Ruth Leon recommends… Hodler’s Kien Valley with the Bluemlisalp Massif  – National Gallery

Hodler’s Kien Valley with the Bluemlisalp Massif  – National Gallery

 Christopher Riopelle, the National Gallery’s Curator of Post -1800 Paintings enthusiastically introduces us to a painter I have to admit I’d never heard of. Who is, or was, Ferdinand Hodler?  

A native of Berne, Hodler was the leading Swiss artist of the turn of the 20th century.   Hodler spent the summer of 1902 in the Bernese Oberland, painting landscapes in and of the Kien Valley. He aimed to paint what he called the ‘essential structure’ of the landscape, ‘liberated from all unimportant details’.

Drawing on the Swiss landscape tradition but equally engaging with the international avant-garde, Hodler allied Swiss painting with the most advanced currents of modern art.  This work depicts the Kien Valley looking towards the Bluemlisalp mountain range. The painting is unique among Hodler’s works, as he chose a striking vertical format for the canvas, exaggerating the steep peaks and the interlacing of the foothills.  With its intense, vibrant colours, decorative clouds and a stacking of motifs, the painting calls to mind Picasso and Braque’s Cubist landscapes, as well as Japanese woodblock prints
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Fervently admired almost as a patriotic obligation in Switzerland but for a half century little noted beyond its borders, the critical reassessment of Hodler abroad began in the 1970s. Along with Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and others, Hodler is today regarded as a key figure of a distinctly Northern European modernist tradition largely independent of Paris.

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