FERDINAND HODLER (1853-1918)
Les Dents Blanches / La Dent du Barme (2,759m - 9,051ft)
France - Switzerland border
In Les Dents Blanches in Champery, oil on canvas, 1916, Private collection
The mountain
Les Dents Blanches (The White Teeth) is a mountain range made up of 9 peaks between Champery in Switzerland and Sixt-Fer-à-Cheval (France), in the Giffre massif and overlooking the Illiez valley. The highest peak, Dent de Barme, rises to 2,759m.
Like its neighbor the Tour des Dents du Midi, the Tour des Dents Blanches takes place in stages and over several days. The complete loop covers 44.4 km and has a cumulative elevation of 8,400 meters. This tour exists since 1983 thanks to a collective work of different regions and huts. Together they carried out the tracing of the route, its markup and the securing of certain passages.
With its 4 mountain lakes, the Dents Blanches are the delight of nature lovers. The ibex have made Pas de l'Ours their privileged habitat and marmots are not lacking in appeal. Other treasures of fauna such as ptarmigan and bearded vulture can also be obs
The painter
Ferdinand Hodler is one of the best-known Swiss painters of the 19th century. His early works were portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings in a realistic style. Later, he adopted a personal form of symbolism he called Parallelism.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century his work evolved to combine influences from several genres including Symbolism and Art Nouveau. In 1890 he completed Night, a work that marked Hodler's turn toward symbolist imagery. It depicts several recumbent figures, all of them relaxed in sleep except for an agitated man who is menaced by a figure shrouded in black, which Hodler intended as a symbol of death. Hodler developed a style he called "Parallelism" that emphasized the symmetry and rhythm he believed formed the basis of human society. In paintings such as The Chosen One, groupings of figures are symmetrically arranged in poses suggestive of ritual or dance.
Hodler painted number of large-scale historical paintings, often with patriotic themes. In 1897 he accepted a commission to paint a series of large frescoes for the Weapons Room of the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum in Zurich. The compositions he proposed, including The Battle of Marignan which depicted a battle that the Swiss lost, were controversial for their imagery and style, and Hodler was not permitted to execute the frescoes until 1900.
Hodler's work in his final phase took on an expressionist aspect with strongly coloured and geometrical figures. Landscapes were pared down to essentials, sometimes consisting of a jagged wedge of land between water and sky
_________________________________________
2020 - Wandering Vertexes...
Un blog de Francis Rousseau
