DIE HOCHFEILER OR GRAN PILASTRO BY AUGUST STRINDBERG

-

AUGUST STRINDBERG (1849-1912)
The Hochfeiler or Gran Pilastro (3,510 m -11,520 ft)
Austria - Italy border
 

In Alpine Landscape Austria, oil on canvas, Private collection

The artist
Johan August Strindberg known to be a famous  Swedish playwright was also  a novelist a poet, an essayist and a painter. Strindberg, something of a polymath, was also a telegrapher, theosophist, photographer and alchemist!  Painting and photography offered vehicles for his belief that chance played a crucial part in the creative process. Strindberg's paintings were unique for their time, and went beyond those of his contemporaries for their radical lack of adherence to visual reality. The 117 paintings that are acknowledged as his were mostly painted within the span of a few years, and are now seen by some as among the most original works of 19th-century art. Today, his best-known pieces are stormy, expressionist seascapes, selling at high prices in auction houses. Though Strindberg was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, and was thus familiar with modern trends, the spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of his landscapes and seascapes can be ascribed also to the fact that he painted only in periods of personal crisis. Anders Zorn also did a portrait.
Strindberg's interest in photography resulted, among other things, in a large number of arranged self-portraits in various environments, which now number among the best-known pictures of him. Strindberg also embarked on a series of camera-less images, using an experimental quasi-scientific approach. He produced a type of photogram that encouraged the development and growth of crystals on the photographic emulsion, sometimes exposed for lengthy periods to heat or cold in the open air or at night facing the stars. The suggestiveness of these, which he called Celestographs, provided an object for contemplation, and he noted: "Today, in these days of x-rays, the miracle was that neither a camera nor a lens was used. For me this means a great opportunity to demonstrate the real circumstances by means of my photographs made without a camera and lens, recording the firmament in early spring 1894."
His interest in the occult in the 1890s finds sympathy with the chance quality of these images, but for him they are also scientific. In 1895 Strindberg met Camille Flammarion and became a member of the Société astronomique de France. He gave some of his experimental astronomical photographs to the Society

The mountain
The Hochfeiler 3,510 m (11,520 ft) called Gran Pilastro in italian is a mountain, 3,510 metres high, and the highest peak in the Zillertal Alps on the border between Tyrol, Austria, and South Tyrol, Italy.

___________________________________________

2021 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau