PARIS, FRANCE.- Musée d’Orsay presents today Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), on view through February 3rd, 2008. This exhibition has been jointly organised by the Réunion des musées nationaux with the support of Pro Helvetia, Swiss Foundation for culture.

Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) is the first exhibition in France of the painter’s work, since the monograph organised for him in 1983 at the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris. This temporary exhibition, part of the programme started by the museum in 1995 for exhibiting great artists from foreign schools, comes two years after the Musée d’Orsay acquired one of the artist’s major paintings, Le Bûcheron (The Woodcutter, 1910). Over the last twenty years, studies and exhibitions devoted to Hodler have highlighted new aspects of his work (the preparation and publication of an annotated catalogue, exhibitions in Geneva, Zurich, Munich, etc). The exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay aims to redefine the sources and the geography of modern art, and to help return Ferdinand Hodler to the central position that he once held at the heart of the European avant-garde movements at the turn of the 20th century. Linked to Symbolism, Hodler in fact opened the way for both abstract art and for expressionism.

During his lifetime, Ferdinand Hodler was considered as one of the leading voices of Modernism. Born in Berne in 1853, he lived in Geneva until his death in 1918, but after a difficult start, he had a successful career in Europe, punctuated with scandals. A member of the great Secession movements, his work was lauded in Vienna, Berlin and Munich from the 1900s. But it was in Paris, in 1891, that his reputation was first established when he exhibited his manifesto painting La Nuit (Night) [1889-1890, Berne, Kunstmuseum], banned by the city of Geneva for indecency. This picture, praised by Puvis de Chavannes, Rodin and French critics, launched Hodler’s international career and made him one of the major exponents of Symbolism. This key work, which has never left the museum in Berne, is on special loan to the Musée d’Orsay. At the turn of the century, Hodler undertook major public commissions in Zurich, Geneva, Iena and Frankfurt providing him with the opportunity to indulge his taste for simplified, monumental and decorative painting. He painted scenes from the history of the founding of the Swiss confederation (La bataille de Morat [The Battle of Morat] 1917), Glaris, Kunsthaus), and symbolic figures such as reapers and woodcutters. Thus, by the end of the 1890s, Hodler had become the Swiss national painter par excellence. In his landscape paintings he liked to idealise nature, and in particular the mountains, breathing new life into the genre. His exact topography of the locations was accompanied by rigorous stylisation, making Hodler an unequalled landscape painter, on a par with Cézanne (La pointe d’Andey, vallée de l’Arve [The Andey Peak, Arve valley] 1909, Musée d’Orsay). Convinced that beauty lay in order, symmetry and rhythm, Hodler based his compositions on what he called “Parallelism” (“A repetition of similar forms”) (Paysage rythmique au Lac Léman [The Rhythmic Landscape of Lake Geneva] 1908, private collection).

Hodler was also a great innovator in portrait painting; this is seen in the images of collectors (Portrait of Gertrud Müller,1911, Soleure Kunstmuseum), poets and critics who supported him, as well as in uncompromising self-portraits (Autoportrait aux roses [Selfportrait with roses], 1914, Schaffhouse, Museum zu Allerheiligen), which came before the “Valentine Cycle”, unparalleled in the history of art. Between 1914 and 1915, Hodler made a series of portraits of his mistress while she was dying. These images become more profoundly moving as the illness progressed and death approached (Valentine sur son lit de mort [Valentine on her deathbed] 1915, Bâle, Kunstmuseum).

After this cycle, Hodler pursued his meditation on death through a series of almost abstract views of Lake Geneva, where his increasingly radical quest for simplicity and unity reached its peak: “The nearer I get to the great Unity, the more I wish my art to become simple and great.”

The exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay brings together eighty major paintings from different stages throughout the artist’s career, from the mid 1870s to the final landscapes of 1918; there are examples of all the genres tackled by the painter: large compositions of symbolist figures, paintings of history, landscapes and portraits. Two graphic arts display cabinets, around the symbolist compositions (Le Jour III [Day lll] 1909-10, Lucerne, Kunstmuseum, and la Vérité II [Truth ll] 1903, Zürich, Kunshaus) and the history paintings, enable the visitor to understand Hodler’s creative process, as well as his passion for drawing. About forty photographs, taken by close friends and in particular by Gertrud Dubi-Müller, a friend, collector and model of Hodler, take us inside the painter’s studio.

In order to create a dialogue between Hodler’s work and the art of today, the Musée d’Orsay has invited Helmut Federle into the exhibition. This artist, who has always acknowledged Hodler as one of his major sources, has chosen four drawings of mountains and a large monumental painting, 4.4 the Distance, 2002 (private collection) as a counterpoint to Ferdinand Hodler’s painting. The exhibition was curated by Serge Lemoine, Chairman of the Musée d’Orsay and Sylvie Patry, curator, Musée d’Orsay.