Rediscovery

DURING ITS PREVIOUS stops at the University Museum at Berkeley and the Guggenheim in New York, the exhibition of works by Ferdinand Hodler now at the Busch-Reisinger has attracted as much critical attention as any show of the past year. Much of the publicity seems to have been the product of surprise: few in this country had ever heard of Hodler, much less assigned him the same prominence in which he is held by European critics, who see him at the forefront of early modernism.

The show contains a wide sampling of Hodler's work ranging in date from the early 1870s to the artist's death in 1918. Most astonishing -- and somewhat disconcerting -- is the bizarre variety of styles. The exhibition leaves the impression of an artist of superb talents who because he never found a consistent style has been immensely difficult to appreciate. The early influences are the ones expected for the time: Corot and Manet in particular. The diversity is present right away in Hodler's work, and so is the excellence. The Angry One, a self-portrait of 1881, demonstrates a fully mastered technique and skillful if clearly derived composition.

The pictures in which Hodler placed most pride are his large, carefully structured nude groups. These include consciously symbolist works with titles like Night, Day, Love and Truth. Carefully composed and painted, these are likely to strike us now as overly flat and academic. The symbolist aura of the time when they were painted has faded, and the preliminary sketches appeal much more than the stiff finished paintings.

The sketches included in the show evidence a wonderfully simple, soft and controlled line that comes closer to clearly modern style than anything in the paintings The show's excellent catalogue includes an essay by Phyllis Hattis locating the position of these drawings in the movement of early modern art. One of the finest of the drawings is actually a collage composed of several delicately drawn figures cut out, pasted onto a larger sheet of paper, and set in relation by a few background lines.

Perhaps Hodler's clearest claim to the recognition so long denied him consists in the series of bluish, highly structured landscapes which lead directly to the rough, brightly colored landscapes of German Expressionism. These depict jagged mountains or seething lakes and are constructed according to Hodler's notions of "parallelism," as he called his method of discovering parallel and reflective patterns in nature.

BUT THE MOST POWERFUL works of the exhibition are a series of brisk sketches and tense, tormented oils done during the fatal illness of his mistress Valentine Gode-Darel in 1914 and 1915. Hodler is obsessed with death throughout his career--the death of an earlier mistress in 1909 had been captured in a Munch-like oil full of looming and vertiginous space. Through the series, the curved, living lines of the woman's face grow harsh and geometrical, until a final version shows the corpse, bony and stiff, with the bedclothes around it indicated by a chaos of loose lines.

Those last years are also represented by a series of casual self-portraits with loose, brushy paint-handling and increasingly harsh introspection in the features. In the very last of these, the paint has grown thin and pale; the face is resigned and tilted slightly to the side. The artist's image appears to be weakening, fading perhaps into the obscure position of one torn between styles and times, and caught, for all his talent, at a rank just below the greatest.