Enchanted Boy 1909

Ferdinand Hodler made Enchanted Boy, in the Städel Museum, using oil on canvas. I can imagine him building up the surface in thin washes, trying to find the light, that pale, almost ghostly light. It makes me think of other painters who were trying to find new ways of picturing bodies, like Paula Modersohn-Becker, another painter of the early 20th century. The painting is mostly in this narrow range of off-whites, pinks, and browns—but then there are these strange smudges of dark green around the edges, like a halo of foliage. What was Hodler thinking? Is he imagining the boy in an enchanted forest, or is this just a way of framing the figure? I am always curious about these kinds of decisions in painting. It's like the artist is in conversation with himself. Painters are always talking to each other across time, arguing, agreeing, and pushing the language forward. That’s how paintings become these little embodied expressions of seeing, thinking, and feeling.