A cloud of criticism, apology and embarrassment hangs over the oeuvre of Ferdinand Hodler, the prodigiously talented Swiss painter who was born the same year as Vincent van Gogh (1853) and died, like Gustav Klimt, in 1918.
Hodler’s work bridges the academic neo-classicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (his teacher’s teacher) at one end and the Viennese Expressionism of Klimt and Egon Schiele on the other, a coupling that accounts as much for its manipulative magnetism as for its overdetermined artifice.