Ferdinand Hodler

Ferdinand Hodler was the first of six children to be born in 1853 in a poor district of Bern - his mother occasionally works as a cook, his father is a carpenter and dies of tuberculosis at an early age. Even after the mother's second marriage to Gottlieb Schüpbach, a painter for decoration and flat painting, the family still lives in poor conditions. Very early on Hodler took over the workshop of the alcoholic stepfather to provide an income. At the end of 1871, Hodler moved to Geneva. In 1872 he was granted a residence permit and permission to copy paintings by Alexandre Calame and François Diday in the Musée Rath. There Bathélemy Menn, professor of painting and director of the École des Beaux-Arts, became aware of him and accepted him into his class as a freelance student. After completing his training with Menn, Hodler made a trip to Italy and later a trip to Spain, where he studied with great masters. 1881 he participates in the Paris Salon with the self-portrait The Angry. It was only nine years later that he wanted to succeed in establishing his fame as one of the most important Symbolist painters with the large-format painting Die Nacht. Over the next few years he will become a member of the Berlin, Munich and Vienna Secession. An exhibition in the latter has given Hodler a great success, which has made him internationally known. Despite some scandals about his art, which he considered too revealing or erotic, Hodler is able to achieve a certain prosperity through his artistic success. In the course of his work, he created a work that could not be more diverse, ranging from small-format works on paper to monumental paintings. On the one hand, Hodler is associated with a specific image and self-image of Switzerland, and on the other he is one of the most important artists of the early beginnings of modernism, not only for Switzerland. His work revolves around topics such as self-portraits, the Swiss Alpine world, the fascination for women and death, whereby the works become more and more radical and abstract with increasing age.
Ferdinand Hodler died on May 19, 1918 in Geneva.

His work has recently been exhibited at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.