Studio: international art (67.1916)

Modern Swiss School of Alpine Landscape Art

“VENT DE MARS

summits in their own cold, luminous, silent upper
world. And turning to living Swiss painters, the
same may be said of Charles Giron, for he too is at
home in those higher altitudes, and as a landscapist
his subject by predilection is the Alp.

The character of the Alps “ as Nature’s archi-
tecture outside and above our civilisation ” has
surely never been more effectively treated than by
Ferdinand Hodler and Albert Trachsel. For
sheer primitive vigour in building up into a picture
the rugged structural character and unity of the
mountain, and making one feel the rockiness of
the rock and the massive-
ness of the pile, few
painters can equal Ferdinand
Hodler. His Die Jungfrau is
a masterpiece in this respect.

And in Albert Trachsel’s
water-colours, the architecture
of the mountains emerging
from what seems the un-
certain dawrn of things is, as
it wrere, carved with the brush.

The spirit of a w'orld in the
making is with these artists ;
in them has survived in a
marked degree a strong,
primitive cosmic sense.

To their works must be
added those, so remarkable
in their wray, of Alexandre
Perrier, in which the monu-
mental form and granitic
nature of peak and ridge are
rendered by a process, the “ pr£ fleuri”

94

technical asperities of which
the artist has bent to his
use with rare effect ; and
Edoardo Berta’s beautiful
and impressive St. Bernard
landscapes, revealing the
strong appeal of mountain
solitude to the pensive
imagination of one of the
most temperamentally
poetic of Swiss painters.
In studying the Alpine
landscapes of these artists,
one cannot fail to feel that
the mountain has been the
School of Nature where
they have grown up to the
by edoardo berta full consciousness of their
vocation.

Some Swiss painters have been attracted not
only by the rugged Gothic of the Alps, but by the
more classic form of the Jura or Mount Saleve.
The latter, seen in the glow of sunset which brings
out the distinctive character and value of its rocky
ledges, has furnished A. Perrier with the theme of
several of his best pictures, and L. Rheiner, whose
impressionistic paintings of “la C6te d’Azur”
landscape are an intoxication of delight to the eye,
has shown, specially in his water-colour drawings
of Mount Saleve, his capacity not only to deal with
the magic revel of light in the South, but with the

BY EDOARDO BERTA