Translations of Pain: Ferdinand Hodler’s Cancer Paintings of Valentine Godé-Darel

From the time of her cancer diagnosis in 1912, Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler meticulously documented his muse and mistress, Valentine Godé-Darel, often multiple times a day, drawing and painting with increasing urgency from October 1913 to January 1915. As Godé-Darel’s cancer worsened, Hodler’s record became increasingly brutal, emphasizing her deterioration through the distortion of her physiognomy and bodily exterior. The aesthetic elements of these paintings, corresponding to the severity of Godé-Darel’s cancer, also “deteriorate” and become increasingly abstracted. These later paintings begin to destabilize and crumble into patches of color, line, and form. They challenge the long-standing consensus that if a represented object does not bear high verisimilitude to the portrayed subject, an emotional response is inconceivable because the beholder is lost and helpless in the face of unsubstantial semblance. I argue that Hodler’s pictorial vocabulary is an efficient vehicle to suggest to the beholder Godé-Darel’s elusive state of suffering that would otherwise escape the traditional language of realistic academic paintings. If seen from the perspective of widely accepted theories that reject abstraction’s ability to engage the beholder, Hodler’s execution of the Godé-Darel cancer paintings should obscure the evocation of any emotional response, including that of empathy.