Harmonising Death
Eurythmia (1894-95) by Ferdinand Hodler
MúzeumCafé 8.
Eurythmia is a Greek word meaning: 1. correct beat/proportion/harmony; 2. decorum/dignity. The painter gave this title to his work, adding that the five men marching with decorum are heading for death. Nothing in the picture refers concretely and directly to death. Hodler rather indicates the destination of the march with the autumn atmosphere and the white gowns of martyrdom. He does not depict death symbolically, but represents people who accept the unavoidable with dignity, who understand that it is also part of their lives.
Hodler does not symbolise a concept but tries to represent human knowledge and experience in an image. The painting, which seems melancholic at first sight, paradoxically presents the animated rhythm deriving from the eurythmia of life and death. This rhythm is an abstraction and Hodler renders it with the help of individualised human figures, though with the compositional abstraction of a Mondrian painting: the parallels. The vertical of the five figures and the two small trees towering over the horizontal of the path rhythmically breaks up the surface of the painting. The composition is axially symmetrical, yet the group of figures is also symmetrical centrally: the forward figure to the right corresponds to the rear on the left; the forward on the left does so to the rear on the right. At the same time the central figure is not standing exactly in the middle but proceeds in the line on the left. Examining how the figures and trees are composed in space, their position more or less makes up a semicircle on the ground bulging towards the viewer. The light patches of the figures also support the image visually, so what the viewer sees is somehow arching towards him, while a veil of mist descending behind the figures impedes a perspective into the space of the painting.
The ‘double nature’ of Hodler’s work can be also detected in the way the artist uses both surface and space. Traditional painting produces an illusion by which the viewer may be able to catch sight of something. The pictorial surface is only a means, a well-cleaned window. It tries to make it appear to the viewer that what is seen is beyond the painting’s surface.
Is all this a subsequent fanciful interpretation? Even if you agree with these comments you can still harbour suspicions that perhaps the eye trained in relation to non-figurative painting allows you to see all. After all, butterflies can be discovered in grains of wood without the latter having the slightest butterfly connection.
To brush aside this justified suspicion three things deserve highlighting. One is that Hodler, who made several studies for all his works, made the rendering of his large paintings easier by beginning on canvasses with the guidelines of a square grid. These grid lines can still be detected on all his large canvasses including Eurythmia, since he did nothing to hide them later. He must have wanted them to remain visible (after all, there is little in the world more rhythmical than a square grid) but at least he did not mind it ruining the pictorial illusion in its traditional sense. His landscapes also show the same abstract, rhythmical arrangement on the picture surface – unsurprisingly, a whole landscape series bears the title Landscape Rhythm of Form. Finally, the third important fact is that Hodler as a young painter stipulated for himself “Ten Commandments for a Painter”, the second of which was: “A painter must see the surface as a plain.”