Symbolism – Humoring the Goddess

Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) was one of the best-known Swiss Symbolist painters of the nineteenth century.Hodler was the son of a carpenter and a woman of peasant stock. His parents and all five of his siblings had died of tuberculosis by the time he reached adulthood.The works of Hodler’s early maturity consisted of landscapes, figure compositions, and portraits, treated with a vigorous realism.Many of Hodler’s best-known paintings are scenes in which characters are engaged in everyday activities.In the last decade of the nineteenth century his work evolved to combine influences from several genres including symbolism and art nouveau.Hodler developed a style he called “parallelism” that emphasized the symmetry and rhythm he believed formed the basis of human society.Throughout the latter part of his career, Hodler’s depictions of Swiss patriotism and historic scenes became increasing popular with his countrymen.More of Ferdinand Hodler‘s art can be found at https://wooarts.com/ferdinand-hodler/

Odilon Redon (1840–1916) was a French Symbolist painter, lithographer, and etcher of considerable poetic sensitivity and imagination.Redon depicted a variety of motifs including dreams, floral still lives, landscapes, and mythological scenes.His collection is associated with the Symbolist movement, which is typified by an interest in imbuing art with ambiguous metaphors and themes of romance, morbidity, and the occult.In both charcoal drawings and lithographic prints, the artist relied on the expressive and suggestive possibilities of black in his monochromatic compositions called noirs. Instead of drawing inspiration from what he saw, Redon preferred to paint images from his dreams, nightmares, and stories from mythology.This resulted in drawings and paintings with a tenuous grasp on realism, and a preferred emphasis on emotion, color, and atmosphere.His lithographs and noirs in particular were admired by the Symbolist writers of the day but also by later Surrealists for their often bizarre and fantastical subjects, many of which combine scientific observation and visionary imagination.In the 1890s pastel and oils became his favored media; he produced no more noirs after 1900.