Ferdinand Hodler- The Kien Valley with the Bluemlisalp Massif

Ferdinand Hodler, The Kien Valley with the Bluemlisalp Massif, 1902, oil on canvas, The National Gallery, London

My first thought on looking at a photo of this painting was that its aspect ratio felt out of kilter, like the reverse of those changes that you sometimes see on a TV set-up when old film or TV shows are made to fit the modern screen size. But this landscape seems, after a proper look at it in the flesh at The National Gallery, to glory in its ‘aspect’; its portrait orientation emphasizes the narrowness of its valley subject so aptly. The gallery’s website has a felicitous phrase to describe this impression when it refers to the works’ ‘insistent verticality’.

The viewpoint is high up in the valley and it is spring or more likely summertime judging by the snow’s absence although it (the snow) does cap the Bluemisalp Massif above its permanent snowline in the far distance. The vertiginous perpendicularity in the view and in the composition that Hodler chooses to render it, is exciting; it is both scary and uplifting as it would be for anyone standing there in nature, but it also summons a hushed sense of reverence at so imposing a sight. This is conjured by the dramatic and self-reflecting diagonals, the plunging and symmetrical V-shapes formed by the steep cleft of the valley and Hodler’s particularised depiction of small rocks and larger boulders in the foreground juxtaposed with the portrayal of the 3,500m tall Massif in the background. The former feel touchable and real while the latter is awesomely towering and fantastical, seemingly beyond reach. The painting recreates a sense of awe at nature’s transcendent sublimity by yoking together both its titanic and its localised domains, thereby drawing the viewer further into its depths and heights.

Hodler saw it as his mission to show what he termed the ‘parallelism’ in nature – the way that certain forms seem to be self-replicating and self-organising, corresponding with one another to create a sense of unity, rightness. He wanted to strip back any visual clutter and distraction and to simplify what stands in front of our noses so that he could uncover for us nature’s essence, its unforced rhythms, its fundamental order.

But this sense of a landscape’s natural cadence is seen not only in its contours but also in the harmonising of its colours. The eye is drawn into the receding depths of the painting by the way the viridian green of the middle ground fir trees become hazier and bluer the further away they march while the chartreuse yellow of the foreground, the colour that dominates the lower half of the work and lends it such sunlit immediacy, shades increasingly into cooler shadows of cobalt offset by violet in the top half in the higher reaches, places where rock formations are ultramarine-outlined and then surmounted by the icy grey-blue and white of the massif itself. The sense of unity that the landscape evokes arises from the echoes and consonance between these colours and the forms they inhere. These strong outlines are reminiscent of the Japonism of Van Gogh, Gaugin and Lautrec and of course Hokusai and Hiroshige before them. It’s a delineation which lends emphasis to shapes but which also clarifies and deciphers. It unscrambles extraneous or peripheral untidiness and cuts to what is elemental and unmistakably structural.

The sky above is a more forgiving cerulean while the clouds seem celestially inviting. In fact, there are three sets of clouds: there are the clouds which crest the mountains, shown bubbling up behind them, throwing them into relief and then there is that large mass of cloud at the top of the painting, but whose two left and right-hand udders hang pendulously towards the upper wedge-shape declivities either side of the massif, as if seeking to occupy rifts in the high horizon. In between, pink-tinged wispy stratus cloud is dawn across the canvas, demarcating the full height of the massif and establishes the paintings’ only concession to a horizontal plane.

Alpinism and alpine tourism more generally were thriving in Switzerland at the time, with climbers and walkers seeking ever-more challenging routes up its most famous peaks and exploring its lesser-known ones too. Dedicated facilities and mountaineer-related infrastructure was becoming increasingly apparent in the Bernese Oberland. As a proud Swiss-born native, Hodler was not ignorant of such development in his homeland, but his mountainscapes remain resolutely people-less and seem to celebrate not their scalability but their untamedness, their indomitability and even a sense of their inviolable mystique.

In fact, it’s difficult to imagine any kind of human activity in the scene presented in this painting, as the foregrounded incline is so steep that it becomes dizzying, and summons feelings of basophobia, or more accurately, a sense of untetheredness in the viewer. One can’t picture oneself moving easily through such a landscape; the going would be too precipitous to remain upright; it would be physically demanding, and ultimately too exhausting and then the massif stands at the end of it like an unassailable citadel. Such an imagined hiker’s plight tells me that this is a place inimical to human traffic and that despite its seductive splendour it should forever remain a wilderness deserving of our respect and admiration, not our despoilation or exploitation.

 It is depicted by Hodler as a place of extremes of both beauty and danger (despite the relatively benign season) and made me think back to the snowier Alpine scenes in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, more specifically to Ken Russell’s cinematographically wonderful film version of it, where toweringly monumental vistas reflect the emotional highs and lows of the relationships characterised in it. In the end, while the painting represents grand physiographic patterns in the natural world, it also speaks to me of unassailability; the massif is like a psychically imposing solidity that is paradoxically also painted as an ungraspable mirage.

The painting is modernist in that it eschews realism in favour of a more stylised and iconographic approach to a representation of nature. We get from it a sharp sense of the land’s dramatic topography in ways that photographs or more faithful or verisimilitudinous works would never achieve. The foreground terrain is blocked out in yellow-green while the rocks and nearby flowers look like renegade motifs scribbled in from a much later Cy Twombly work.  Up close, the coniferous mountainside trees are rendered with a little more finish until they merge into one another in the middle distance and altogether they are so numerous that they can only serve as silent supporting players to the lead role of the distant and unfeasible massif.

The analogous colours of green, blue and yellow in this work are deeply satisfying. They have an appeal that feels atavistic, cognate with nature’s immersiveness. Hodler was not an overt pantheist, but something of that philosophy can be read in the way that his colours consort and cohere and infuse the magnitude of the earth’s sheer heft, its swooping expanse, its Olympian might. These are elemental, prismatic colours that chart geological lineaments – they suffuse the valley’s rich depths and brace its otherworldly heights.

Hodler’s concentrated focus on this precarious and compressed valley, rendered with such chromatic vigour and formalistic ‘parallelism’ is aesthetically entrancing and inviting, while its summit remains chillingly remote and eternal. The painting celebrates the summer-soft vibrancy and beauty of proximate nature but at the same time, the scale of both valley and peak speak of their impassable remoteness and of human insignificance in the face of their unsubmissive majesty.