The Night

Today is the day! As you may know, on every Sunday this month we are presenting the collection of Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland. This is our third feature in September :)

The painting The Night by Ferdinand Hodler seems pessimistic and gloomy. In a bleak landscape, surrounded by seven sleeping figures, a powerful man is seen wrestling with a creature cloaked in black. It is striking that the figure in the center of the painting, who has been startled out of a nightmare, has similar facial features to Ferdinand Hodler. The dark, cloaked figure personifies death as an intensification of sleep. The painting reflects the artist’s fear of death, which preyed on him from his earliest childhood as a result of the many tragedies in his family. This also explains why Hodler wrote on the back of the canvas: “There is many a person who lies down to rest in the evening but who does not wake up in the morning”.

Hodler felt disadvantaged and misunderstood throughout his life. Following a childhood of extreme poverty and having had to fight as an adult against the dominant tastes of the period, he created a symbolic representation of his own existence in the painting The Night: as a battling artist, he is misunderstood by his contemporaries who are asleep around him. The painting is also a representation of Hodler’s complex love life. At that time, he was being torn between two women: the woman lying on the left of the picture represents his lover Augustine Dupin, while the figure on the right of the picture is his first wife Berta Stucki. The night is not represented primarily by darkness here, but by sleep. The crucial elements of the composition are the parallel horizontal lines of the reclining figures and their more or less symmetrical alignment. This reveals Hodler’s belief in the formal principle of “parallelism”, by means of which he attempts to give his paintings greater expressive power.

The Night was banned from an exhibition in the Musée Rath in Geneva in 1891 on moral grounds. Following public protest, Hodler exhibited the painting in the Palais Electoral and demanded one Swiss franc as an entrance fee. The controversy in the press helped to draw a huge crowd to see the work. With his earnings of about 1000 Swiss francs as a result, Hodler was able to afford the trip to Paris that he had been longing to make, where his international career began.