The art of Ferdinand Hodler typifies the European fin-de siecle interest in evocative self-expression. In both his landscape and allegorical works, Hodler used the rhythms of contour lines and patterned color to suggest the Symbolist themes of emotional despair and spiritual hope.

The subject of this black-and-white print is a young girl seated in a field of flowers, head upturned and eyes closed. Altough the gestures suggest a dream, her pose is, in fact, quite uncomfortable and has taut contours which define her form to grant considerable tension to the print.

In numerous ways, Hodler's life and art bear a striking resemblance to that of his Norwegian contemporary Edvard Munch. Like Munch, Hodler was a singular artist and becasue he lived in Switzerland, the artist worked in a country outside the mainstrean of European artistic culture. As did Munch, Hodler consistently expressed his very personal and profound confrontation with death and despair through art.

Hodler was born in Bern, Switzerland in 1853, the oldest of six children. His was a family ravaged by tuberculosis; by the age of fourteen, Hodler had lost both his parents and all his brothers and sisters to the disease. He moved permanently to Generva in 1872, studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. After years of poverty he achieved a measure of success in the later 1890s. Hodler died in Geneva in 1918.

Source: Bulletin, November-December, 1983.