Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2008)

ANNUAL REPORT • A 2008. ÉV - PÉTER ÚJVÁRI: Ferdinand Hodler—A Symbolist Vision

entire œuvre (including the monumental figurai compositions recently made transportable by meticulous conservation), offered the opportunity for a balanced overview founded on recent research. The exhibition at the Hungarian venue differed from the Swiss one in two respects. First, in Budapest a slightly different selection was shown to accommodate the needs of an audience less familiar with 8 Hodler. Completeness was preferred to complexity, e.g. the second and third version of "The Day" INTERIOR VIEW OF THE EXHIBITION (all displayed in Berne) were replaced with additional compositions of significance, and the exhibition was completed with a whole section related to Flodler's historical murals, so familiar in Switzerland as to be almost boring, and therefore not included in the Berne show. The other difference was related to the style of presentation which took full advantage of the architectural setting of the "Ionic Wing", a sequence of large Neo-classical halls completed in 1906 and originally designed to house sculptures and plaster casts copied from antiquity. The large halls were divided into smaller sections by temporary walls of up to five metres high, where the undivided upper space spread diffused daylight over the paintings, thus creating an almost outdoor spaciousness under the markedly classical roofs. This was fitting not only because Hodler preferred painting in the open air (even when working on his life-size figurai compositions), but also because the atmosphere of the lofty contemporary architecture and the generous spacing of the pictures evoked the memorable Hodler show at the 1904 exhibition at the Vienna Secession. The medium sized, but still spacious, well-lit rooms with their winding, yet still linear sequence (created by exhibition architects Ulrich Zickler and Zsolt Vasáros) provided the curator Katharina Schmidt with the rare opportunity to create an arrangement which did not suppress motivic correspondences in favour of chronologic ones, or vice versa. This is all the more crucial in Hodler's case as his art did not evolve along one single line, his lifework is rather a matrix of interwoven motifs and ways to picture them, where the passing of time is only the