Hello, my name is Paul Priestley. Welcome to Artist in School, the home of art history
for young people and for interested amateurs. Today, is the first in a series of brief encounters
where I’m going to be looking at more obscure artists. The first one is an artist from Switzerland
called Ferdinand Hodler, he is a really interesting person. Let’s go and find out, come on.
Ferdinand Holder was born in Bern in Switzerland in 1853, the eldest of 6 children. Unfortunately,
tuberculosis killed his father and his 2 younger brothers by the time he was 8 years old. As
a result, his mother later remarried, marrying Gottlieb Schüpach, a decorative painter who
had 5 children from a previous marriage. The family was poor and at the age of 9 young
Hodler was put to work helping his stepfather to paint commercial signs. Hodler’s mother
died when he was 13, resulting in Hodler being sent to the town of Thun to work as an apprentice
to a local landscape painter, called Ferdinand Sommer. From him, he learnt the craft of copying
prints of Alpine landscapes to create paintings, which he subsequently, sold in shops for the
tourist trade. In 1871 aged 18, Hodler travelled to Geneva
to study under painter Barthelemy Menn. In 1875, he went to Basel where he studied the
paintings of Hans Holbein. His painting at this time consisted mainly of Swiss landscapes,
figure compositions and portraits, painted in a very vigorous realistic style, much influenced
by the French Realist painter, Gustave Courbet. But his paintings were also influenced by
his own spiritual crises and his desire to flee from the modern industrialized society,
to find refuge in an more innocent idealised sort of world.
However, from 1890 his work evolved, it absorbed influences from many genre, particularly symbolism
and Art Nouveau. His new style of painting emphasized the symmetry and rhythm that he
believed formed the basis of human society. But his paintings also have a mystical, dreamlike
quality and often depict an escape from the bourgeois cares of modern life. His painting
Night, which was exhibited in the Salon in 1890, emphasizes this new style, symbolising,
age solitude and contemplation. Hodler filled his canvases with monumental
and simplified flat figures, often displaying ritualised gestures, and created with rhythmic
and repetitive lines, forms and colours, a style he referred to as Parallelism. He also
painted a number of large-scale historical paintings often with patriotic Swiss themes.
For example, in 1897 he was commissioned to paint frescoes for the weapons room at the
Swiss National Museum in Zurich, but his ideas proved controversial and it was three years
before he was allowed to create the frescoes. In 1900 he received his first recognition,
when he was awarded a gold medal at the Paris World’s Fair, for three of his paintings,
Night, Eurhythmy and Day. Hodler was married twice, but in 1908 he met
Valentine Gode-Darel, who became his mistress. He was passionately in love with her, but
in 1913 she was diagnosed with cancer. Hodler spent many hours by her bedside drawing, and
this resulted in a remarkable series of paintings which documented her gradual decline. Hodler
was devastated by her death and spent the next year isolated, occupying himself with
painting 20 very introspective self-portraits. In 1914, he condemned conducted by the shelling
of Rheims in France as a German atrocity. In retaliation German museums withdrew Hodler’s
work from their exhibitions. But by 1917 his health was deteriorating and
at one point he considered suicide. However, although bedridden, he still managed to paint
several views of Geneva from his balcony in the months before his death. Ferdinand Hodler
died on the 19th of May 1918 in Geneva. He was relatively unknown outside of Switzerland,
Germany and Austria until quite recently. His legacy is that his work is seen as embodying
the Swiss federal identity. Perhaps because, many of his best-known paintings feature ordinary
people doing everyday jobs, rather than dignitaries in their finery, as seen in his famous painting,
The Woodcutter. This attitude is best summed up by the fact that in 1908 the Swiss National
Bank commissioned Hodler to create two designs for their new paper currency. Controversially,
he chose not to depict the images of famous men, but instead of a simple wood cutter and
a reaper instead. Both notes eventually appeared in circulation in 1911.
Thank you for watching, I hope you’ve really enjoyed the video and found out some really
interesting information about Ferdinand Hodler. If you have please give my video a like, please
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