Communion with the Infinite

By 1892 Hodler had spent years painting death and gloom, and his Geneva public had come to expect it of him. This canvas surprised them. A single nude woman kneels and reaches upward, her body pared down to a few clean lines against open sky. He gave it the German title Aufgehen im All, roughly a dissolving into the universe. What he was working out here was a Symbolism that leaned on no myth and no literary story, only on the old human wish to be at one with nature. For an audience used to his darker pictures, this came close to hope. She fills a canvas about 160 centimetres tall, alone, with nothing around her but light.