Koller View 2/21

10 Water worlds and magic mountains Preview of the Swiss Art Auction on 2 July 2021 The selection of Swiss art in the 2 July sale presents a concentration of exemplary works rarely encountered in a single auction. It is a journey through the devel- opment of Swiss painting from Calame and Diday to Hodler and Vallotton, and beyond to a large expressive nocturnal landscape by Max Gubler. The name Ferdinand Hodler evokes grandiose lake and mountain landscapes, both to the general public as well as art connoisseurs. Hodler also actively en- gaged in figure painting, mostly of symbolic content (ill. 2), and portraits, such as the important likeness of Clara Pasche-Battié (ill. 3) offered in this auction. His first international breakthrough was with a figure painting: ‘The Night’ (Kunstmuseum Bern). Crucial not only for Hodler’s personal development, but also for the development of Swiss art, was his relation- ship with his first formal teacher, Barthélemy Menn, who introduced Hodler to new developments in the plein air painting of the Barbizon school, including its goal of treating the landscape as a subjective atmos- pheric experience. Landscape, then, is at the origins of Hodler’s art. And his development into one of the most influential and important Swiss painters culmi- nated in the magnificent Lake Geneva landscapes of his late work. In this painting from circa 1911 (ill. 1), Hodler celebrates the fluid transitions between the almost dematerialised water surface, the distant coastline, and the overcast sky. The artist’s last painting was an unfinished view of Lake Geneva, which closes the circle. Between his early and late works lie almost 50 years and an immense progression – not only in Hodler’s work itself, but inmodern art in general. The period be- tween 1870 and 1920 is characterised by a break with tradition and a shift towards new artistic approaches. In Switzerland, painting the Alps has been a central – if not the central – theme ever since Caspar Wolf, who climbed glaciers and peaks in the 18th century, armed with easel and palette. Philosophical approaches such as Rousseau’s ‘retour à la nature’, as well as tourism, driven by the British in the 19th century, proved to be decisive influences on new visions of the Helvetic world. The great Swiss landscape painters however, from Alexandre Calame to Giovanni Segantini to Ferdinand Hodler, were not concerned with a tourist perspective of the Alps. In their work, mountains and lakes became dramatically heightened places in which nature stands symbolically for life and death, genesis and demise, and at the same time as an eternal constant. This approach influenced almost all the painters of the fol- lowing generation, of whomCuno Amiet and Giovanni Giacometti were the most important. Félix Vallotton came to landscapes by his own path. His acquaintance with the artists of the Nabis group in Paris led him to make paintings in which, as in ‘Pommier, Equemauville’ (p. 13), he creates enigmati- cally intimate moods. From here, Vallotton developed his art further into large-scale, strictly structured ‘pay- sages composés’ arising not from nature alone, but from his power of imagination (p. 13). After the First World War, the first generation of modernists was followed by artists such as Adolf Dietrich and Niklaus Stoecklin, who practically turned this development on its head, giving their full attention to observed reality while employing a new naiveté. 1 2