Neue Galerie, New York
Through Jan. 7
Fans of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele are likely to find the paintings of Ferdinand Hodler “a revelation as well as a pleasure,” said Barrymore Laurence Scherer in The Wall Street Journal. The late works of the Swiss symbolist artist (1853–1918) rarely travel outside Europe, but Hodler’s “vigorous brushwork and mastery of strong color” ensure that they hold their own against the paintings of his more famous Austrian peers. Even in his final two decades, Hodler explored a range of styles. The 65 paintings on display at the Neue Galerie include Alpine landscapes, dance-inspired decorative works, and intimate portraiture. Should you doubt that Hodler merits comparison with the Vienna Secessionists, the show invites you to consider the “lively candor” of Hodler’s 1911 portrait of Gertrud Müller against Klimt’s famous 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which hangs nearby. Though Hodler’s women are rarely “conventionally beautiful,” the tenderness of his gaze makes them lovely.
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This becomes an “exceptionally touching” show, said Ken Johnson in The New York Times. Though it opens with figure studies for a major mural, the emotional high point arrives with a series that documents the decline and death, from cancer, of his mistress Valentine Godé-Darel. It’s a body of work “thought to be unique in the history of art,” and the “extraordinary immediacy” of the images has heartbreaking effect. Fortunately for the viewer, Hodler sought consolation in landscape painting in his final years, producing “intensely colorful” works that stand up well today. His reductions of sky, sea, and land into “blocky passages of radiant color” anticipate Mark Rothko’s work, but also “a spiritual time to come, when the material world would dissolve into the pure light of eternity.”
