SIX FEET UNDER: The Beloved and the Honoured Dead

All the artworks exhibited here show the corpses of people who were close to the artists or who meant a lot to them. That artists began to thematize their private relationship with death in portraits of dead people is a long-term consequence of the secular phase following the French Revolution that threw the artistic individual back on to his or her self in an existential questioning: the paradigms for the individual “Homage to the beloved dead” can be found in Pietá depictions.

The experience of death and fear of death run through the whole artistic work of Ferdinand Hodler. In the portrait Louis Duchosal sur son lit de mort (1901), the “permanence of death” as accepted by the artist “that transforms thoughts of death into a powerful force” is manifested in the completely relaxed face of his poet friend which is enclosed in a constellation of Art Nouveau geometry. In the death room of his mistress Valentine Godé-Darel, on the other hand, Hodler remains fixated on the actuality of the body lying before him. This dead body has been horribly destroyed, furrowed; the bones emerge through the eroded skin. Hodler finds no positive and affirming answer to death in the presence of his dead beloved.