Hodler coin
Biography
Swiss painter.
Ferdinand hodler biography gallery images Born in a poor family. Father, Jean Hodler, worked as a carpenter, his mother, Marguerite nee of Neukomm, Neukomm hails from a peasant family. At the age of 8 years lost his father and two younger brothers died of tuberculosis. Mother married the decorative painter, but in , also died of tuberculosis. Up to 10 years stepfather taught Hodler decorative painting, then he was sent to Thun, where he studied with a local painter, Ferdinand Sommer.The oeuvre Ferdinand Hodler, who is held to be one of the foremost Central European Symbolist painters of the late nineteenth century, was shaped by his personal conception of the world, underpinned by the principles of symmetry and rhythm.
He came from a poor family and lost both of his parents at an early age. He received his first training from Ferdinand Sommer (), a painter from Thun who produced lake and mountain landscape views for tourists.
In or Hodler moved to Geneva to attend lectures in natural science at the Collège de Genève and to copy paintings by Alexandre Calame and François Diday in the museum there. In he became a pupil of Barthélemy Menn () at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and while there undertook an intensive study of Dürer's writings on proportions.
In he travelled to Madrid, spending almost a year there, and was strongly influenced by the Spanish landscape and by the works of such masters as Titian,Poussin,Claude,Velázquez and Goya in the Museo del Prado. He returned to Switzerland in , having learnt to lighten his colour.
On returning to Switzerland he was introduced to the Symbolist trends in French painting by the poet Louis Duchosal.
Ferdinand hodler biography gallery One of the key figures of modernism, Ferdinand Hodler is the leading Swiss artist of the turn of the twentieth century. Allying Swiss landscape painting with the most advanced currents of modern art, in ferment around across Europe, Hodler led a successful international career, exhibiting regularly in Paris and avant-garde milieus like the Berlin, Munich and Vienna Secessions. A native of Berne, Ferdinand Hodler was born in an impoverished family. He trained in decorative painting and in his youth executed views of the Bernese Oberland aimed at the burgeoning tourist market. A fascination with eurythmics, indebted to modern dance, influenced his syncopated manner of depicting large groups of figures.Thenceforward his works reinforced this aspect and were centred on representing states of mind and man's main philosophical concerns. Dating from this stage in his development is Night, executed in (Berne, Kunstmuseum Bern), a painting related to the idea of death and sleep, which enjoyed success at the Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris in A subsequent series of twenty-seven life-sized figures from Swiss history, painted from life, marked the start of his career as a painter of the Swiss national imaginary and the beginning of the considerable appreciation he still enjoys in his country of birth.
Hodler took part in the Berlin Secession in , in the Munich Secession in , and a year later showed his works together with those of Edvard Munch and Axel Gallén at the Vienna Secession.
During the last years of his life he ended up becoming one of the most innovative muralists of the period, with works such as those executed for the University of Jena in and Hanover council in
He died in Geneva in