KOLLER VIEW 4/24

pre view. 02 13 Ferdinand Hodler’s views of Lake Geneva are milestones from the final years of the artist’s life, and at the same time highlights of Swiss art history from the early 20th century. Hodler’s late work after 1914 stands out from the works he created before that time. In his final creative phase, colour and light in his landscape paintings be- came increasingly important. The painting ‘Lake Geneva with the Mont Blanc, early morning’ from our November Swiss Art auction has not only been widely published, but has also been shown in numerous major international exhibitions, including in Madrid, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin and Paris. The Neue Galerie in New York and the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland, showcased the artist’s late work, which incorporates many essential elements of modernism, in magnificent exhibitions in 2012/13. The strong colour scheme of blue and yellow tones in the horizontal layers of this painting, created in March 1918, a few weeks before Hodler’s death, causes the eye to continually change focus between the sky, mountain peaks and lake. The flicker- ing, unevenly contoured silhouette of the Savoy Alps heralds the imminent sunrise. ‘... I will paint landscapes that are different from those I have painted before ... Do you see how, over there, everything merges into lines and space? Don't you feel as if you were standing at the edge of the earth and freely interacting with the universe? This is what I will paint from now on!’ These famous and oft-quoted words by Ferdinand Hodler were spoken on a summer evening in 1917, less than a year before his death, during a walk along Lake Geneva. He said he no longer wanted to accept commis- sions, only to paint ‘planetary landscapes’. In the autumn of 1917, Hodler left his chilly studio after a bout of pneumonia and worked in his apartment at 29 Quai du Mont-Blanc in Geneva, which offered a view of the lake and the Alpine peaks on its French side. The play of light at different times of the day and year inspired Hodler to deepen his engagement with the same sub- ject over and over again. As the culmination of his career, Ferdinand Hodler painted the legendary series of views of Lake Geneva and the Mont Blanc from autumn 1917 until his death on 19 May 1918. In 1918, he said of this series of pictures: ‘Form lives through colour. And now it is glorious. Now I have the great spaces’. The gallery owner Max Moos, who had exhibited the work for the first time in Gene- va immediately after its completion in 1918, brought it 22 years later to the first solo Hodler exhibitions overseas, in New York and San Francisco. Prior to that, it was shown in Chicago in 1921 at the initiative of Jeanne Charles Cerani-Ćišić, and in a group exhibition in New York in 1927. In 1957, the painting was acquired by Arthur Stoll, a Swiss chemist and collector. After the dispersion of Stoll’s important collec- tion, it entered another prominent Swiss private collection in the early 1990s, where it remained until today. The shimmering horizon:Hodler’s latework Preview of the Swiss Art auction on 29 November 2024