![]() Hodler’s new approach to painting emphasized the complementary forces of symmetry and rhythm, which he believed formed the basis of human society. This ultimately culminated in the development of an entirely unique artistic style of composition, which he called "parallelism". Night marked Hodler's provocative shift into symbolism and art nouveau. Hodler even received personal compliments from the leading French artists of the era, including Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas, and Puvis de Chavannes. Although the mayor of Geneva found Hodler’s work so grotesque that he had it thrown out of l’ Exposition Municipale on moral grounds, Night received a rapturous acclaim at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars in Paris. Depicting a mysterious dark, cloaked figure around seven sleeping figures – including Hodler himself, his wife Bertha Stucki, and his mistress Augustine Dupin – Night feels pessimistic and moody, but also charged with meaning and infused with contrasting color palettes. It was not until the completion of Night (1889/1890) that finally Hodler received the recognition he craved after years of feeling misunderstood. Genevan Art critics found them to be uninteresting, and his submissions to the Paris Salon went largely ignored. Hodler’s earliest works completed in the 1870s and 1880s are a mélange of genre paintings, mostly landscapes and portraits rendered in a realistic style. The collective corpora of these artists would shape Hodler’s appreciation of form, movement, and color, while simultaneously reinforcing his marked interest in the paradoxes of life, death, and physicality. Encouraged by his instructor in Geneva, Barthélemy Menn, Hodler found artistic inspiration in the works of Holbein, Titian, Poussin, Velázquez, Goya, and Alexandre Calame. Nonetheless, he demonstrated a marked talent for painting and after completing his apprenticeship with the Bernese painter Ferdinand Sommer, he walked to Geneva in 1871, penniless and without a word of French. By the time he was a teenager, Holder had lost both of his parents and several siblings to tuberculosis. Born the eldest of six children to Johannes Hodler and Margarete Neukomm in Bern’s poorest district, Hodler’s early life was marked by near-constant struggle and deprivation. Website: Ferdinand Holdler (1853-1918) was no stranger to poverty, hunger, and death.
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