Ferdinand Hodler Quotes (8 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Ferdinand Hodler: 8 quotes 1 like

Famous Ferdinand Hodler Quotes

“The artist's mission is to give shape to what is eternal in nature, to reveal its inherent beauty; he sublimates the shapes of the human body. He shows an enlarged and simplified nature, liberated from all the details, which do not tell us anything. He shows us a work according to the size of his own experience, of his heart and his spirit.”

Ferdinand Hodler

Quote from a speech of Ferdinand Hodler: 'The artist's mission' (held in Freibourg in 1897), first published in 1923 in Zurich; as cited by Paul Westheim in Confessions of Artists - Letters, Memoirs and Observations of Contemporary Artists, Propyläen Publishing House, Berlin, 1925

“from his postcard, October 1903 to de:Carl Moll; as quoted by Hans-Peter Wipplinger, director of the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which owns this postcard”

Ferdinand Hodler

Carl Moll was co-founder of the Vienna Secession which invited Hodler to participate in their exhibitions. Hans-Peter Wipplinger stated that it was then that Hodler received the recognition he had previously been denied in his own country, Switzerland

“If a few people who have come together for the same purpose sit around a table, we can understand them as parallels making up a unity, like the petals of a flower. When we are happy we do not like to hear a discordant voice that disturbs our joy. Proverbially, it is said: Birds of a feather flock together. In all these examples parallelism, or the principle of repetition, can be pointed out. And this parallelism of experience is, in expression, translated into the formal parallelism which we have already discussed.”

Ferdinand Hodler

from: Die Kunst Ferdinand Hodlers, 1923

“If an object is pleasant, repetition will increase its charm; if it expresses sorrow or pain, then repetition will intensify its melancholy. On the contrary, any subject that is peculiar or unpleasant will be made unbearable by repetition. So repetition always acts to increase intensity. Since the time that this principle of harmony was employed by the primitives, it has been visually lost, and so forgotten. One strove for the charm of variety, and so achieved the destruction of unity... Variety is just as much an element of beauty as parallelism, provided that one does not exaggerate it. For the structure of our eye itself demands that we introduce some variety into any absolutely unified object... To be simple is not always as easy as it seems... The work of art will bring to light a new order inherent in things, and this will be: the idea of unity.”

Ferdinand Hodler

another source of his 'parallelism' concept is Hodler's letter, written in 1904 to de:Franz Servaes; in which Hodler explained his design principle of 'parallelism', later adopted by the Vienna Secession artists. The Leopold Museum in Vienna discovered and owns this letter
from: Die Kunst Ferdinand Hodlers, 1923

“Parallelism' can be pointed out in the different parts of a single object, looked at alone; it is even more obvious when one puts several objects of the same kind next to each other. Now if we compare our own lives and customs with these appearances in nature, we shall be astonished to find the same principle repeated... When an important event is being celebrated, the people face and move in the same direction. These are parallels following each other..”

Ferdinand Hodler

from: Die Kunst Ferdinand Hodlers, 1923

“This beautiful head [of Valentine Godé-Darel], this whole body, like a Byzantine empress on the mosaics of Ravenna - and this nose, this mouth - and the eyes, they too, those wonderful eyes - all these the worms will eat. And nothing will remain, absolutely nothing!”

Ferdinand Hodler

Quote from Hodler's letter to de:Hans Mühlestein, c. late 1914; as cited by Anya Silver in: 'Valentine Godé-Darel (1873–1915): Five Paintings by Ferdinand Hodler' https://thegeorgiareview.com/spring-2013/valentine-gode-darel-1873-1915-five-paintings-by-ferdinand-hodler/, April 2013
In 1908, Hodler met Valentine Godé-Darel who became his mistress. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1913 and died in January 1915; Hodler painted five oils the day after her death

“I call 'parallelism' any kind of repetition. When I feel most strongly the charm of things in nature, there is always an impression of unity. If my way leads into a pine wood where the trees reach high into heaven, I see the trunks that stand to the right and to the left of me as countless columns. One and the same vertical line, repeated many times, surrounds me. Now, if these trunks should be clearly outlined on an unbroken dark background, if they should stand out against the deep blue of the sky, the reason for this impression of unity is parallelism.”

Ferdinand Hodler

from: Die Kunst Ferdinand Hodlers, 1923

“When I enter a forest of tall fir trees, reaching toward the sky, I am surrounded, right and left, by their trunks, which seem to me like innumerable columns. Around me, one and the same vertical line is repeated endlessly. Th the extend that these tree trunk are clearly distinguished from a murky background, to the extent that they are well delineated from the blue sky, I am impressed with a feeling of unity, of parallelism.”

Ferdinand Hodler

Quote from Hodler's speech: 'Über die Kunst', in Freibourg, 1897; as cited in Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish Art of the 1890's, Michelle Facos; University of California Press, 1998, p.