View into Infinity

Five tall women in long robes stand in a row, and each repeats the pose of the next with a small change, an arm lifted a little differently, a head turned a touch more. That echoing of one form down a line is the principle Hodler called Parallelism, and here it carries almost the whole picture. The figures are not meant to hide a secret meaning. The feeling is supposed to reach you straight from their shape and their spacing. He worked at this composition, Blick in die Unendlichkeit, a view into infinity, across five versions between 1913 and 1917, in the last years of his life. Basel keeps one of them and another hangs in Zurich.