationally renowned and exhibited in artistic metropolises throughout Europe such as Paris and Munich. He trained at the Geneva School of Design, after growing up in extreme poverty, and in his career explored both naturalism and symbolism with various subject matters. From catering to tourists with his naturalistic landscape paintings of his idyllic homeland, compared frequently to Cezanne, to illustrating politically motivated historical propagandist paintings for Switzerland, Oskar Bätschmann and Alice Kennington demonstrate that both his execution of the former, and the latter, ‘could represent defense against threats and the grandeur of all that was Swiss.’, earning himself the title of founder regarding a new style of Swiss nationalist painting. 

Reinhold Heller indicates that the transition of naturalism to symbolism in his work climaxed with his Night in 1890. Perhaps one of his most famous works, Heller suggests its purpose to alleviate personal anxieties surrounding the artist’s fear of his own death, a consequence of his  sister’s passing. However, Hodler himself proclaims "my painting exists on a plane of thought totally superior to the intentions attributed to it”, therefore despite being part of his motivations for the piece, Hodler emphasizes it as transcending specificities. Hodler continues to state, ‘I conceived of Night as the great symbol of death’, therefore encapsulating the very mystery circumambient in death through the dark, cloaked figure perching over the horror-struck man in the centre of the canvas framed by his sleeping peers. The juxtaposition of this man with the peaceful sleepers, exemplified by the squashed face and slightly parted lips of the curled up figure in the left corner of the canvas, and the intimacy of the couple of the right, curled in to one another, engenders a perpetual sense of perturbation in the viewer that death is omnipresent. Intertwining with the unconscious figures, the motif of the dark cloak in the painting reifies this realisation that even when we are at our most vulnerable, death is amongst us and is inescapable.  

Not only paralysed by fear in a metaphorical sense but a physical one too, as the hooded figure literally weighs the man down, the extremely expressive facial reaction of with his wide eyes, creased forehead, downward mouth, squashed neck to indicate him rearing backwards, solidifies his terror. The intense musculature in his arms, reminiscent of Michelangelo, completely contrasts with the limp choreography of the sleeping figures, reinforcing this panic of the central figure in the face of death, and is reminiscent of Gaugin’s Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), with his figure frozen from fright. The anatomy and pose of the sleeping nude women in the foreground heavily allude to traditional depictions of the female nude, specifically, Velázquez’s renowned The Toilet of Venus (1599-1660), whom Hodler may have studied in his visit to Madrid in 1878. The choice to paint the scene in landscape, amplifies the horizontal emphasis of the resting figures, allowing the upright figure to stand out drastically, drawing our focus to death personified. After being determined an orphan at 14 and losing several siblings, death constantly permeated Hodler’s life, which is perhaps why this painting has such visceral and psychological depth to it.  

Hodler died at the age of 65 as one of Switzerland's most celebrated artists, and is captured rather eloquently in a quote by Kristin Hoermann Lister, Sharon L. Hirsh, Francesca Casadio, and Inge Fiedler, detailing the artist as “a mystic and a realist, a duality which disconcerts and disorients .... He excels in rendering the things of the past or of the dream and the realities of life.”

Bibliography

Bätschmann, Oskar and Alice Kennington. “Ferdinand Hodler: Historical Painting.” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 19 (1993): 8-23. 

Heller, Reinhold. “Ferdinand Hodler: A Unique Note in the Birch Bartlett Collection.” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 12, no.2 (1986): 166-187. 

Lister, Kristin Hoermann, Hirsh, Sharon L., Casadio, Francesca, Fiedler, Inge. “Hodler’s Truth.” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 31, no.2 (2005): 60-73+108-111.