Interpretive Resource

Ferdinand Hodler was, with Fdix Vallotton, the crucial Swiss painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like Vallotton, Hodler spent considerable periods of time in Paris. Yet, unlike his fellow countryman, he wanted very much to be a Swiss artist and, with several other of his compatriots, including the sculptor James Vibert, attempted to bring some of the energy and intensity of French aesthetic life to his native country. Very few important works by Hodler can be found outside Switzerland, where he is represented in major public and private collections. The Art Institute is fortunate to possess one of Hodler’s finest portraits, depicting his friend James Vibert. From an absolutely frontal position, the monumentally proportioned sculptor gazes at us with such directness that he seems to look right through us. Gone are the props or niceties of pose that habitually personalize a portrait. Instead, Vibert simply exists, his character condensed by Hodler into an almost iconic form created through an abstract language of painted lines and colors that conform to the artist’s theory of art, which he called "parallelism." According to this theory, the painter has to obey certain laws — recognizing the flatness of the canvas, dividing it into geometric planes, drawing the contours of the subject with expressive clarity — in order to render the essential "unities of existence." Here, a strict symmetry is maintained, with the sculptor’s head placed at the exact center of the composition, and the major features of the portrait — Vibert’s face, beard, and clothing — aligned symmetrically along the canvas’s midline. The rhythms of similar shapes, the imposing silhouette and mass of Vibert’s body all give the picture an intensity that is as philosophical as it is physical, and this is made all the stronger by the fact that the sitter is not placed in a recognizable setting, but rather against a field of pulsating yellow paint.

For all its participation in Hodler’s theory of "parallelism," his portrait of Vibert is, in the end, a portrait. An exactly contemporary description of the sculptor made without knowledge of Hodler’s portrait makes the truth of the painting clear: ‘An energetic man — a man of action: his eyes are round and wide awake — his lips are closed and pinched, some might say. Without being large, he has a Hercu-lean physique, large shoulders, and big biceps.