Ferdinand Hodler, The Kien Valley with the Bluemlisalp Massif

A native of Berne, Switzerland, Ferdinand Hodler spent much of 1902 in the Oberland painting mountainous landscapes. This work depicts the Kien Valley looking towards the Bluemlisalp, a massif at the far end of the valley.

The subject wasn’t new: Hodler’s earliest works were landscape souvenirs, created for a growing tourist market. Highly naturalistic in style, they continued the Swiss Alpine tradition to which Alexandre Calame (1810–1864) brought international recognition. Although initially Hodler emulated Calame – indeed, in 1874 he won the locally prestigious Concours Calame – he later distanced himself from the representation of reality.

During his artistic retreats in the Alps – not so different, in spirit, from Gauguin’s travels in the South Seas or Van Gogh’s sojourn in Arles - Hodler aimed to render what he called the ‘essential structure’ of the landscape, ‘liberated from all unimportant details’. This picture – with its insistent verticality, defined fields of colour and ornamental decorative clouds – conveys a sense of timelessness, harmony and meditative stillness. ‘The landscape must have a character’, Hodler wrote, ‘express a passion or an emotion’. With a striking economy of means, in which geometry and composition don’t diminish, but rather enhance, nature’s mystical element, this painting harks back to the tradition of Japanese woodcut prints. At the same time an adept of Idealism and a forerunner of Symbolism, Hodler believed that ‘the mission of the artist is [...] to express the eternal element of nature’.

Fervently admired almost as a patriotic obligation in Switzerland but for a half century little noted beyond its borders, the critical reassessment of Hodler abroad began in the 1970s. Along with Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and others, Hodler is today regarded as a key figure of a distinctly Northern European modernist tradition largely independent of Paris.