Planetary landscape

Preview of the Swiss Art auction on 26 June 2026

Ferdinand Hodler’s late landscapes rank among the most radical pictorial inventions of European Modernism. Painted in 1917, ‘Sunset over Lake Geneva from Caux’ exemplifies the way in which, during the final years of his life, the artist moved away from contour-defined painting and assigned the central role within the composition to colour. Hodler himself described this development with remarkable candour in October 1917: for him, form no longer determined colour; rather, form only began to live through colour. In this insight lies the key to his late work.

Warm shades of rose, blue, violet and gold flow through sky and lake in finely nuanced transitions. The horizons begin to shimmer, shorelines lose their solidity, and the boundaries between water, atmosphere and light appear to almost dissolve. All anecdotal detail disappears in favour of a concentrated pictorial rhythm that draws the gaze into the distance while simultaneously creating a peculiar stillness. The composition appears both monumental and immaterial. As though under a silent cosmic tension, the surface of the lake expands to the very edges of the picture. The viewer no longer confronts a view of nature, but rather a vision that seems to transcend time and space.

The painting was created in Caux above Lake Geneva, where Hodler worked during the late summer of 1917. The elevated view across water, shoreline and sky recalls earlier scenes from Chexbres, yet the depiction now distances itself from topographical representation. The artist condenses the landscape into a vast, breathing mass. Nature no longer appears as a describable place, but as a spiritual realm.