Aesthetic and Ethical and Dimensions in Hodler’s Paintings of the Dying Valentine Godé-Darel

Harold Schweizer (Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA)

A late cycle of paintings by the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler chronicles his mistress Valentine Godé-Darel’s fight with ovarian cancer, ending with her death in 1915. Most of the more than 200 sketches and paintings – most of them executed between November 1914 and January 1915 – mirror the progress of the disease in Valentine’s face, from her initial expressions of hope and her gradual acknowledgment of the disease to her resignation and the long torment of dying.  From December 1914 until her death at the end of January 1915, she does not return the painter’s gaze; her eyes remain closed, her face appears like that of one drowning in her bed.  The paintings become a record of her struggle and the impossibility of fleeing from her pain. The painter’s compassionate – or is it compulsive? – attention to Valentine’s suffering during this time inflects the deeply emotional style of many of the paintings. The position of her body on the bed, as Hodler’s commentators have noted, increasingly assumes the “severe horizontality” of his depictions of the lake of Geneva outside the window of Valentine’s room of a private clinic in Lausanne.

While the sequence of paintings narrates the inexorable development of a terminal illness and the drawn out endurance of suffering, the narrative claims no other meaning than the passage of time recorded in the relentless details of Valentine’s demise. The painter’s excruciating precision in the depiction of Valentine’s suffering poses epistemological, aesthetic, and moral questions: What sense or knowledge of her suffering can or should these paintings convey? Are the paintings to be understood as empathic or opportunistic responses? How are they, aesthetically, to render Valentine’s suffering in order to resolve the conflict between compassion and compulsion? The viewer’s aesthetic and historical distance may grant only an illusory reprieve from the urgency of these questions. For, how are we to witness the intimacy of such protracted suffering without making the very images before us, as Stanley Cavell puts it, a substitute for our response? Or are the images rather to transform the uselessness of suffering into a meaning, “the only one of which suffering is capable,” as Emmanuel Levinas claims, which is “a suffering for the suffering of someone else”? Hodler’s cycle of paintings, I argue, urges the painter or viewer to negotiate a “supreme ethical principle” (Levinas) – the attention to the suffering of another – against the simultaneous temptation of our evasion of another’s suffering.