Letter from Ferdinand Hodler to Franz Servaes (2 sheets, written on both sides and folded once), 30th Dec. 1904

After folding the brownish paper in half, Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) covered the two vertical halves with his quick and slightly irregular handwriting in round letters to recount his recent major successes in a very personal letter dated 30th December 1904 to Franz Servaes (1862–1947), a journalist and art critic who lived in Vienna and worked for the Freie Wiener Presse – one of the most important daily newspapers in Vienna around 1900. In the same year, Hodler had seen his artistic breakthrough in Vienna, the capital and seat of the empire, marking the beginning of his international success. Hodler opens his letter to Cologne-born Servaes with a polite apology for his late reply and goes on to report in sincere phrases that he has joined the artists’ associations Kölner Künstlerbund and Berliner Künstlerbund. The central theme of the letter’s six pages, composed by Hodler on eight half-sheets, are his artistic ideas and his development of parallelism as a design principle, which he explains to his friend, the art critic.

MH, 2021