Saturday, January 26, 2019

Running along a path
through woods, through planes,
through the blind expanse of cities,
running breathlessly through them all
we halted at last at the brim of this swirling blue
of infinity
Ferdinand Hodler
The Lake Geneva From Chexbre (1903)
blue, you see, is also the color we can most easily bear in great expanses
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Ferdinand Hodler (March 14, 1853 – May 19, 1918) was 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 he called Parallelism … that emphasized the symmetry and rhythm he believed formed the basis of human society.

Hodler's work in his final phase took on an expressionist aspect with strongly coloured and geometrical figures. Landscapes were pared down to essentials, sometimes consisting of a jagged wedge of land between water and sky.

In 1908, he met Valentine GodΓ©-Darel, who became his mistress. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1913, and the many hours Hodler spent by her bedside resulted in a remarkable series of paintings documenting her decline from the disease. 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 condemned the German atrocities conducted using artillery at Rheims.[11] In retaliation for this, German art museums excluded Hodler's work.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org
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image from wikiart.org
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this collection is permanently on view at http://anu.co.za/
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#Art #FerdinandHodler
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