Ferdinand Hodler made his reputation with Night, but could he find his way into the light? The Morgan Library brings out his public aspirations and darker private longings, through October 1.
His 1890 painting had shocked and delighted Paris with its mural scale and sheer gloom. It made the Swiss artist, already well into his thirties, a central figure in Symbolism, in the world capital of the movement’s art and poetry. Could he now encompass the remainder of the day? Day took a decade of planning and execution, and it survives today in studies and fragments—from an earlier version at that. To Paul Klee, he was “a depicter of people, who knows how to portray the soul by means of the body like few others,” but with so light a body and so dark a soul. 
In truth, Hodler had little taste for sunlight and joy. He was at heart a figure painter, much as he also indulged in landscape. Figures have wide-open, ill-defined backgrounds, if that. A portrait sketch brings the subject so close that his head rivals in size the body, with little room for anything else. In studies for history paintings, the background merely adds more figures, like marching soldiers behind young men flexing their muscles and dressing for war. In an allegory like Day, five women at a distance are the subject.
As for joy, he finds at last his Joyful Woman with a full-length dancer around 1911. Even then, though, she has the languid look of such predecessors as Gustave Moreau, and her very commitment to modern dance requires that she turn away without a glance or a smile. Of the women in Day, all but one bury their face in their hands, while the other, at center, lowers her eyes and raises her arms, elbows out. She might be pointing to her head and to stranger thoughts within—or she might be posing as Atlas, bearing the world on her shoulders. But then the mind alone for Hodler contains the weight of the world. In landscape, the Alps become ice mountains floating in a blue mist like a mystic sea.
What, then, was his place in art? The Morgan seeks an answer in loans from the Musée Jenisch in Vevey, on Lake Geneva. While most are drawings, it has enough oils to show his range, including a second fragment of Day from the Detroit Institute of Arts. The curator starts with Hodler as a history painter, with classically robust bodies and scenes of war. He may have made an impact in Paris, but his heart lay at home, and he is still best known from Swiss collections. Scenes include centuries of struggle for Swiss independence, plus the Napoleonic wars, seen as a “war of liberation.”
Next comes the Symbolist, from a contemporary of Odilon Redon and an heir to Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. He also looks forward to Symbolism in modern art, like that of Edvard Munch and Hilma af Klint. The Morgan sees his early work as more realist than escapist and his late work as close to abstraction, which is news to me, but af Klint really did anticipate abstract painting. At the very least, sharp planes of color on the dancer’s dress and portrait approach Fauvism’s “painting of disquiet.” The show concludes with portraits and landscapes. It might be better, though, to see all these genres as one, from his earliest studies to his death in 1918.
In combat, for all his patriotism, Hodler foregrounds the wounded and armies in retreat. Portraits, too, mix tenderness and pain. His wife, Berthe, has piercing eyes and a wisp of hair on her forehead like a spider tattoo. She also ages frankly. Drawings of his lover, Valentine Godé-Darel, show her on her deathbed. I cannot say whether Hodler shares Picasso’s sexism, but these were long loves, and his wife adopted his soon motherless child.
For Hodler, sadness and Symbolism alike depend on rhythms in art, what he called parallelism. That is why figures so often line up in rows. Silhouettes in wartime could come right off a Grecian urn, while later figures recycle earlier studies as cutouts, with brand new rhythms. (He may have cut fragments from that earlier version of Day for a more commercial reason, for sale.) They also depend on his one consistent subject, the body. The Morgan quotes Klee, a countryman, to introduce his portraits, but he struggled all his life with body and soul.