From Landscape into Night

John Haber
in New York City

Gustav Klimt and Ferdinand Hodler

In truth, "Klimt Landscapes" has little in the way of landscapes. It hardly needs them.

The Neue Galerie begins elsewhere, with its magnificent collection of Austrian and German Expressionism and its ongoing display of portraits by Gustav Klimt, including one of its most precious holdings. How could it not take pride in a portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer from 1907, in all its patterned gold? One hardly knows whether she is sitting or standing—and whether those triangles and eyes belong to her dress, her lavish interior, her own brilliance, or the Austrian artist's inner world. The portrait's gallery has its richness as well, with still functioning clocks by Adolf Loos, earlier Klimt portraits in their black clothing and pallor, and two works by Carl Moll. Moll's brighter, crisper outdoor portraits absorb the lessons of Impressionism as Klimt never could. Upstairs, the show itself displays the full range of his interests and where in the landscape they took him.

A contemporary, Ferdinand Hodler made his reputation with Night, but could he, too, find his way into the light? The Morgan Library brings out his public aspirations and darker private longings. Like Klimt, he had his roots in figure or narrative painting with dark undertones. He pushed the limits of his time as well, without quite becoming a paragon of early modern art. He died within just two years of Klimt at that. How could natural or unnatural light enter into both?

Hodler's 1890 painting had shocked and delighted Paris with its mural scale and sheer gloom. It made the Swiss artist, already well into his thirties, a central figure in Symbolism, in the world capital of the movement's art and poetry. Could he now encompass the remainder of the day? Day took a decade of planning and execution, and it survives today in studies and fragments—from an earlier version at that. To Paul Klee, he was "a depicter of people, who knows how to portray the soul by means of the body like few others," but with so light a body and so dark a soul.

From behind the curtain

Born in 1862, Gustav Klimt came of age when academic training was a must and Symbolism was a movement. They left the young artist searching for a place between tradition and Modernism, and at first he tried to combine them. He could draw nudes and tell stories just fine, much like an older artist, even if one cannot make out the fables. He was to develop separate pursuits of allegory, portraiture, and landscapes, but already he was chafing at the limits of distinct genres. They all fed his psychologically charged landscapes. So did his love of patterning, whether in Symbolism itself or his later portraits.

So, too, did his artistic circle. He was there at the start with the Vienna Secession and Vienna Camera Club in the 1880s. The first insisted on a break with the old, the second on heading out of doors. Remarkably, the medium also sustained his growing interest in color. Decades before true color photography, he printed with multiple dyes to convincing effect. Not coincidentally, his works on paper favor collotypes, a process involving light-sensitive chemicals brushed on metal and glass plates—like a cross between photos and lithographs.

One last inner circle was smaller still. Emilie Flöge, the sister of Klimt's sister-in-law, founded a workshop for her fashion design. Neue Galerie includes jewelry as well as prints and paintings. While they never lived together or married, they headed together to the country, where he posed often for the camera with the beard and robe of a Greek philosopher. Then as now, all the right people fled the summer heat and urban crowds, and Klimt, too, traveled among the right people, like his patrons. Then, too, who would want to return when avoiding the crowds left the city so empty?

Even an artist deserves a break, and a vacation can bring a breakthrough in art. Pablo Picasso (whom the Met has displayed alongside Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele) headed for Fontainebleau to find his way to Three Musicians, Three Women, and what might come after Cubism. Klimt, too, made the best of time to himself. Portraits earned him a reputation, but landscapes were pretty much his alone. Summer holidays took him to Austria's lake district, home to chapels, castles, and well-off homes, and all appear in his paintings. They just happen to lurk behind entire curtains of greenery, just as Adele Bloch Bauer emerges in gold.

The curator, Janis Staggs, describes his landscapes as an evolution from a misty Impressionism to decorative patterns. The exhibition itself leaves the first to a helpful time line, in reproductions—and to his portraits. Its actual landscapes begin instead with Large Poplar Tree I in 1900. Its thick trunk and diverging leaves might belong to three giants or a single demon, while glints of color at its base might be eyes of still more hauntings. This is one animated landscape. By Klimt's Park at Kammer Castle in 1909 and Forester's House in Weissenbach II (Garden) in 1914, the curtain had descended.

In defiance of gravity, a clearing at the base of the curtain may look onto a building's windows, a pond, an animated cluster of thin trees—and the light. Above, flecks of color within the greenery make it a monumental source of its own light. Klimt died soon after, in 1916, far too soon for Hitler to declare work like this "degenerate art." Still, his overlapping circles included Jewish patrons, and the Neue Galerie describes how the Nazis looted its prized portrait, only later restored to the family's descendants and repurchased for New York. But then the Jewish Museum has told the story of Nazi-looted art, too. Here it all appears, as if by magic, from behind the green curtain.

The remainder of the day

In truth, Ferdinand Hodler had little taste for sunlight and joy. He was at heart a figure painter, much as he also indulged in landscape. Figures have wide-open, ill-defined backgrounds, if that. A portrait sketch brings the subject so close that his head rivals in size the body, with little room for anything else. In studies for history paintings, the background merely adds more figures, like marching soldiers behind young men flexing their muscles and dressing for war. In an allegory like Day, five women at a distance are the subject.

As for joy, he finds at last his Joyful Woman with a full-length dancer around 1911. Even then, though, she has the languid look of such predecessors as Gustave Moreau, and her very commitment to modern dance requires that she turn away without a glance or a smile. Of the women in Day, all but one bury their face in their hands, while the other, at center, lowers her eyes and raises her arms, elbows out. She might be pointing to her head and to stranger thoughts within—or she might be posing as Atlas, bearing the world on her shoulders. But then the mind alone for Hodler contains the weight of the world. In landscape, the Alps become ice mountains floating in a blue mist like a mystic sea.

What, then, was his place in art? The Morgan seeks an answer in loans from the Musée Jenisch in Vevey, on Lake Geneva. While most are drawings, it has enough oils to show his range, including a second fragment of Day from the Detroit Institute of Arts. The curator starts with Hodler as a history painter, with classically robust bodies and scenes of war. He may have made an impact in Paris, but his heart lay at home, and he is still best known from Swiss collections. Scenes include centuries of struggle for Swiss independence, plus the Napoleonic wars, seen here as a "war of liberation."

Next comes the Symbolist, from a contemporary of Odilon Redon and an heir to Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. He also looks forward to Symbolism in modern art, like that of Edvard Munch and Hilma af Klint. The Morgan sees his early work as more realist than escapist and his late work as close to abstraction, which is news to me, but af Klint really did anticipate abstract painting. At the very least, sharp planes of color on the dancer's dress and portrait approach Fauvism's "painting of disquiet." The show concludes with portraits and landscapes. It might be better, though, to see all these genres as one, from his earliest studies to his death in 1918.

In scenes of combat, for all his patriotism, Hodler foregrounds the wounded and armies in retreat. Portraits, too, mix tenderness and pain. His wife, Berthe, has piercing eyes and a wisp of hair on her forehead like a spider tattoo. She also ages frankly. Drawings of his lover, Valentine Godé-Darel, show her on her deathbed. I cannot know whether Hodler shares Picasso's sexism, but these two were long loves, and his wife adopted his soon to be motherless child.

For Hodler, sadness and Symbolism alike depend on rhythms in art, what he called parallelism. That is why figures so often line up in rows. Silhouettes in wartime could come right off a Grecian urn, while later figures recycle earlier studies as cutouts, with brand new rhythms. (He may have cut fragments from that earlier version of Day for a more commercial reason, for sale.) They also depend on his one consistent subject, the body. The Morgan quotes Klee, a countryman, to introduce his portraits, but he struggled all his life with body and soul.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Gustav Klimt landscapes ran at the Neue Galerie through May 6, 2014, Ferdinand Hodler at The Morgan Library through October 1, 2023. A related review considers Klimt alongside Pablo Picasso and Egon Schiele in the the Scofield Thayer collection.