different types of light.

Fig. 165 – This plan of ‘The Temple of the Earth’ (1895) by Fidus gives the various secular arrangements within the cubic temple.

The artist Fidus made Jugendstil-drawings and his most characteristic painting was a canvas called ‘Northern light’, which can be seen as a time document. His ‘free’ spirit was attracted to opposites-in-general and a celebration of extremes. A sympathetic attention for nudism and purification fits into such a state of mind. In 1932 he became a member of the NSDAP, but was not accepted as a Nazi artist.

Fidus was a contemporary with the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler (1853 – 1918), who was also a representative of the same Zeitgeist. Cultural life in Europe before the First World War (1914 – 1918) was concerned withrenewal, vitality and youth (WATKIN, 1977). This same general sense of unrealized and unfulfilled potentiality was present in England when Robert Baden-Powell (1857 – 1941) wrote his ‘Scouting for Boys’ in 1918 and the Boy Scouts’ movement was unofficially founded a year earlier.

Hodler’s themes were Swiss landscapes and (self) portraits in a realistic style. He called his characteristic grouping of figures – like his controversial ‘Die Nacht’ (1889/1890, Kunstmuseum Bern) – Parallelism. Later work was focused on love and death – due to the passing away of two loved ones, Augustine Dupin and Valentine Godé-Darel in respectively 1909 and 1915. His retrospective exhibition in Zurich in 1917 was a summa of his entire career (HAUPTMAN, 2007).

The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of imagining all sorts