In the spotlight: Ferdinand Hodler record-breaking auction prices and major retrospectives return this Swiss painter to the prominence he enjoyed during his own lifetime.

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A leading light of the Modernist movement at the turn of the 19th century in Europe, Ferdinand Hodler is also the artist whose 'Swissness' makes him Switzerland's national painter sans pareil.

He was a master of landscapes and portraits, with a penchant for history and symbolism that also found expression in his murals. Towards the end of his life, Hodler created a unique and gut-wrenching, up-close-and-personal series depicting his mistress on her deathbed.

From a poor family, the self-made Hodler sometimes caused scandal with his art and his stance against war atrocities made him persona non grata in Germany from 1914. But he was also showered with honours--including a major retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zurich a year before his death in 1918.

Market trend

So it is no surprise that today, Hodler pieces remain at the forefront for Swiss art collectors. The current sales record for a Hodler painting at auction is SFr 10.9 million, paid in the spring of 2007 when Sotheby's sold a 1901 view of Lac Leman (Lake Geneva) as seen from Saint-Prex in Vaud.

Other Sotheby's sales prices achieved since 2005 say it all about Hodler's ascendance in the art market: a mountain landscape went for SFr 4.8 million in 2005; another landscape for SFr 4.9 million in May 2006, while yet another brought SFr 5.7 million in December 2006.

A recently discovered Hodler piece--Les Dents-du-Midi painted in Champery, Valais during the summer of 1916--went on the auction block in November, but failed to sell when bidding stopped just short of the SFr 5 to 7 million estimate.

Urs Lanter, the head of the Swiss art department at Sotheby's in Zurich, told Swiss News that the painting may have failed to sell because the mountainscape is not as approachable as more typical Hodler pieces.

"And let's face it, not every painting is going to a break a previous record. In this case, the estimate was right on, and chances are more than likely that, post-auction, a private sale will go through," he said.

In any event, Stephanie Schleining Deschanel, a Swiss art specialist at Sotheby's Geneva, says the selling price of Hodler works is being fuelled by a strong international art market with both institutional and private collectors. "And we're also seeing [higher prices], albeit not so extreme, with other Swiss artists who, like Hodler, were part of European movements mainly of the 1890-1930 period."

Swiss-specific subject matter is also a drawing card for an increasing number of international collectors, she added.

Hodler: the early years

Born in 1853 in Bern, and orphaned by 14, the penniless boy became an apprentice to a painter in Thun who specialised in Alpine scenes much admired by tourists.

Natural scenery remained a seminal influence on Hodler until the end of his days.

At 18, he went on to pursue landscape painting in what was then the art capital of Switzerland, Geneva. Trying to earn a hiving as an artist was a tough slog. But travel and new influences led to the establishment of the Art Nouveau-tinged symbolist style that finally allowed him to break into the art scene.

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At first, the groundbreaking allegorical painting, Night, which the artist began in 1889, was refused for exhibition in Geneva.

His realistic rendition of himself with his first wife, Bertha Stucki (lower right), and his mistress Augustine Dupin (left)--the mother of his son, Hector--was deemed indecent.

But in 1891 the picture was shown to great acclaim in Paris, thus launching Hodler's career.

The symbolic painting is a reflection on sleep, dream and death. The terrifying shrouded presence hovering over the central figure is variously seen as a nightmare or as death, a subject Hodler was more than a little conversant with, having by this time experienced the early deaths of not only his parents and stepfather, but his siblings too. And indeed, the frame of the painting is inscribed: "More than one who tranquilly retired at night did not awaken the following day."

Yet--quite literally in this instance--in Hodler's work there is no night without day.

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Inherent to the painter's philosophy is a sense of the balance of natural cycles. So it was not long after painting Night that Hodler began working on Day, in which he rendered women in poses that suggest awakening or rising, in a symbolic semi-circle (the other half of a circle). The flowing white cloth over the central figure's genitalia seems to issue from her in a suggestion of human birth as well.

Fame and love

Famous in Munich, Berlin, Vienna and Paris, Hodler was 55 when he met Valentine Gode-Darel, an independent woman unlike any of his acquaintance. He fell passionately in love with her, and in 1913, five years after they met, a daughter, Paulette, was born.

Tragically, Gode-Darel was diagnosed with cancer in 1914.

As she made her slow, agonising way towards death between December 1914 and January 1915, Hodler sat by her bedside and created some 200 works of his beloved. The result is known as the Valentine Cycle, a meditation on death that the Musee d'Orsay, in documentation accompanying its major Hodler retrospective, calls "unparalleled in the history of art".

After the death of his mistress, their daughter Paulette was raised by his second wife Berthe Jacques, whom the painter had married in 1898 after his divorce from Bertha Stucki in 1891.

The last years

Throughout his life, Hodler was influenced by different styles including Art Nouveau, symbolism, realism and expressionism, among others. Some of his last works veer almost to abstraction.

He was known not only for the number of times he painted himself, but also for the unstinting honesty of the portrayals. Images he created, such as The Woodcutter, a version of which was once used on the Swiss 50-franc note, have become all-time icons of traditional Swiss values.

Yet for all the variety and diversity of genres and style, once Hodler hit his stride as an artist, his philosophy of universal harmony between man and nature and cycles of life and nature underpinned all his work.

The philosophy imbued his art with a kind of mysticism that explains comments such as that of artist Paul Klee, who in 1911 wrote that Hodler "can create the soul by painting the body, better than anybody".

As related to landscapes, Sotheby's Swiss art expert Urs Lanter captures this almost Taoist feel when he says: "Hodler didn't just paint Alpine landscapes, he captured the essence of mountains."

As the artist's own life was ebbing, he threw himself back into the genre that had marked his beginnings as a painter landscape--spending nearly the whole summer of 1916 in the Valais mountains around Champery, producing 12 oils of its peaks and streams.

It was here that he produced Les Dents-du-Midi.

Hodler expert Dr. Matthias Oberli, an art historian at the Swiss Institute for Art Research in Zurich who is working on the complete catalogue of the artist's works, says the painting is one of four on the same subject produced by the artist, and that it is considered the finest of the four.

A surprise twist

"And yet," says Oberli, "Les Dents-du-Midi was actually a 'lost' picture, bought in 1917 and passed down in the family to descendants we had no trace of. And we think there are still some 70 Hodler paintings hidden away in private collections."

Oberli thus welcomes the "repositioning" of Hodler because the publicity could reach collectors who may possess these lesser known works.

He urges them to come forward by contacting him at the Institute for Art Research (www.sikart.ch) so that their art, if authentic, can be included in the complete catalogue of Hodler's works.

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Major exhibitions

The Musee d'Orsay in Paris will ring in the New Year with a retrospective that aims "to 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 19th century," says a press release.

In 2005, the museum purchased a 1910 Woodcutter for its permanent collection.

This spring, Bern's Museum of Fine Arts opens a show entitled Ferdinand Hodler. A Symbolist Vision. This show will later move on to Budapest.

In conjunction with the Bern show, an international Hodler symposium is taking place in April. Echoing the Musee d'Orsay's goal, the symposium's aim, say organisers, is to "lastingly reposition" Hodler in art history.

Part of the current buzz surrounding Hodler manifests in carefully researched catalogues and literature attached to these exhibitions. In addition, the Swiss Institute for Art Research will in 2008 launch the first volume of an annotated catalogue, devoted to the artist's entire production of over 2,000 paintings and some 10,000 drawings.

Calendar

The Musee d'Orsay in Paris is hosting a major Ferdinand Hodler retrospective lasting until February 3, 2008. www.musee-orsay.fr

The Museum of Fine Arts in Bern will feature Ferdinand Hodler: A Symbohst Vision, from April 9 -August 10, 2008. www.kunstmuseumbern.ch

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