EIGER, MÖNCH & JUNGRAU PEINTS PAR FERDINAND HODLER

 

FERDINAND HODLER (1853-1918)

La Jungfrau (4,158 m - 13, 642 ft)  

Le  Mönch (4,107 m - 13,474 ft)

L'Eiger (3,970 m -13,020 ft)

Suisse

In  L’Eiger, le Mönch et la Jungfrau vus de Beatenberg aus, 1910, 1910, collection privée

Les montagnes
Le Mönch (4 107 m) (Le Moine) est une montagne des Alpes bernoises, en Suisse. Le Mönch se situe à la frontière entre les cantons du Valais et de Berne et fait partie d'une crête montagneuse entre la Jungfrau et le Jungfraujoch à l'ouest et l'Eiger à l'est. Le versant nord du Mönch forme un mur en escalier au-dessus de la vallée de Lauterbrunnen. Le tunnel ferroviaire de la Jungfrau passe juste sous le sommet, à une altitude d'environ 3 300 mètres (10 830 pieds). Le sommet a été escaladé pour la première fois il y a 159 ans en 1857 le 15 août, par Christian Almer, Christian Kaufmann, Ulrich Kaufmann et Sigismund Porges.

L'Eiger (3 970 m) est situé dans les Alpes bernoises, surplombant Grindelwald et Lauterbrunnen dans l'Oberland bernois, juste au nord du bassin versant principal et à la frontière avec le Valais. C'est le sommet le plus à l'est d'une crête qui s'étend à travers le Mönch jusqu'à la Jungfrau à (4 158 m-13 642 ft), constituant l'un des sites les plus emblématiques des Alpes suisses. La caractéristique la plus remarquable de l'Eiger est sa face nord de roche et de glace de 1 800 mètres de haut - 5 900 pieds, appelée Eigerwand ou Nordwand, qui est la plus grande face nord des Alpes. Cette immense face domine la station de Kleine Scheidegg à sa base, sur le col homonyme reliant les deux vallées.
La première ascension de l'Eiger a été réalisée par les guides suisses Christian Almer et Peter Bohren et l'Irlandais Charles Barrington, qui ont escaladé le flanc ouest le 11 août 1858.

 

La Jungfrau (4'158 m ) ("La Vierge" en allemand) est l'un des principaux sommets des Alpes bernoises, situé entre le canton nord de Berne et le canton sud du Valais, à mi-chemin entre Interlaken et Fiesch. Avec l'Eiger et le Mönch, la Jungfrau forme un mur massif surplombant l'Oberland bernois et le plateau suisse, l'un des sites les plus distinctifs des Alpes suisses. C'est l'un des sommets les plus représentés par les artistes avec le Cervin et le Mont Blanc. Le sommet a été atteint pour la première fois le 3 août 1811 par les frères Meyer d'Aarau et deux chasseurs de chamois du Valais. L'ascension fait suite à une longue expédition sur les glaciers et les hauts cols des Alpes bernoises. Ce n'est qu'en 1865 qu'une route plus directe côté nord est ouverte. La construction du chemin de fer de la Jungfrau au début du XXe siècle, qui relie Kleine Scheidegg au Jungfraujoch, la selle entre le Mönch et la Jungfrau, a fait de la région l'un des endroits les plus visités des Alpes. Avec le glacier d'Aletsch au sud, la Jungfrau fait partie de la région Jungfrau-Aletsch, qui a été déclarée site du patrimoine mondial en 2001.

Le peintre
Ferdinand Hodler était l'un des peintres suisses les plus connus du XIXe siècle. Ses premières œuvres étaient des portraits, des paysages et des peintures de genre dans un style réaliste. Plus tard, il adopta une forme personnelle de symbolisme qu'il appela Parallélisme.
Au cours de la dernière décennie du 19e siècle, son travail a évolué pour combiner les influences de plusieurs genres, dont le symbolisme et l'Art nouveau. En 1890, il achève Night, une œuvre qui marque le tournant de Hodler vers l'imagerie symboliste. Il représente plusieurs gisants, tous détendus dans le sommeil, à l'exception d'un homme agité qui est menacé par une silhouette enveloppée de noir, que Hodler a conçue comme un symbole de mort. Hodler a développé un style qu'il a appelé «parallélisme» qui mettait l'accent sur la symétrie et le rythme qui, selon lui, formaient la base de la société humaine. Dans des peintures telles que The Chosen One , des groupements de personnages sont disposés symétriquement dans des poses évoquant un rituel ou une danse.
Hodler a peint un certain nombre de peintures historiques à grande échelle, souvent avec des thèmes patriotiques. En 1897, il accepte une commande pour peindre une série de grandes fresques pour la salle d'armes du Schweizerisches Landesmuseum de Zurich. Les compositions qu'il a proposées, y compris La bataille de Marignan qui dépeignait une bataille perdue par les Suisses, étaient controversées pour leur imagerie et leur style, et Hodler n'a été autorisé à exécuter les fresques qu'en 1900.
L'œuvre de Hodler dans sa phase finale prend un aspect expressionniste avec des figures fortement colorées et géométriques. Les paysages sont réduits à l'essentiel, constitués parfois d'un coin de terre déchiqueté entre l'eau et le ciel. 

 

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2023 - Wandering Vertexes ....
Errant au-dessus des Sommets Silencieux...
Un blog de Francis Rousseau 

THE WETTERHORN PAINTED BY ALEXANDRE CALAME

ALEXANDRE CALAME (1810-1864)
The Wetterhorn (3,692m-12,113ft)
Switzerland

In "In het Berner Oberland" (1847) Oil on canvas, 78 x 100 cm , Amsterdam Museum

The Mountain
The Wetterhorn (3,692m-12,113ft) in the Bernese Alps, towers above the village of Grindelwald. Formerly known as Hasle Jungfrau, it is one of three summits of a mountain named Wetterhorn sensu lato, or the "Wetterhцrner", the highest summit of which is the Mittelhorn (3,704 m) and the most distant the Rosenhorn (3,689 m). The Mittelhorn and Rosenhorn are mostly hidden from view from Grindelwald. The Grosse Scheidegg Pass crosses the col to the north, between the Wetterhorn and the Schwarzhorn.
Climbing
The Wetterhorn summit was first reached on August 31, 1844, by the Grindelwald guides Hans Jaun and Melchior Bannholzer, three days after they had co-guided a large party organized by the geologist Edouard Desor to the first ascent of the Rosenhorn. The Mittelhorn was first summitted on 9 July 1845 by the same guides, this time accompanied by a third guide, Kaspar Abplanalp, and by Stanhope Templeman Speer. The son of a Scottish physician, Speer lived in Interlaken, Switzerland.
A September 1854 ascent by a party including Alfred Wills is much celebrated in Great Britain. Apparently believing to be the first ascendant, Wills' description of this trip in his book "Wanderings Among the High Alps" (published in 1856) helped make mountaineering fashionable in Britain and ushered in the systematic exploration of the Alps by British mountaineers, the so-called golden age of alpinism.  Despite several well-documented earlier ascents and the fact that he was guided to the top, even in his obituary in 1912 he was considered to be "certainly the first who can be said with any confidence to have stood upon the real highest peak of the Wetterhorn proper" (i.e. the 3,692 m summit).  In a subsequent corrigendum, the editors admitted two earlier ascents, but considered his still "the first completely successful" one.
In 1866, Lucy Walker was the first documented female ascendant of the peak.
The 24-year-old English mountaineer William Penhall and his Meiringen guide Andreas Maurer were killed by an avalanche high up on the Wetterhorn on 3 August 1882.
The famed guide and Grindelwald native Christian Almer climbed the mountain many times in his life, including on his first of many trips with Meta Brevoort and her nephew W. A. B. Coolidge in 1868. His last ascent was in 1898 at the age of 70 together with his wife to celebrate their golden anniversary on top.  Winston Churchill is also supposed  to have climbed the Wetterhorn in 1894.

The painter
Alexandre Calame was a Swiss painter. He was the son of a skillful marble worker in Vevey. His father lost the family fortune, and Alexandre Calame was forced to work in a bank at the age of 15. When his father fell from a building and then died, the young Calame provided for his mother.
In his spare time he began to practice drawing small views of Switzerland. In 1829 he met his patron, the banker Diodati, who made it possible for him to study under landscape painter François Diday. After a few months he decided to devote himself fully to art.
In 1835, he began exhibiting his Swiss-Alps and forest paintings in Paris and Berlin. He became quite well known, especially in Germany, although Calame was more a drawer than an illustrator. He is associated with the Dusseldorf school of painting. In 1842 he went to Paris and displayed his works Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, the Brienzersee, the Monte Rosa and Mont Cervin. He taught in Geneva, where Adolf Mosengel was one of his pupils.
He went to Italy in 1844 and brought back from Rome and Naples countless paintings, among them one of the ruins of Paestum (in the city museum in Leipzig). He showed that he was capable of understanding Italian nature; but the Alps remained his speciality.
The glaciers, emerald-green, white foaming mountain water, which split the trees during the storm, and the whipped clouds, the multi-colored rocks, half masked from fog, in the rays of the gleaming sun, are those things, which he knew to be true to nature.
One of his most ingenious works is the representation of the four seasons and times of the day in four landscapes, a spring morning in the south, a summer midday in the Nordic flatlands, an Autumn evening, and a winter night on a mountain. He became popular with these large works, and his popularity grew with smaller pieces and lithographies, namely 18 studies of Lauterbrunnen and Meiringen and the 24 sheets of Alpine passes. These were widespread in France, England, and Germany and are still today used to teach this style of painting.
He died in Menton, France in 1864. An exhibition featuring more than thirty of Calame's paintings was held at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 2006.

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2020 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau

LES GRANDES JORASSES BY NOEL ROOKE

 NOEL ROOKE (1881-1953) 

 Les Grandes Jorasses ( 4,208m -13, 806 ft) 

 France - Italy border  

 In Les Grandes Jorasses et la Mer de Glace.

The mountain 

The Grandes Jorasses (4,208 m - 13,806 ft) is a mountain in the Mont Blanc massif, on the boundary between Haute-Savoie in France and Aosta Valley in Italy.  Les Grandes Jorasses are, simply speaking, the most strikingly complex and powerful structure of the entire Mont Blanc massif. If Mt. Blanc is the king of the Alps, the Grandes Jorasses complex is truly the queen.
The summits on the mountain (from east to west) are:
- Pointe Walker (4,208 m; 13,806 ft), named after Horace Walker, who made the first ascent of the mountain.
- Pointe Whymper (4,184 m; 13,727 ft), he second-highest summit named after Edward Whymper, who made the first ascent.
- Pointe Croz (4,110 m - 13,484 ft), named after Michel Croz, a guide from Chamonix.
- Pointe Elena (4,045 m -13,271 ft), named after Princess Elena of Savoy.
- Pointe Margherita (4,065 m- 13,337),named after Queen Margherita of Savoy, wife of King Umberto I of Italy
- Pointe Young (3,996 m - 13,110 ft)   named after Geoffrey Winthrop Young.
The first ascent of the highest peak of the mountain (Pointe Walker) was by Horace Walker with guides Melchior Anderegg, Johann Jaun and Julien Grange on 30 June 1868. The second-highest peak on the mountain (Pointe Whymper )was first climbed by Edward Whymper, Christian Almer, Michel Croz and Franz Biner on June 24, 1865, using what has become the normal route of ascent and the one followed by Walker's party in 1868.
North Face
Located on the French side of the mountain, the north face is one of the three great north faces of the Alps, along with the north faces of the Eiger and the Cervin/Matterhorn (known as 'the Trilogy'). One of the most famous walls in the Alps, it towers 1200 m (3,900 ft) above the Leschaux Glacier, stretching 1 km from end to end. The classic route on the face is the Walker Spur (Cassin/Esposito/Tizzoni, 1938, TD+/ED1, IV, 5c/6a, A1, 1200 m) which leads directly to the summit of Pointe Walker. The other major buttress on the mountain is the Croz Spur, which leads to the summit of Pointe Croz. In her solo ascents of the six most difficult north faces of the Alps, Alison Hargreaves chose this route in preference to the Walker Spur.
South face
On the Italian side of the mountain, the south face can be accessed from the Boccalatte cabin, above the hamlet of Planpincieux in the Italian Val Ferret, part of the  municipality.
Summit ridge.
From the Col des Hirondelles, the summit ridge connects Pt. Walker to the other summit points and then descends to the Col des Grandes Jorasses where a bivouac shelter is located - the Bivouac E Canzio hut. The ridge forms the French-Italian border, almost all of which is above 4,000 m -13,000 ft).

The artist 
Noel Rooke  was an English wood engraver and artist. His ideas and teaching made a major contribution to the revival of British wood engraving in the twentieth century. Rooke was born in Acton, in London, where he would remain all of his life. His father was Thomas Matthews Rooke, for many years the studio assistant of Edward Burne-Jones, and an accomplished artist in his own right. He completed his education at the Slade and the Central School of Arts and Crafts.
In 1920 Rooke helped to found the Society of Wood Engravers and exhibited with the society from 1920-1933. In the same year he became an associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers. As a result of his teaching, his own production was comparatively small - wood engraved, line drawn and watercolour illustrations, individual prints, posters and paintings, many of which reflect his passion for mountains. He described himself as one who draws mountains and also climbs them.  Margaret Pilkington remembers classes where Rooke dwelt on the dramatic contrasts of dark rock and snow covered sunlit slopes, on the angularity of line and on the possibilities of abstraction presented by such scenes.
He produced colour plates for two books by Robert Louis Stevenson - An Inland Voyage (1908) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1909) - and a King Penguin book on Flowers of Marsh and Stream (1946).  The final judgement on Rooke as a wood engraver goes to Douglas Percy Bliss, who wrote of Vivien Gribble and Rooke: If their work had more verve and vitality they would be among the best book -decorators of our time.

LE MONT ROSE PEINT PAR ALEXANDRE CALAME

ALEXANDRE CALAME (1810-1864)
Le Mont Rose  (4 634 m)
Suisse- Italie 

In Le Mont Rose, Huile sur toile 1843, 110x151cm, Musée d'art et d'histoire, Ville de Genève.

La montagne
Le mont Rose, (4 634 m) appelé depuis peu Massif du Mont-Rose, situé à la frontière entre la Suisse et l'Italie, estle )lus haut sommet de Suisse à la Pointe Dufour. lI est aussi deuxième plus haut massif des Alpesaprès celui du Mont-Blanc. Il est le quatrième plus haut sommet des Alpes. Le mont Rose comporte onze pics distincts : la pointe Dufour : 4 634 m ; la pointe Dunant : 4 632 m ; le Nordend : 4 608 m ; la pointe Zumstein ou Zumsteinspitze : 4 562 m ; la Signalkuppe ou pointe Gnifetti : 4 553 m ; la pointe Parrot : 4 434 m ; e Ludwigshöhe : 4 342 m ;  la tête Noire : 4 318 m ; la pyramide Vincent : 4 215 m ; le Balmenhorn : 4 167 m ; la pointe Giordani : 4 046 m. 

Le peintre
Alexandre Calame, est un peintre et graveur suisse. Alexandre Calame, enfant, de constitution chétive, s'est trouvé très tôt orphelin de père et a eu la malchance de perdre un œil à la suite de coups reçus d'un camarade. Dès l'âge de 15 ans, il commence à gagner sa vie dans la banque Diodati.
Dès son enfance, il manifeste son talent artistique et, pour aider sa mère, se met à peindre des vues suisses que les touristes achètent à titre de souvenir. Faisant œuvre de mécènes, les patrons de la banque lui permettent de fréquenter dès 1829 l'atelier du peintre genevois François Diday. Il quitte bientôt son travail administratif pour se consacrer entièrement à la peinture, et celle-ci rencontre rapidement du succès
En 1835, il ouvre une classe de dessin à Genève, en même temps qu'il expose dans cette ville et à Paris. Le premier tableau qu'il présente à Genève, Cours du Griffe, attire l'attention sur lui. Dès lors, il peut vivre de son art, caractérisé par une fidélité jamais démentie à un même sujet: la Nature, avec une prédilection pour le paysage alpestre suisse. Il devient le maître incontesté du paysage alpin. En 1837, il réalise son premier grand tableau, Orage sur la Handeck, qui lui vaut la médaille d'or de l'Exposition des beaux-arts de la ville de Paris (1841). En 1842, il reçoit la croix de la Légion d'honneur, à la suite de l'exposition de ses œuvres, dont : le Mont Cervin,  le Lac de Brienz, le Mont Blanc et le Mont Rose. Ce dernier tableau est considéré comme son chef-d'œuvre et il marque l'apogée de sa carrière. En 1853, Napoléon III lui achète pour 15 000 francs-or sa toile Le Lac des Quatre-Cantons, primée à l'Exposition universelle1. Calame fait de nombreux voyages dans l'Oberland, en Italie, en Allemagne, en Belgique, à Londres et en Hollande mais sa santé devenant de plus en plus précaire, ses campagnes de peintre paysagiste ne lui étaient de moins en moins permises. En 1863, le peintre tombe malade et son médecin lui conseille d'aller sous un ciel plus clément. Il alla séjourner dans le Midi de la France, à Menton où il meurt le 17 mars 1864. L'artiste ne s'adonne pas seulement à la peinture mais également à l'art de la lithographie et à celui de l'eau-forte. Selon l'historienne d'art genevoise Valentina Anker, il existerait plus de 400 grands tableaux, 250 aquarelles, 500 études, 670 dessins et croquis, plus de 100 sépias et une vingtaine de fusains.

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2023 - Gravir les montagnes en peinture
Un blog de Francis Rousseau

 

THE JUNGFRAU MASSIF PAINTED BY ALEXANDRE CALAME

 

ALEXANDRE CALAME (1810-1864)

The Jungfrau (4,158 m - 13,642 ft)

Switzerland (Valais)

In The Jungfrau Massif and Lauterbrunnen Valley, Bernese Oberland, Switzerland oil on canvas, 50 x 63 cm, John Mitchell gallery, London 

The mountain
The Jungfrau (4,158 m - 13,642 ft) ("The virgin" in german) is one of the main summits of the Bernese Alps, located between the northern canton of Bern and the southern canton of Valais, halfway between Interlaken and Fiesch. Together with the Eiger and Mönch, the Jungfrau forms a massive wall overlooking the Bernese Oberland and the Swiss Plateau, one of the most distinctive sights of the Swiss Alps. It is one of the most represented by artists summits with the Matterhorn and the Mont Blanc. The summit was first reached on August 3, 1811 by the Meyer brothers of Aarau and two chamois hunters from Valais. The ascent followed a long expedition over the glaciers and high passes of the Bernese Alps. It was not until 1865 that a more direct route on the northern side was opened. The construction of the Jungfrau railway in the early 20th century, which connects Kleine Scheidegg to the Jungfraujoch, the saddle between the Mönch and the Jungfrau, made the area one of the most-visited places in the Alps. Along with the Aletsch Glacier to the south, the Jungfrau is part of the Jungfrau-Aletsch area, which was declared a World Heritage Site in 2001.
Politically, the Jungfrau is split between the municipalities of Lauterbrunnen (Bern) and Fieschertal (Valais). It is the third-highest mountain of the Bernese Alps after the nearby Finsteraarhorn and Aletschhorn, respectively 12 and 8 km away. But from Lake Thun, and the greater part of the canton of Bern, it is the most conspicuous and the nearest of the Bernese Oberland peaks; with a height difference of 3,600 m between the summit and the town of Interlaken. This, and the extreme steepness of the north face, secured for it an early reputation for inaccessibility.
The landscapes around the Jungfrau are extremely contrasted. Instead of the vertiginous precipices of the north-west, the south-east side emerges from the upper snows of the Aletsch Glacier at around 3,500 metres. The 20 km long valley of Aletsch on the south-east is completely uninhabited and also surrounded by other similar glacier valleys. The whole area constitutes the largest glaciated area in the Alps as well as in Europe.

The painter
Alexandre Calame was a Swiss painter. He was the son of a skillful marble worker in Vevey. His father lost the family fortune, and Alexandre Calame was forced to work in a bank at the age of 15. When his father fell from a building and then died, the young Calame provided for his mother.
In his spare time he began to practice drawing small views of Switzerland. In 1829 he met his patron, the banker Diodati, who made it possible for him to study under landscape painter François Diday. After a few months he decided to devote himself fully to art.
In 1835, he began exhibiting his Swiss-Alps and forest paintings in Paris and Berlin. He became quite well known, especially in Germany, although Calame was more a drawer than an illustrator. He is associated with the Dusseldorf school of painting. In 1842 he went to Paris and displayed his works Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, the Brienzersee, the Monte Rosa and Mont Cervin. He taught in Geneva, where Adolf Mosengel was one of his pupils.
He went to Italy in 1844 and brought back from Rome and Naples countless paintings, among them one of the ruins of Paestum (in the city museum in Leipzig). He showed that he was capable of understanding Italian nature; but the Alps remained his speciality.
The glaciers, emerald-green, white foaming mountain water, which split the trees during the storm, and the whipped clouds, the multi-colored rocks, half masked from fog, in the rays of the gleaming sun, are those things, which he knew to be true to nature.
One of his most ingenious works is the representation of the four seasons and times of the day in four landscapes, a spring morning in the south, a summer midday in the Nordic flatlands, an Autumn evening, and a winter night on a mountain. He became popular with these large works, and his popularity grew with smaller pieces and lithographies, namely 18 studies of Lauterbrunnen and Meiringen and the 24 sheets of Alpine passes. These were widespread in France, England, and Germany and are still today used to teach this style of painting.
He died in Menton, France in 1864. An exhibition featuring more than thirty of Calame's paintings was held at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 2006.

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2020 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau

 

 

 

THE ZUGSPITZE AND THE WAXENSTEIN BY EMIL NOLDE

EMIL NOLDE (1867-1956) 

Die Zugspitze (2,962m - 9,718 ft) 

Die Waxenstein (2,277m - 7,470ft)

 Germany (Bavaria)

  In  The Zugspitze and Waxenstein, postcard 

About this work 

The postcards series date from  pre-expressionist phase of Nolde’s career (though he was around 30 when he created them). After hiking in the Swiss Alps, Nolde did a painting, Mountain Giants, presenting the mountains in human form. Nolde wrote : “The picture went to the annual exhibition in Munich in 1896. Ferdinand Hodler’s picture “Night”  which established his fame, was also there. But my “Mountain Giants" was soon returned, rejected… In those days there was a general and stormy derision and ridicule about each of Hodler’s pictures. ‘And his colors are as ugly as can be possible!’ What help was my contradiction and my firm conviction that his sinuous, pushing, wry bodies are part of the character of the mountain folk, just as the firs on the mountain slopes are gnarled and grown oddly.” From then, he painted practically every Swiss Alps Summit in human form: the Zugspitze, the Waxenstein, the Eiger, the Monch, the Jungfrau, the Grand Saint- Gothard, Piz Bernina, the Morteratch, the Ortler, the Finsteraarhorn... they will be posted one after one in this blog, the Cervin / Matterhorn being the first one.

The mountain 

The Zugspitze (2,962m -9,718 ft) above sea level, is the highest peak of the Wetterstein Mountains as well as the highest mountain in Germany. It lies south of the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and the border between Germany and Austria runs over its western summit. South of the mountain is the Zugspitzplatt, a high karst plateau with numerous caves. On the flanks of the Zugspitze are three glaciers, including the two largest in Germany: the Northern Schneeferner with an area of 30.7 hectares and the Höllentalferner with an area of 24.7 hectares. The third is the Southern Schneeferner which covers 8.4 hectares.

The Waxenstein (2,277m - 7,470ft) is an Alpine summit, at an altitude of 2,227 m, in the Wetterstein, Germany (Bavaria). It is composed of five points: the Großer Waxenstein ; the Vorderer Waxenstein  ; the Zwölferkopf ; the Mittagscharte and  the Männ.

The painter 

Emil Nolde (born Emil Hansen) was a German-Danish painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke (The Bridge) of Dresden in 1906, and was one of the first oil painting and watercolor painters of the early 20th century to explore color. He is known for his brushwork and expressive choice of colors. Golden yellows and deep reds appear frequently in his work, giving a luminous quality to otherwise somber tones. His watercolors include vivid, brooding storm-scapes and brilliant florals.

2018 - Wandering Vertexes...
Un blog de Francis Rousseau, #BlogWanderingVertexes, #mountainpaintings

BREITHORN PEINT PAR BLANCHE BERTHOUD

 

BLANCHE BERTHOUD  (1864 -1938)
Breithorn (4,165 m-13,664 ft)
Suisse-Italie

In Breithorn, huile sur carton, 25 x 33cm, 1920, Collection privée

La montagne
Le Breithorn (4,165 m) est une montagne du massif des Alpes pennines, à la frontière entre la Suisse (canton du Valais) et l'Italie (Vallée d'Aoste). Le Breithorn possède cinq sommets principaux : le Breithorn occidental (4 163 ou 4 165 m) ; le Breithorn central (4 156 ou 4 160 m) ; le Breithorn oriental (4 138 ou 4 141 m) ; le Breithornzwillinge (4 106 m) ; la Roche Noire (4 074 ou 4 075 m).
La première ascension du Breithorn a été réalisée le 13 août 1813 par Henry Maynard avec Jean-Marie Couttet, Jean Gras, Jean-Baptiste et Jean-Jacques Érin.
Actuellement le Breithorn est considéré comme le 4 000 le plus facile des Alpes car un téléphérique amène les alpinistes au Petit Cervin, à 3 820 m d'altitude.

La peintre
Blanche Berthoud est une artiste peintre suisse de la région de Neufchâtel (Suisse) qui a été très active tout au long de la première moitié du 20e siècle. Elle fait partie de la Société romande des femmes peintres fondée par la peintre Jeanne Lombard (1865-1945) qui défend très farouchement les femmes peintres montagnardes, un monde souvent réservé aux hommes. Elle a réalisé plusieurs peintures et aquarelles du Breithorn, dont l'une a été acquise par le Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Neufchâtel.

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2023 - Gravir les montagnes en peinture
Un blog de Francis Rousseau

 

PIZ BERNINA & MORTERATSCH BY EMIL NOLDE

Emil Nolde  (1867-1956) 

Piz Bernina (4, 049m- 13, 283ft) 

Switzerland - Italy border 

In  La belle Bernina et le vieux Morteratsch, postcard 

About this work 

The postcards series date from  pre-expressionist phase of Nolde’s career (though he was around 30 when he created them). After hiking in the Swiss Alps, Nolde did a painting, Mountain Giants, presenting the mountains in human form. Nolde wrote : “The picture went to the annual exhibition in Munich in 1896. [Ferdinand] Hodler’s picture “Night”  which established his fame, was also there. But my “Mountain Giants" was soon returned, rejected… In those days there was a general and stormy derision and ridicule about each of Hodler’s pictures. ‘And his colors are as ugly as can be possible!’ What help was my contradiction and my firm conviction that his sinuous, pushing, wry bodies are part of the character of the mountain folk, just as the firs on the mountain slopes are gnarled and grown oddly.” From then, he painted practically every Swissw Alps Summit in human form: the Zugspitze, the Waxenstein, the Eiger, the Monch, the Jungfrau, the Grand Saint- Gothard, Piz Bernina, the Morteratch, the Ortler, the Finsteraarhorn... they will be posted one after one in this blog, the Cervin / Matterhorn being the first one.

The mountain 

Piz Bernina or Pizzo Bernina (4, 049m- 13, 283ft)  is the highest mountain in the Eastern Alps, the highest point of the Bernina Range, and the highest peak in the Rhaetian Alps. It is located south of Pontresina and near the major Alpine resort of St. Moritz, in the Engadin valley with the massif partially in Italy.  The mountain can be seen from different viewpoints with the use of ski-lifts from Diavolezza, Piz Corvatsch or Piz Nair. It is also the most easterly mountain higher than 4,000 m (13,000 ft) in the Alps, the highest point of the Swiss canton of Graubünden, and the fifth-most prominent peak in the Alps. The minor summit (4,020 m -13,190 ft) known as La Spedla is the highest point in the Italian Lombardy region. The mountain was named after the Bernina Pass in 1850 by Johann Coaz, who also made the first ascent.  The prefix Piz comes from the Romansch language in Graubünden; any mountain with that name can be readily identified as being located in southeastern Switzerland.
The Morteratsch Glacier  is the largest glacier in the Bernina Mountains. It is located in the canton of Grisons in Upper Engadine. It has a maximum length of 7 km with a height difference of 2,000 m and ends at the highest point on Punta Perrucchetti at 4,020 m. It covers with the Pers glacier about 16 km2. Between 1878 and 1998, the glacier retreated 1.8 km with an annual average of about 17.2 meters. The decline has accelerated in recent years with an average of 30 meters per year from 1999-2005. At the confluence with the Pers Glacier, the Morteratsch Glacier behaves like a natural dam blocking the runoff and the origin of a small lake.

The painter 

Emil Nolde (born Emil Hansen) was a German-Danish painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke (The Bridge) of Dresden in 1906, and was one of the first oil painting and watercolor painters of the early 20th century to explore color. He is known for his brushwork and expressive choice of colors. Golden yellows and deep reds appear frequently in his work, giving a luminous quality to otherwise somber tones. His watercolors include vivid, brooding storm-scapes and brilliant florals.

Nolde's intense preoccupation with the subject of flowers reflects his continuing interest in the art of Vincent van Gogh.

From the early 1920s,  Nolde was a supporter of the Nazi party, having become a member of its Danish section. He expressed anti-semitic, negative opinions about Jewish artists, and considered "Expressionism to be a distinctively Germanic style". This view was shared by some other members of the Nazi party, notably Joseph Goebbels and Fritz Hippler.

However Hitler rejected all forms of modernism as "degenerate art", and the Nazi regime officially condemned Nolde's work. Until that time he had been held in great prestige in Germany. A total of 1,052 of his works were removed from museums, more than those of any other artist.  Some were included in the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937, despite his protests, including (later) a personal appeal to Nazi gauleiter Baldur von Schirach in Vienna. He was not allowed to paint—even in private—after 1941. Nevertheless, during this period he created hundreds of watercolors, which he hid. He called them the "Unpainted Pictures".

In 1942 Nolde wrote: "There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue. Every color holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as a stimulus. To a person who has no art in him, colors are colors, tones tones...and that is all. All their consequences for the human spirit, which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed."

After World War II, Nolde was once again honored, receiving the German Order of Merit, He died in Seebüll (now part of Neukirchen). The Schiefler Catalogue raisonné of his prints describes 231 etchings, 197 woodcuts, 83 lithographs, and 4 hectographs.

THE RITZLIHORN PAINTED BY ALEXANDRE CALAME

ALEXANDRE CALAME (1810-1864) 

Ritzlihorn (3,282m - 10,768 ft) 

Switzerland  

In Le Ritzlihorn et la vallée d’ 'Urbach, oil on canvas

The mountain
The Ritzlihorn  (3,282m - 10,768 ft) is located in the district Interlaken-Oberhasli and the Canton of Bern, in the central part of Switzerland, 70 km southeast of the capital Bern. The Ritzlihorn is part of the Bernese Alps, overlooking Handegg in the canton of Bern.  It lies on the range east of the Gauli Glacier and north of the Bдchlistock. The width at the base of 3.2 kilometers.
The terrain around the Ritzlihorn is mainly mountainous. Around Ritzlihorn it is very sparsely populated, with 2 inhabitants per square kilometer.  The neighborhood consists essentially of grasslands. Tundra climate prevails in the region.  The average annual temperature in the area is -1 ° C. The warmest month is August, when the average temperature is 10 ° C, and the coldest is January, with 12 ° C. Average annual rainfall is 2465 millimeters. The rainiest month is November, with an average of 347 mm of precipitation, and the driest is March, with 113 mm of rainfall.

The Painter 

Alexandre Calame )was a Swiss painter.  He was the son of a skillful marble worker in Vevey. His father lost the family fortune, and Alexandre Calame was forced to work in a bank at the age of 15. When his father fell from a building and then died, the young Calame  provided for his mother.

In his spare time he began to practice drawing small views of Switzerland. In 1829 he met his patron, the banker Diodati, who made it possible for him to study under landscape painter François Diday. After a few months he decided to devote himself fully to art.

In 1835, he began exhibiting his Swiss-Alps and forest paintings in Paris and Berlin. He became quite well known, especially in Germany, although Calame was more a drawer than an illustrator. He is associated with the Dusseldorf school of painting. In 1842 he went to Paris and displayed his works Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, the Brienzersee, the Monte Rosa and Mont Cervin. He taught in Geneva, where Adolf Mosengel was one of his pupils.

He went to Italy in 1844 and brought back from Rome and Naples countless paintings, among them one of the ruins of Paestum (in the city museum in Leipzig). He showed that he was capable of understanding Italian nature; but the Alps remained his speciality.

The glaciers, emerald-green, white foaming mountain water, which split the trees during the storm, and the whipped clouds, the multi-colored rocks, half masked from fog, in the rays of the gleaming sun, are those things, which he knew to be true to nature. 

One of his most ingenious works is the representation of the four seasons and times of the day in four landscapes, a spring morning in the south, a summer midday in the Nordic flatlands, an Autumn evening, and a winter night on a mountain. He became popular with these large works, and his popularity grew with smaller pieces and lithographies, namely 18 studies of Lauterbrunnen and Meiringen and the 24 sheets of Alpine passes. These were widespread in France, England, and Germany and are still today used to teach this style of painting.

He died in Menton, France in 1864.

An exhibition featuring more than thirty of Calame's paintings was held at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 2006.

Reference 

- Alexandre Calama in  Historical Dictionnary of Switzerland

LA JUNGFRAU PEINTE PAR FERDINAND HODLER

 

FERDINAND HODLER (1853-1918)
Jungfrau (4'158 m - 13'642 ft)
Suisse.

In La Jungfrau au dessus d'une mer de nuages, 1908

La montagne
La Jungfrau (4'158 m - 13'642 ft) ("La jeune fille" en allemand) est l'un des principaux sommets des Alpes bernoises, situé entre le nord du canton de Berne et le sud du canton du Valais, à mi-chemin entre Interlaken et Fiesch. Avec l'Eiger et le Mönch, la Jungfrau forme un mur massif surplombant l'Oberland bernois et le plateau suisse, l'un des sites les plus distinctifs des Alpes suisses. C'est l'un des sommets les plus représentés par les artistes avec le Cervin et le Mont Blanc. Le sommet a été atteint pour la première fois le 3 août 1811 par les frères Meyer d'Aarau et deux chasseurs de chamois du Valais. L'ascension fait suite à une longue expédition sur les glaciers et les hauts cols des Alpes bernoises. Ce n'est qu'en 1865 qu'une route plus directe côté nord est ouverte. La construction du chemin de fer de la Jungfrau au début du XXe siècle, qui relie Kleine Scheidegg au Jungfraujoch, entre le Mönch et la Jungfrau, a fait de la région l'un des endroits les plus visités des Alpes. Avec le glacier d'Aletsch au sud, la Jungfrau fait partie de la région Jungfrau-Aletsch, qui a été déclarée site du patrimoine mondial en 2001.
Politiquement, la Jungfrau est partagée entre les communes de Lauterbrunnen (Berne) et de Fieschertal (Valais). C'est la troisième plus haute montagne des Alpes bernoises après le Finsteraarhorn et l'Aletschhorn, respectivement distants de 12 et 8 km. Mais du lac de Thoune, et de la plus grande partie du canton de Berne, c'est le plus remarquable et le plus proche des sommets de l'Oberland bernois ; avec un dénivelé de 3 600 m entre le sommet et la ville d'Interlaken. Ceci, et l'extrême raideur de la face nord, lui ont valu une réputation précoce d'inaccessibilité.
Les paysages autour de la Jungfrau sont extrêmement contrastés. Au lieu des précipices vertigineux du nord-ouest, le versant sud-est émerge des neiges supérieures du glacier d'Aletsch à environ 3 500 mètres. La vallée d'Aletsch, longue de 20 km au sud-est, est complètement inhabitée et également entourée d'autres vallées glaciaires similaires. L'ensemble de la région constitue la plus grande zone glaciaire des Alpes ainsi que d'Europe. 

Le peintre
Ferdinand Hodler fut l'un des peintres suisses les plus connus du 19e siècle. Ses premières œuvres étaient des portraits, des paysages et des peintures de genre dans un style réaliste. Plus tard, il adopta une forme personnelle de symbolisme qu'il appela Parallélisme.
Au cours de la dernière décennie du 19e siècle, son travail aévolua pour combiner les influences de plusieurs genres, dont le symbolisme et l'Art nouveau. En 1890, il achève Night une œuvre qui marqu un tournant  vers l'imagerie symboliste. Le «parallélisme»  mettait l'accent sur la symétrie et le rythme qui, selon lui, formaient la base de la société humaine. Dans des peintures telles que The Chosen One, des groupements de personnages sont disposés symétriquement dans des poses évoquant un rituel ou une danse.
Hodler a peint un certain nombre de peintures historiques à grande échelle, souvent avec des thèmes patriotiques. En 1897, il accepte une commande pour peindre une série de grandes fresques pour la salle d'armes du Schweizerisches Landesmuseum de Zurich. Les compositions qu'il a proposées, y compris La bataille de Marignan qui dépeignait une bataille perdue par les Suisses, étaient controversées pour leur imagerie et leur style, et Hodler n'a été autorisé à exécuter les fresques qu'en 1900.
L'œuvre de Hodler dans sa phase finale prend un aspect expressionniste avec des figures fortement colorées et géométriques. Les paysages sont réduits à l'essentiel, constitués parfois d'un coin de terre déchiqueté entre l'eau et le ciel.

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2023 - Wandering Vertexes ....
Errant au-dessus des Sommets Silencieux...
Un blog de Francis Rousseau