Page 35 - Studio International - July August 1971

difficult to see how it ever could have convinced the speed with which naiads and dryads plunge symbolize the most important phases of life in
or even entertained. There is something into bathos, stand in the centre of an terms of single events, to raise the particular to
ridiculous about the half-naked woman honourable German tradition : the painting as the level of the universal by gesture, by
languishing in a crevice in the cliffs with the sea mirror of the soul. compositional means, and by a careful use of
boiling over rocks at her feet and the suggestion At the Hayward, where the high gloss of contrast between the naturalistic and the
of a giant harp behind her. It is something not Böcklin's canvases and the convoluted heavy stylized.
resolved by the hint in the title, Sea-Foam, frames make one area look like a fusty This is, of course, the greatest, and the
Meeresbrandung, that she is the personification Victorian drawing-room, Hodler's paintings crucial difference between Hodler and Böcklin :
of the music of the waves as they dash against appear by comparison to be the climax of early Hodler's symbolism is indivisible from his
the shore. 2
The Naiads at Play is even more ridiculous :
merbabies, half well-fed putti, half minnow,
and a dirty old merman nosing naughtily
through the water towards the backside of a
buxom mermaid. It is indeed almost impossible
to recognize here Böcklin's aim of personifying
the various forces of nature in terms of a
convincing mythology. It is difficult to compre-
hend how the silence of a forest should be
made plain by the appearance of a unicorn in a
shaft of sunlight, Das Schweigen des Waldes,
Silence of the Forest, or how a scrimmage of
battling centaurs should express the perpetual
flux of the universe, Kentaurenkampf, Battle of
the Centaurs.
It is unfortunately too easy to send up such
paintings, and it is even easier to overlook the
qualities which Böcklin's work does possess. In
spite of a meretricious technique, in spite of a
colour-sense which was individual to say the modernism. He was, after all, born in 1853, style as a painter. It emerges more from purely
least, Böcklin was a superb landscape-painter twenty-six years later than Böcklin. But his pictorial elements than from literary allusion or
and, as even The Naiads at Play demonstrates, clearly resolved compositions, his use of detailed description. It is this which makes
was also a brilliant painter of waves, foam and colour for formal rather than naturalistic Hodler, in spite of everything, a modernist.
rollers. Early landscapes like Fir Trees reasons, his respect for the picture-plane and Night is an impressive painting by any
(highly reminiscent of Friedrich) or Landscape sense of sharp contours make the difference standards and is also one of the most
from the Alban Hills, which are for the most part between the two painters seem larger than that satisfactory expressions of Hodler's theory of
devoid of figures, make the point especially of a generation. With Hodler, somehow, we parallelism: the evocative and descriptive
clearly, and show what Böcklin might have are firmly in touch with our own time. potential of the repetition of major and minor
become had his ambitions not demanded that Hodler's landscapes, usually of one or two formal elements. The gesture made
he devise his own mythology in order mountain peaks pushed far down the canvas meaningful by removing it slightly from the
bizarrely to people the woods, the mountains under an expansive depth of sky, seem pattern of which it is a part. Hodler gives his
and the sea. particularly modern, recalling as they do certain figures a naturalistic anatomy, but makes them
To praise his early work and to suggest that landscapes by Munch, where the subject is also take up exaggerated postures, makes them
Böcklin, by turning to allegory and mythology, raised to the level of a symbol. This occurs when speak mime, which transforms them into
took the wrong path is to use the same outlines are clarified, when the composition puppets, and then symbols. There is always a
arguments as Meier-Graefe however. But it is implies that the object described is more than marked contrast, too, between the carefully
tempting to argue this way, for the current itself alone; when, for example, a cloud or a observed figures and the flat, stylized back-
view of nineteenth-century painting is still wreath of mist around a mountain-top is grounds. The spectator becomes disoriented
largely the one which Meier-Graefe outlined depicted as a thing of as much substance as the and is persuaded to think of the composition
for Germany, and we, like him, lose little time mountain itself; when, instead of being as something more than the depiction of some
on Symbolists and others anxious to preserve descriptive, the painting of an object becomes aspect of nature, or the visualization of some
the primacy of the subject in painting. first decorative and then something much more. literary fancy. In Night, the individual facial
Böcklin's paintings, like those of his equally Hodler's work can be compared with that of expression, the human gesture, take on, because
underestimated contemporaries Moreau and Munch in other ways. Not only the subject of of this, much larger implications.
Carrière, should not be looked at as descriptions the landscapes is similar. Large paintings by Hodler's abiding interest in large mural
of a real or imagined nature. They are not Hodler like Sleep, Night, The Gaze into decoration, his concern for historical subjects
windows out on to the world but events. And Infinity (as with Böcklin, few of the best (Rising of the Jena Students, The Retreat from
the events are meant to develop in terms of Hodler's are in the exhibition) recall the Frieze Marignano, for example) and the not always
what the spectator brings to the picture; are of Life in more than subject. They too attempt, resolved balance between the expressive and the
meant to gain enormously in implication in the although because of Hodler's belief in theatrical talented large-scale decorators, like Puvis de
memory. Böcklin's paintings, then, in spite of postures less successfully than Munch, to Chavannes, Hodler's ambitions often seem not
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