Ferdinand Hodler: View to Infinity

Fans of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele are likely to find the paintings of Ferdinand Hodler “a revelation as well as a pleasure.”

Neue Galerie, New York

Through Jan. 7

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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.”