Angst in Oil

...The artist's fascination with parallel lines that he saw as ever-present in nature...

...Lesser masters are often more interesting to write about than the greats: One can observe their work in a more relaxed way and derive from it a greater empathy with the historical period (and enjoy the silly but pleasant illusion of making a personal discovery...

...Now Peter Selz, Director of the University Art Museum in Berkeley, has joined with Eva Wyler to mount an exhibition of Hodler's paintings at the Guggenheim (through April 8...

...Indeed, to see the pictures spiraling down the Guggenheim's ramp is to savor whiffs of Vienna-before-all-the-wars, though they show a crude personal strength atypical of the period...

...There was scarcely a time when he was not surrounded by death...

...Whatever his style, Hodler was a very tense painter...

...At one time angst was to Northern and Central Europeans what the liver was to the French...

...This is an odd interpretation of the evidence, since his father was a skilled artisan and the child received elementary and secondary schooling...

...In 1891 the Paris Salon clu Chanip-de-Mars accepted one of his mural-sized efforts...

...some preliminary sketches of soldiers for his canvas The Departure of the Volunteers in 1813...

...The German historian Werner von Haftmann, on the other hand, has cited Hodler's ability to make "eloquent expressive gestures and eurythmics...

...What is most interesting to me about Hodler and subsequent Germanic painters is a kind of awkwardness, born not of ineptness but of tension...

...When I look at the night, that is another instance of a large expanse.'' Perhaps something has been lost in translation...

...These masterly schematic studies resemble the work of a young follower, Egon Schiele...

...The catalogue generally avoids the question of influence, treating Hodler more as an artist working parallel with his contemporaries...

...Hodler's life was the embodiment of morbid romanticism...

...John Rewald once described Hodler's allegorical figures as "congealed in solemn gestures . . . [revealing] their emotions with the studied attitudes of actors...

...There were many like him groping in what now seems to us the dark passage between the heights of 19th-and 20th-century accomplishments...

...He was able to stay with the French composer Henri Giroud, and he enrolled at the Beaux Arts school, winning a prize for clay modeling the following year...

...Perhaps the reason is that it questions cozy humanistic illusions in a way the most outrageous inventions of the Parisian stars never did...

...To judge from samples of his writing, however, it is true that Hodler was not very bright and was given to making banal observations in a rather windy style: "When I am on the sea, I can only see sky and water, a long line of infinite horizon...

...Two mistresses died from lingering illnesses, both avidly recorded by the artist...

...Rewald went on, made the figures "appear like prisoners of their roles who were never quite permitted to express their own feelings...

...beneath this tight skin rumbles a tide of emotion trying to get out...

...Naturally, the small works are the best, but it is likely the large compositions will attract the most attention, since they have a kinky erotic quality that can be related to current realism...

...Toward the end, he was using a fine oil line on paper, modeling only the head on the pillow in simple planes of color...

...The death by can-;er of his second and best-loved mistress is documented in some detail, and it is quite distressing to watch the magnificent bones of her head become progressively more apparent...

...Contours are sharply drawn and impasto applied meticulously with small brushes...

...His drab early works are diligent applications of lessons learned from the old masters...

...Now that the abyss is closing and the avant-garde has metamorphosed into the academy, painters like Hodler are getting a fairer shake...

...The central, seventh figure Another self-portrait is awakening to find Death in a black shroud on top of him...

...As far as can be deduced through the folds of drapery, it is molesting him sexually...

...Most of his family was wiped out by tuberculosis...

...Considering his art spoiled by Jugendstil soulfulness von Haftmann proceeded to dismiss Hodler with an unfavorable comparison to Toulouse-Lautrec: "It is the same old story: The French artist processes his material and distills his arabesque from it...

...This resulted in his election to the So-cicte N.itional des Artistes Francais and brought him to the attention of Puvis de Chavanncs and Sir Pcia-r dan, founder of the Rose-Croix Esthetique...

...An era of work previously treated as the underbelly of modern art has taken a more prominent place in Western culture...

...there are no second thoughts...

...None of these should be missed...

...Men as disparate as Oskar Kokoschka and Gustav Klimt, who could draw as a bird flies, appear to have frequently seized up (in their different times and fashions) when confronted by a canvas...

...It seems to have been a regional problem, even an ethnic one...

...Alongside Van Gogh, Seurat and Gauguin, they look like oddities of academic orientation, having wound up on the wrong side of an abyss that had opened earlier between the avant-garde and the salon...

...Klimt would produce stilted, overdecorated pictures that sagged compositionally...

...Hodler obviously falls into this category...

...Regardless, these exhumations make absorbing and refreshing viewing...

...after contact with French ideas, he developed a hard, high-keyed clarity of his own...

...the German idealizes his instinct and stylizes...

...He had, in addition, a rather late-Italian penchant for painting himself mid-expression, and one cannot help marveling at how long he must have held his eyebrows raised while depositing dab after dab of very efficient paint...

...From then on his work, whether large or small, was much in demand...

...Selz also notes that Hodler made the trip from Bern to Geneva on foot, with no money and only a smattering of French...

...Apart from the fact that this may not have been so uncommon in those days, the chronology once again weakens the case for romantic suffering...

...Nonetheless, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he was affected by Van Gogh, Rodin, Cezanne, and Puvis at various times, or to miss his affinity with Munch...

...After studying Diirer and Holbein, among other masters, the young man began painting landscapes and religious compositions...

...and a page with three simplified dancers spaced exactly right with arms raised...

...Kokoschka could worry paint until it was mud...

...Unlike his fellow-countrymen Henry Fuseli, Paul Klec...

...Moreover, it does provide historical precedence for the New Repulsive-ness in all the arts...

...Each blunt graphite stroke has been perfectly estimated...

...Now it has become virtually universal...

...He was thus indirectly exposed to the latest French developments...

...Le Corbusier, and Alberto Giacometti (to whose younger brother he was godfather), he achieved success without having to emigrate...

...Stressing his portraits and landscapes, the collection focuses on Hodler's more attractive, less formal side, 'fn the same spirit, Selz' introduction to the catalogue endeavors to make him interesting as a character by presenting his background as unusually proletarian, uneducated for an artist, and wretchedly poor...

...He was born in Bern in 1853, moved to Geneva at age 19...

...Of course, it can also be seen as a case of historians and curators becoming so desperate for subject matter that they are strip-mining overlooked talent...

...They were all drawn at the beginning of Hodler's last decade, when he was at his peak, participating in international exhibitions and doing innumerable commissions...

...One may still prefer to loll in Matisse's "armchair," but there is no denying the fascination exerted by this other mode...

...The landscapes range from near-monochromatic alpine studies, very brisk and fresh, to later scenes of lakes showing a preoccupation with pattern and stylization...

...He may or may not have been a susceptible individual, but such shifts are very much a part of the uneasy fin-de-siecle...

...By the time of his first show in 1885, Hodler had acquired a circle of friends.that included a Symbolist poet named Louis Duchosal and other Paris-oriented people...

...The fierce, brightly lit lemons, blues and purples in these paintings suggest a latitude to the north of Switzerland and have a mystical quality that is quite hypnotizing...

...One of its manifestations is a disjunction between drawing and painting...

...Other high points are found among the drawings: an exquisite profile of his major mistress...

...After closing here, the show will travel to Harvard University's Busch-Reisinger Museum...

...but said these are "marred to some extent by shrill rhetoric" and grandiosity...

...and remained there until his death in 1918...

...The conventional financial difficulties were alleviated by occasional prizes, and there is no mention of his having to earn a living in any other line of work...

...Epitomizing his character are the many self-portraits from all stages...

...Night, for instance, the pivotal salon picture with its six seminude figures laid horizontally in shallow perspective, is peculiar indeed...

...His work, said to have exerted 'considerable influence on the Central European Secessionist school, often shows up in books about Symbolism and Art Nouveau...