Exhibition Hodler and Franzoni at the Masi Art Museum in Ticino
With his painting "Delta della Maggia", the Ticino painter Filippo Franzoni was finally recognized by fellow painters and critics beyond the Alps.
Image: Keystone
In "Lake Geneva in the Evening from Chexbres", Ferdinand Hodler's elliptical pictorial composition becomes visible.
Image: Keystone
With his painting "Delta della Maggia", the Ticino painter Filippo Franzoni was finally recognized by fellow painters and critics beyond the Alps.
Image: Keystone
In "Lake Geneva in the Evening from Chexbres", Ferdinand Hodler's elliptical pictorial composition becomes visible.
Image: Keystone
In a new exhibition, the Masi Art Museum in Ticino is juxtaposing Ferdinand Hodler with the Ticino painter Filippo Franzoni. Although different as artists, the two cultivated a friendship that went beyond a mere painting partnership.
10.04.2025, 17:38
10.04.2025, 17:39
SDA
Filippo Franzoni is still not very well known internationally - wrongly so, said the director of the Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana (Masi), Tobia Bezzola, to the media on Thursday. The Masi is dedicating the "dialogical" exhibition "Ferdinand Hodler - Filippo Franzoni: An Artistic Connection" to him and the most famous Swiss painter of the 19th century.
Born in Locarno and trained at the Brera in Milan, Franzoni came from a completely different world to Hodler, explained curator Cristina Sonderegger. While the more famous of the two came from a humble background, Franzoni grew up as the son of a lawyer and a noblewoman from intellectual Milanese circles.
Soft landscapes in Franzoni's work
Although their subjects repeatedly meet in astonishing ways - here the beech forest, there the Bosco Isolino near Locarno - the paintings of the two artists are also very different. Whereas Hodler's paintings are characterized by light and linearity, Franzoni's are soft and melancholy. In his work, figures merge into landscapes and landscapes into the sky.
In the exhibition, which extends over five rooms, some of the artists' lesser-known works are displayed on opposite walls. Just how different the painters were can be seen most clearly in the portraits and self-portraits. Franzoni's inward gaze is visible in the uncertain, almost anxious look in a self-portrait. In contrast, Hodler's (self-)portraits appear clearer and perhaps also more distanced.
In 1895, Hodler and Franzoni jointly won second prize in the 10th Concours Calame - a Geneva competition for artists. Hodler received the award for "Lake Geneva in the Evening from Chexbres", Franzoni for "Delta della Maggia". 16 years later, the Ticino artist died in a psychiatric clinic in Mendrisio. The circumstances of his death are unknown.
