Koller View 4/20

5 Ferdinand Hodler’s artistic curiosity is inextricably as- sociated with landscapes. His vision of nature helped to shape Swiss art history of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, as well as the image of Switzerland in gen- eral. Hodler’s depiction of Lake Thun with the Niesen on the opposite shore, offered in the 4 December auction (ill. 3), attracts viewers by its composition: the conical peak of the Niesen stands just off-centre and slopes down nearly symmetrically to the edges of the painting. The lake, situated between the mountain and the viewer, becomes almost immaterial. The art- ist succeeds in representing the water’s motionless surface as a kind of magical field. It feels as if one must hold one’s breath so as not to disturb this stillness. Contemporary critics spoke of the ‘blue, transparent light’ in which Hodler depicted the Niesen. The artist strove to free his paintings from ‘all insignificant de- tails’. The austere, pyramidal shape of this mountain peak emphasizes Hodler’s pictorial structure, which he called ‘parallelism’, and which opened the artist’s way toward abstraction. This work was probably painted in the winter of 1912/13, when the tourist potential of the area around theNiesen in theBerneseOberlandwas just beginning Preview of the Swiss Art Auction on 4 December 2020 An obsession with landscape to be developed. Although there was a guesthouse on the 2,362-metre-high summit in 1856, visitors had to make the laborious climb up the mountain on foot if they wanted to enjoy the phenomenal view without incurring the expense of porters or pack animals. It was not until the Niesen funicular was completed in 1910 that travellers could easily reach the summit of the Niesen fromMülenen in just under an hour. Hodler shows us the Niesen from the northern shore of Lake Thun; he probably looked south from the lake road be- tween Oberhofen and Gunten. This painting is one of some forty depictions of the Niesen by Hodler; many are now in museum collections. In addition to the magnificent depiction of the Niesen and a rocky landscape with a tree by a stream (see p. 7), the sale features a self-portrait that Hodler made as part of a small series two years before his death (ill. 4). Two further works come from an important private Swiss collection: a monumental female head study (ill. 1), which is closely related to the mural ‘View to Infini- ty’ created for the Zurich Kunsthaus, and ‘The Reaper’ (ill. 2), a central motif in Hodler’s work that also embel- lished the Swiss 100-franc note issued in 1911. 3 4