Dr. Peter Schütt
Biography
Julius Voegtli was born on March 29, 1879, in the Swiss village of Malters. His artistic inclinations were discovered and encouraged at an early age by his mother, Josefine Haefeli. He received a comprehensive professional art education at the Basel General Crafts School and the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. After 1906, Voegtli returned to his beloved hometown of Biel in southwestern Switzerland for artistic inspiration, rarely leaving this place. Here, he absorbed the tranquility of the landscape and was fascinated by the idyllic life. He not only created numerous landscape and still life paintings but also painted many portraits in his distinctive style. In addition to his vocation as an art painter, Julius Voegtli was time and again active as a journalist, expressing definitive, personal viewpoints on various issues highlighted in the Swiss national press.
Julius Voegtli was an enterprising, restless, energetic artist and person who early on gained a reputation as a benefactor. He was a member of the municipal council of the city of Biel for almost a quarter of a century. He took on numerous honorary offices during this time and was also active on behalf of the municipal council and the city administration.
Voegtli’s Contemporaries
Voegtli’s artist colleagues included Ferdinand Hodler, Fritz Mock, Giovanni Giacometti, and Ernst Morgenthaler. Together with his colleagues, Julius Voegtli established the ‘Hellsau Artists’ Colony’. In the Freienhof (vacation farm) in Hellsau, stimulating artistic interchanges took place among the avant-garde of Swiss painting.
Hodler and Voegtli
Ferdinand Hodler was an artist who, like Julius Voegtli, was ahead of his time. His artistic style, with its free use of color and form and the striking outlines that almost resembled comic drawings, was too progressive for many art critics of the time. Hodler‘s symbolist figure paintings, often showing naked and ecstatic women and men, were condemned as immoral. His first significant work, „The Night“ from 1889, was initially to be part of the exhibition at the Musée Rath in Geneva. Shortly before the opening, the painting was excluded because it was too scandalous. Hodler then rented a private room and exhibited the painting for an entrance fee. With these private proceeds, he travelled to Paris, where he was even awarded a prize for this work.
Hodler‘s art thrives on simplification and size. His figures appear animated and at the same time radiate lightness. His works are subject to a concept of symmetry, as he organized nature into parallel patterns. Parallelism was found in both his landscape paintings, portraits and history paintings, and became his concise stylistic device.
Thanks to an exhibition tour around 1911 through major German cities such as Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Munich, Hodler‘s works became collectors‘ favorites on the German art scene. Initially celebrated, the artist unfortunately fell out of favour with the Germans in 1914. The reason for this was a protest by Geneva artists and intellectuals against the shelling of Reims Cathedral by imperial troops, in which Hodler also signed. Germany was outraged and reported the „Fall Hodler“ [“Hodler Case”] in the press. A short time later, the artist was expelled from German artists‘ associations and his works were even taken down. The University of Jena hid its magnificent Hodler mural behind a wooden ficture. For Hodler, these methods of exclusion were completely incomprehensible, since he was merely protesting against a military act and not against the Germans themselves. Four years later, at the age of 65, during which he created over 2000 paintings, the artist died of a lung ailment. He did not live to see his rehabilitation.
Between 1886 and 1918, the Gasthof Freienhof in Hellsau was known as a popular retreat for the major artists of the time. Cuno Amiet, Giovanni Giacometti, Hans Morgenthaler, Ferdinand Hodler, Julius Voegtli and many more belonged to the Künstlerkolonie Hellsau (Hellsau artist colony). The aspiring artists were tired of painting in „dusty and darkened“ studios and sought inspiration in nature. And so not only landscape paintings were created, as with the neighbouring French Impressionists, but it was important to embed people in the composition as part of the contemplation of nature.
In the artists‘ colony at Hellsau, Ferdinand Hodler and Julius Voegtli enjoyed exchanging ideas among like-minded people. Julius Voegtli held Hodler in high esteem. This becomes particularly clear when one reads the article from the “Bieler Tagblatt” of 1913. Hodler was hostile and banned from many artists‘ associations. Voegtli did not let the hostility rest on his laurels and wrote an article in order to bring his fellow painter out of the line of fire in an appreciative manner. It is precisely the progressive and courageous nature of Hodler‘s art that Voegtli praises in high tones. Those who imitate the art he despises. „Hats off to Hodler, the genius, but fight, to the knife, the pretending genius, decorated with foreign feathers incompetence!“.
Shortly before the „Hodler Case“ Julius Voegtli had experienced a joint art exhibition with Ferdinand Hodler in the Biel gallery (Bieler Kunstverein). During this time, the two artist colleagues met more intensively. It is there obvious that Voegtli had burnt to comment on Hodler‘s negative press and to broadcast his admiration to the masses.
„When a new direction in art appears, it always seems strange at first, because it brings new elements into the usual art, or uses old ones in such a way that they appear new. The viewer then needs some good will and must make some effort if he wants to come to the understanding of works of art that belong to such a direction. He will see himself rewarded for his effort if the artworks are really worth something and will discover in them always new beauties.“
Quote by Julius Voegtli
“I call parallelism any kind of repetition. Whenever I feel the attraction of things in nature most strongly, it is always an impression of unity.”
“If a few people who are united by the same purpose, sit down at a table we can understand them as parallels that somehow form a unit, for example, as the leaves of a flower.”
Quotes by Ferdinand Hodler