Ferdinand Hodler was a Swiss painter, born in Bern in 1853 and dead in Geneva in 1918. He painted the Alps, the symmetrical rows of figures he called parallelism and, at the end, the slow death of the woman he loved. His career ran from a Geneva jury that kept his best-known painting out of an exhibition to a hall of his own in Vienna.
Geneva kept his painting Night out of an exhibition in 1891. Thirteen years later Vienna gave him a room. In 1914 he signed a letter about a burning cathedral, and the German art societies struck his name from their lists.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
Night shows seven young people asleep in the open under black blankets, and a figure in a black cloak crouching on one of the men. Hodler painted it in 1889 and 1890, on a canvas nearly three meters wide, and in 1891 the jury of the Geneva exhibition excluded it on moral grounds. Hodler rented another building close by and showed it there. The city's mayor called it obscene, and it was removed in a hurry.
The painter his own city had refused sent the canvas to Paris, to the Salon du Champ-de-Mars. Puvis de Chavannes and Rodin praised it there. Berlin followed: Night was shown at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung in 1898, and Hodler joined the Berlin Secession in 1900.
What Geneva called indecent was something else to the man who painted it. He had grown up in a house where, as he put it later, there always seemed to be a dead person. The black figure on the sleeper was a memory before it was a symbol.
What You'll Discover
What his childhood house held.
Where a tourist painter's apprentice went.
Why Geneva shut out one painting.
What he saw in repeated gestures.
What a letter about Reims cost him.
Whom he kept painting to the end.